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2009 August 28
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"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion,
for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." |
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of
confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and
courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we
cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we
risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan
who comes along." |
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2009 August 27
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"Truth is incontrovertible,
ignorance can deride it,
panic may resent it,
malice may destroy it,
but there it is." |
"If you add to the truth, you subtract from it." |
"Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth.
If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off." |
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2009 August 26
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"To deny freedom of the will is to make morality impossible." |
"I would rather be exposed to the
inconveniences attending too much liberty
than to those attending too small a degree of it." |
"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate,
we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love." |
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2009 August 25
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"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing
man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling." |
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ..." |
"Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them." |
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2009 August 24
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"Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms." |
"As Hitler showed us, a press suppressed does not make a recovery.
As Lenin indicated, a press controlled does not revert to a critic’s role.
As history reminds us, free speech surrendered is rarely recovered." |
"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee,
"If it was so, it might be;
and if it were so, it would be;
but as it isn't, it ain't.
That's logic." |
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