Quote

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

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
Turn
Cheek
Happen
Cheeks
Turns
Complain
Happens
Complaining
Doe
Blow
Firsts
Expected
First
Harder
Always
Ought

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What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
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No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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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.
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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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We were once told that the aeroplane had abolished frontiers actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
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The object of power is power.
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It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
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The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
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It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
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The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.
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Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
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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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He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
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... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
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Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.
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To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
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Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
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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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