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I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

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
Fool
Looking
Whether
Often
Others
Grasped
Done
Solely
Wondered
Avoid

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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
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Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'
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Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
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All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
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