The Daily Bastardette: September 2011

Mario Savio on shutting down the machine

Frances Wright on Compromise

Oh! that we could learn the advantage of just practice and consistent principles! that we could understand, that every departure from principle, how speciously soever it may appear to administer to our selfish interests, invariably saps their very foundation! that we could learn that what is ruinous to some is injurious to all, and that whenever we establish our own pretentions upon the sacrificed rights of others, we do in fact impeach our own liberties and lower ourselves in the scale of being! - Frances Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, New York, 1830.

George Orwell on Doublethink,1984

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.