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[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.

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
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Talked
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Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
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All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.
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A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
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The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
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they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!
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In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.: 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
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It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
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As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
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Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
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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.
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The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
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To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.
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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!
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We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
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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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In the face of pain there are no heroes.
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If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
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During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.
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