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Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

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
Animal
Tolerant
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Urge
Public
Conformity
Law
Urges
Less
Thrive
Tremendous
Animals
System
Gregarious

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Writing a novel is agony.
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The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
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And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
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And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.
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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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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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I do not wish to comment on the work if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
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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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Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
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The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
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