The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet --!

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.