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Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.
George Orwell
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Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
George Orwell
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It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
George Orwell
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[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
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The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
George Orwell
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We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
George Orwell
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In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
George Orwell
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How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell
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The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
George Orwell
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You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.
George Orwell
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Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.
George Orwell
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Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
George Orwell
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If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.
George Orwell
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The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
George Orwell
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The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
George Orwell
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Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.
George Orwell
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A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today
George Orwell
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
George Orwell
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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 --!
George Orwell
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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
George Orwell
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We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does... unless conquered from the outside by military force?
George Orwell
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The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.
George Orwell
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I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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And in the general hardening of outlook that set in... practices which had been long abandoned... -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
George Orwell
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Quote of the day
About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert F. Kennedy
George Orwell
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Born:
June 25, 1903
Died:
January 21, 1950
(aged 46)
Bio:
Eric Arthur Blair, who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.
Known for:
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Burmese Days (1934)
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
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