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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.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
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More quotes by George Orwell

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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.
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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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By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
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No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
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I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
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Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.
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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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There is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.
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In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
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The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
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Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
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Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
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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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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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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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And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
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Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.
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The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
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If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I'm a free man in here - he tapped his forehead - and you're all right.
George Orwell