Quote

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.

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
General
Anarchy
Looking
Empires
Horribly
May
Thrive
Heading
Whole
Stable
Headings
Many
Decades
Epoch
World
Slavery
Drift
Slave
Antiquity
Towards
Breakdown

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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
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Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
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Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
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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.
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It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
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...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.
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We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
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The stars are a free show it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
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To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
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How right the working classes are in their materialism. How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
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Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.
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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
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Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.
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Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
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People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.
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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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There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
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But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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I have no wish to take life, not even human life
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