To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.

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.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Weakness is strength.

The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.