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I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY
George Orwell
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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
George Orwell
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
George Orwell
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
George Orwell
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
George Orwell
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
George Orwell
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
George Orwell
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
George Orwell
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
George Orwell
The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.
George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
George Orwell
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
George Orwell
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
George Orwell
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
George Orwell
