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There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

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
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Opinion
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Merit
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
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To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
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The more intelligent, the less sane
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I have no wish to take life, not even human life
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Power is not a means it is an end.
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The end was contained in the beginning.
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The object of powder is powder.
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Napoleon is always right.
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Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
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I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
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For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.
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A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
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The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
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He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable
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No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.
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Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
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I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
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