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The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
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More quotes by George Orwell

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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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The more intelligent, the less sane
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The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
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Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.
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The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
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Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
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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 great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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The stars are a free show it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
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It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
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She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
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Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.
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Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution
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You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing
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A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust.
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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.
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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.
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Power is not a means it is an end.
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