"For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."

Orwell, George on Acceptance
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"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."

Orwell, George on Defeat
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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."

Orwell, George on Dictators and Dictatorship
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"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer."

Orwell, George on Equality
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"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Orwell, George on Equality
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"We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun."

Orwell, George on Food and Eating
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"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Orwell, George on Freedom
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"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

Orwell, George on Freedom
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"To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous."

Orwell, George on Generals
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"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

Orwell, George on Achievement
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"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."

Orwell, George on Goodness
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"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness"

Orwell, George on Happiness
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"The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time."

Orwell, George on Intelligence and Intellectuals
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"A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

Orwell, George on Jokes and Jokers
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"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."

Orwell, George on Language
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"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Orwell, George on Language
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"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."

Orwell, George on Language
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"The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic."

Orwell, George on Leaders and Leadership
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"A liberal is a power worshipper without the power."

Orwell, George on Liberals
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"Four legs good, two legs bad."

Orwell, George on Animals
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"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."

Orwell, George on Literature
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"The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."

Orwell, George on Literature
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"To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others."

Orwell, George on Love
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"What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?"

Orwell, George on Madness
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"We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose."

Orwell, George on Middle Class
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