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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.

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
Write
Whoever
Art
Sentences
Vagueness
Writing
English
Encroachment
Even
Involved
Adjectives
Never
Struggle
Reliable
Words
Lets
Speak
Writes
Science
Sentence

More quotes by George Orwell

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Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
George Orwell
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The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
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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.
George Orwell
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Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
George Orwell
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As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.
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Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
George Orwell
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The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
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If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.
George Orwell
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At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
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I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY
George Orwell
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The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
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I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
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Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
George Orwell
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Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
George Orwell
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People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
George Orwell
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A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
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Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.
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Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home what they fear is physical force.
George Orwell