“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Brave New World
― Brave New World
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― 1984
― 1984
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
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“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
― The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
Joe’s 2025 Year in Books
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