Joshua Berlow

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

“The visionary impulse giving rise to apocalyptic eschatology tends to be strongest among those embracing the prophetic promise of Yahweh's restoration of the faithful but at the same time witnessing the political and cultic structures of their nation falling into the hands of adversaries, thereby vitiating the possibility of fulfillment within the existing order of things. The pragmatic or realistic impulse tends to be strongest among those exercising control over political and religious structures; they often actively oppose the visionaries, viewing them as a threat to their position of leadership.”
― Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology