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Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

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
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
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We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
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It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
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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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A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
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The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.
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In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
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When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
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All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
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There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
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Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.
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I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
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Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.
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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.
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Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
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