The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.