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It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

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
Intended
Literally
Dependent
Forgotten
Least
Newspeak
Words
Heretical
Thought
Unthinkable
Adopted

More quotes by George Orwell

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You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
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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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Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
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Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
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From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
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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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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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International football is the continuation of war by other means.
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.
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The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
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The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
George Orwell
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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
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The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell
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Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
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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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Sanity is not statistical.
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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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