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.

Candor

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

Contradiction

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Freedom

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Happiness

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

Language

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Literature

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.

School

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Sports

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.

Technology

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Writers and Writing

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.