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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
Attain
Stupidity
Intelligence
Necessary
Difficult

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...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
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He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
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We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
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Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
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I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.
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The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
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Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
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The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
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You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
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In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.
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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
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