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I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
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Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
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Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
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It's a wonderful feeling to have a niece like you Because you are always so dear You are so dear no matter the year But all throughout each day of the year There could hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
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A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
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The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
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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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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
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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.
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...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
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Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
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The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
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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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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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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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Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist
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It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
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A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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