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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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Civilization
More quotes by George Orwell
I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY
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As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
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It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
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The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
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The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
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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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Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
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The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
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We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
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Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
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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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Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.
George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
George Orwell
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
George Orwell
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
George Orwell
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
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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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