This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already--lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb.