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

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.