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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
Question
Loyalty
Loyalties
Word
Relationships
Mattered
Values
Embrace
Gesture
Individual
Private
Governed
Men
Tears
Tear
Completely
Gestures
Dying
Helpless
Value
Spoken

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The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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Big Brother is watching you.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
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From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
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It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
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If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
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Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.
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The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word Art, and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K. kicking little girls in the head is O.K. even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K.
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To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
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From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
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At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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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!
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Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
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In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.: 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
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Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
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