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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
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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Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.
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But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet --!
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If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
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I watched him [a 'fat Russian agent'] with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts journalists.
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The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
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I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
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We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
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The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
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We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
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When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
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I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
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Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
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All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
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If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
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The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
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Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
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The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] 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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The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
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You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
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There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
George Orwell