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Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

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
Atheism
Effectiveness
Challenges
Genuinely
Opinion
Surprising
Almost
Finds
Anyone
Rage
Unfashionable
Fear
Fairs
Silenced
Given
Fair
Orthodoxy
Never
Hearing
Prevailing

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To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions
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It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
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Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
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Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
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Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
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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.
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Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.
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The belly comes before the soul.
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The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
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The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
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The end was contained in the beginning.
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If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
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All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
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A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
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The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.
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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.
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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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