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... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

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
Idea
History
Ideas
Truthfully
Abandonment
Peculiar
Told
Age

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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
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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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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
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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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It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
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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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To die hating them, that was freedom.
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The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
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Sanity is not statistical.
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
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. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
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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.
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A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
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To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
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But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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