"It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level."
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Quote collection
George Orwell quotes (page 7 of 39)
767 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing."
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"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges."
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"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist"
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"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
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"If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones."
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"To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay."
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"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
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"A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature"
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"Reality is inside the skull."
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"Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
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"The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills."
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"We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases."
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"The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun."
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"When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys"
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"Using clichés is a substitute for thinking"
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"Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."
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"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
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"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."
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"It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours."
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