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“Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow.” — St. Augustine

I don’t recommend many films nowadays but if you’re looking for something to watch, and you’re interested in Einstein not so much as a scientist but as a political figure (as I am), I would highly recommend this short biopic — I thought it was excellent (I don’t tend to like biopics because of their wild inaccuracies, but for this they decided to make all of Einstein’s dialogue things he either wrote down or was recorded as having said, giving it much more value in my view; I recognised many of his quotes from my own reading so I believe this is the case).

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!” — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“Non-violence... If you’re convinced people are wicked, you’ve no right not to try to make them behave decently. Agreed: but how are you most likely to succeed? By violence? But violence may make people assume the forms of good behaviour for the moment; it won’t produce the reality of genuine and permanent good behaviour. She accused me of shirking real issues, taking refuge in vague idealism. It all boiled down at last to her vengeful hatred for the Nazis. Peace all round, except for Nazis and, by contagion, Fascists. These should be punished, painfully exterminated — like rats. (Note that we’re all ninety-nine per cent. pacifists. Sermon on Mount, provided we’re allowed to play Tamburlane or Napoleon in our particular one per cent. of selected cases. Peace, perfect peace, so long as we can have the war that suits us. Result: everyone is the predestined victim of somebody else’s exceptionally permissible war. Ninety-nine per cent. pacifism is merely another name for militarism. If there’s to be peace, there must be hundred per cent. pacifism.)” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“I’ve got four draft-age children, so if you’re playing recklessly, fast and loose with their lives, then I have a right to despise you — and I do.” — Tucker Carlson

“The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals.” — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“It’s not that you love the planet, it’s that you hate humanity.” — Jordan Peterson

“Empirical facts: One. We are all capable of love for other human beings. Two. We impose limitations on that love. Three. We can transcend all these limitations — if we choose to. (It is a matter of observation that anyone who so desires can overcome personal dislike, class feeling, national hatred, colour prejudice. Not easy; but it can be done, if we have the will and know how to carry out our good intentions.) Four. Love expressing itself in good treatment breeds love. Hate expressing itself in bad treatment breeds hate. In the light of these facts, it’s obvious what inter-personal, inter-class and international policies should be. But, again, knowledge cuts little ice. We all know; we almost all fail to do. It is a question, as usual, of the best methods of implementing intentions. Among other things, peace propaganda must be a set of instructions in the art of modifying character.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“States and Nations don’t exist as such. There are only people. Sets of people living in certain areas, having certain allegiances. Nations won’t change their national policies unless and until people change their private policies. All governments, even Hitler’s, even Stalin’s, even Mussolini’s, are representative. To-day’s national behaviour — a large-scale projection of to-day’s individual behaviour. Or rather, to be more accurate, a large-scale projection of the individual’s secret wishes and intentions. For we should all like to behave a good deal worse than our conscience and respect for public opinion allow. One of the great attractions of patriotism — it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we’re profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture for the sake of the fatherland. Good international policies are projections of individual good intentions and benevolent wishes, and must be of the same kind as good inter-personal policies. Pacifist propaganda must be aimed at people as well as their governments; must start simultaneously at the periphery and the centre.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

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“Breakdown on the one hand, Inquisition and Ogpu rule on the other. A real dilemma, if the plan is mainly economic and political. But think in terms of individual men, women, and children, not of States, Religions, Economic Systems and such-like abstractions: there is then a hope of passing between the horns. For if you begin by considering concrete people, you see at once that freedom from coercion is a necessary condition of their developing into full-grown human beings; that the form of economic prosperity which consists in possessing unnecessary objects doesn’t make for individual well-being; that a leisure filled with passive amusements is not a blessing; that the conveniences of urban life are bought at a high physiological and mental price; that an education which allows you to use yourself wrongly is almost valueless; that a social organization resulting in individuals being forced, every few years, to go out and murder one another must be wrong. And so on. Whereas if you start from the State, the Faith, the Economic System, there is a complete transvaluation of values. Individuals must murder one another, because the interests of the Nation demand it; must be educated to think of ends and disregard means, because the schoolmasters are there and don’t know of any other method; must live in towns, must have leisure to read the newspapers and go to the movies, must be encouraged to buy things they don’t need, because the industrial system exists and has to be kept going; must be coerced and enslaved, because otherwise they might think for themselves and give trouble to their rulers. The sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things — science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools — which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one’s interests as a human being, and, having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It’s almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some ‘enemy of society’ to be shot.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“A principle is, by definition, right; a pIan, for the good of the people. Axioms from which it logically follows that those who disagree with you and won’t help to realize your plan are enemies of goodness and humanity. No longer men and women, but personifications of evil, fiends incarnate. Killing men and women is wrong; but killing fiends is a duty. Hence the Holy Office, hence Robespierre and the Ogpu. Men with strong religious and revolutionary faith, men with well-thought-out plans for improving the lot of their fellows, whether in this world or the next, have been more systematically and cold-bloodedly cruel than any others. Thinking in terms of first principles entails acting with machine-guns. A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is a government that uses torture. Per contra, if you never consider principles and have no plan, but deal with situations as they arise, piecemeal, you can afford to have unarmed policemen, liberty of speech and habeas corpus. Admirable. But what happens when an industrial society learns (a) how to make technological advances at a constantly accelerating speed, and (b) to prevent conception? Answer: it must either plan itself in accordance with general political and economic principles, or else break down. But governments with principles and plans have generally been tyrannies making use of police spies and terrorism. Must we resign ourselves to slavery and torture for the sake of co-ordination?” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

✌ https://lewisdwilliams.substack.com/p/day-x

Day X. February 20-21. 8:30AM. Royal Courts of Justice, London (more information in the comments). “Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death.” — Doctors for Assange

“But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.” — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“Peace need not be impractical, and war need not be inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy (1963)

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” — John Quincy Adams (1821)

“We live in a time — apparently — where we have to justify our existence with data... [and] I think the death of God is ultimately the main reason for that. If you forgot that people have intrinsic value because they are created in the image of God, and they’re [now] just a number, and we have to work to Net Zero, and we need to now see if you add something or take too much, and you have to justify your own existence by quoting scientific studies — I think we’ve gone off the road, man!” — Eva Vlaardingerbroek