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Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
George Orwell
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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Intelligence
Necessary
Difficult
Attain
Stupidity
More quotes by George Orwell
You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
George Orwell
... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
George Orwell
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
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During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
George Orwell
The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
George Orwell
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
George Orwell
As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.
George Orwell
Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.
George Orwell
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
George Orwell
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
George Orwell
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
George Orwell
In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.: 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
George Orwell
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
George Orwell
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.
George Orwell