Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

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.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

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.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?