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He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

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
Would
Tail
Flies
Tails
Sooner
Given
Keep

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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.
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If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
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My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.
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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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It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet --!
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Four legs good, two legs bad.
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