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The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
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
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell
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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You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
George Orwell
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
George Orwell
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.
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All men are enemies. All animals are comrades
George Orwell
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
George Orwell
The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
George Orwell
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
George Orwell
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
George Orwell
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
George Orwell