Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.
Commonly ranked as one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century and as one of the most important chroniclers of English culture of his generation, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". {more}
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"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
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"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
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"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
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"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
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"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting."
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"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."
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"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
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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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"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
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"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
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"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
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"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
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"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
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"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
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"The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded."
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"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
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"War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent."
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"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."
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