Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 27 September 2020

 

1984

George Orwell

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

--Ernest Becker

The most fateful consequence of mental time travel may be the understanding that we will all die.

--Michael Corballis

If you know others and know yourself, you’ll not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

--Sun Tzu

It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, found religions, get locked up or ‘disappeared’ or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

--Donella Meadows

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.

--Rabindranath Tagore