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Politics
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Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
-George Orwell
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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.
-George Orwell
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Poverty
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The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
-George Orwell
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People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say, notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated' one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps, are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy...
-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (ch. 10)
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Power
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Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
-George Orwell
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Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
-George Orwell
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Progress
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Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
-George Orwell
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Reading
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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life...
-George Orwell, Riding Down from Bangor
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Religion
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One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
-George Orwell
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Responsibility
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Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
-George Orwell
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Revolution
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Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
-George Orwell
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By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011.txt
-George Orwell, from the essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941
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Saint, Saints
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
-George Orwell
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Security
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You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
possible source: bbc broadcast april 4, 1942
-George Orwell, (attributed)
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Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
-George Orwell, essay, 1942
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Sincerity
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
-George Orwell
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Slavery
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Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.
-George Orwell
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Society
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Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
-George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
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Speeches (oratory)
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Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
-George Orwell, as quoted in Sonia Orwell's and Ian Angus' The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968)
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Spirituality
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But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
-George Orwell
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Sports
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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.
-George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, The Sporting Spirit, 1950
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Success & Failure
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
-George Orwell
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Suffering
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
-George Orwell
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Survival
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To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
-George Orwell
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Technology
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Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
-George Orwell
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Books by and about George Orwell