Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards.
You can go on blackening people’s reputations for years, and everyone will believe you, more or less, even when it’s perfectly obvious that you’re lying.
You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.
Words are such feeble things.
Women who don’t marry wither up — they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don’t even know that they’re withering.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on – that is, badly.
When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
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 but our aitches.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
