Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.