Given todays SCOTUS decision as a wonderful grand finally to a wonderful week. I think some George Orwell quotes are in order.
Note: As I type this with Kieth Olbermann on the TV I would like to re-iterate what he and one of his cohorts just said.
Commentary: "As much as you tend to hype up and dramatize things Keith, I think you are underreacting."
Keith: "I am surprised that people are not marching in the streets in protest behind me over this decision"
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Keith: "The end of democracy as we know it"
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
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?
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.