I know the How and I know the Why

slow day at work today so i looked for some books online and decided to read Orwell's 1984. cant believe i havent read this. its nice i can now read non-law books. i even reserved a box set of Larsson's Millenium Series last Sunday (i just want the paperback version and not the expensive hardbound box set). when i saw on TV that the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was released last March 30 on select local theaters, i immediately went to the bookstore to get myself a copy of the trilogy because i dont want to watch it until ive read the book.

Some excerpts from 1984 on power, truth and reality:

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing - O'Brien

"...if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name."
 

Doublethink: 

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

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. - O'Brien