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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
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More quotes by George Orwell
It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs
George Orwell
... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
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
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
George Orwell
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
George Orwell
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
George Orwell
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
George Orwell
His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto.
George Orwell
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening
George Orwell
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.
George Orwell
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.
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
By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
George Orwell
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
George Orwell
