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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
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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More quotes by George Orwell
It was not the man's brain that was speaking it was his larynx.
George Orwell
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
George Orwell
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
George Orwell
The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.
George Orwell
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
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
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
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.
George Orwell
There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
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
The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
George Orwell
... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
George Orwell
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
George Orwell
The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
George Orwell
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
George Orwell
