Looking for an Orwell quote

[progressiveBadger]

I heard it on Air America a few weeks ago, I guess it was said by Gore (but I'm not sure when). Basically talks about how society writes it's own reality, but true reality eventually catches up and conflicts with the written "reality" causing war. Or some such. Thanks for the help!!!

[trespam]

1. Here's a bunch

-From the book 1984 by George Orwell

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think.

The primary aim of modern warfare <...> is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. <...> But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

What can you do <...> against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

[Inland]

2. Where's the scariest one--the one about seeing the future as a

boot on the face?

[Book Lover]

3. Here you go

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'


http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/1984/20?term=imagine%20a%20boot

[greenman3610]

4. Gore said it:

George Orwell said, “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

[progressiveBadger]

5. That's it! Thanks!!!!