Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.