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If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

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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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
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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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In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.
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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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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
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And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.
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He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.
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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
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One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
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A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.
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The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
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