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A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
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
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Defeats
Simply
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Autobiography
More quotes by George Orwell
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
George Orwell
To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.
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
Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.
George Orwell
The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
George Orwell
they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.
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
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
George Orwell
Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.
George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
George Orwell
How right the working classes are in their materialism. How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
George Orwell
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
George Orwell
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
George Orwell
If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
George Orwell