Hardly. I've read 1984 twice and I didn't remember this. Seeing it now, I cannot recall having heard/seen it quoted in other contexts. Jacoby needs to read some more.
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."
"Who is John Galt?"
ML/NJ
LOL. Ipso facto, it is not one of the most famous first lines in modern Engllish literature.
I recall the first sentence of 1984, but then I have read it many times, almost as a vaccine against being infected by the leftist trend of government over the years.
One of the most memorable, to me at least, of the first sentences of novels is from Wells' War of the Worlds:
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched1 keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.