Quote

The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.

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
Better
Drug
Forming
Like
Accept
Grip
Habit
Accepts
Accepting
Machine
Grudgingly
Becomes
Surrender
Suspiciously
Dangerous
Useful
Surrenders
Probably
Accepted
Oftener
Rather
Machines
Tighter

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So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
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Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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The belly comes before the soul.
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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.
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How right the working classes are in their materialism. How right they 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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Four legs good, two legs bad.
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For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
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I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!
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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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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.
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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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It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
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If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
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You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
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The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
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Never use a long word where a short one will do.
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They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
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