George Orwell on Reality

“Every citizen... could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police... The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time... They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they... were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”