Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Reality is inside the skull.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." ― George Orwell: Narrative Essays, Tribune, 22 March 1946.

Y si todos los demás aceptaban la mentira que impuso el partido, si todos los testimonios decían lo mismo, entonces la mentira pasaba a la Historia y se convertía en verdad.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.