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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

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
Something
Disgraceful
Autobiography
Reveals
Trusted

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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
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It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.
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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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I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
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The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.
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I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
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The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
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My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.
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His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto.
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To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
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In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone.
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That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
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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?
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You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
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What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
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Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
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