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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
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Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
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One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
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The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
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On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
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How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
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Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home what they fear is physical force.
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Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
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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 curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
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