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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
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Journalist
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.
George Orwell
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
George Orwell
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.
George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
George Orwell
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.
George Orwell
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
George Orwell
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
George Orwell
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
George Orwell
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
George Orwell
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
George Orwell
[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
George Orwell
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
George Orwell
