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We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

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
Part
Dust
May
Bones
Take
Dead
Life
Shall
Knowing
Handfuls
Future
Splinters
Away
Bone
True
Handful

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They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening
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If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
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Do you remember writing in your diary, he said, that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
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They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
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It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
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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.
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The more men you've had, the more I love you.
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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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You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
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Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
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You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
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It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
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If human equality is to be forever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.
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Four legs good, two legs bad.
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