“There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night. You gotta get back there, and create a campaign behind the lines.” — Mark Milley (2023)

“Death. It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing. Not from any lack of the desire to do so, of course. We’re like dogs on an acropolis. Trotting round with inexhaustible bladders and only too anxious to lift a leg against every statue. And mostly we succeed. Art, religion, heroism, love — we’ve left our visiting card on all of them. But death — death remains out of reach. We haven’t been able to defile that statue. Not yet, at any rate. But progress is still progressing. The larger hopes, the proliferating futures... One day, no doubt, some genius of the kennel will manage to climb up and deposit a well-aimed tribute bang in the middle of the statue’s face. But luckily progress hasn’t yet got so far. Death still remains.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936) (See comments for more.)

“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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.” — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“In the end the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia... An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction... Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 15O... The introduction of Our Ford’s first T-Model... Chosen as the opening date of the new era... There was a thing, as I’ve said before, called Christianity... All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God... We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

“A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste — this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“I knew that if I could not fight them in the present, then I would fight them in the future. If I couldn’t stop their propaganda, I could at least reveal their lies so that future generations would have a better chance against their own Nazis. This would be my rejection of terror, my opposition.” — Friedrich Kellner

“Consistently applied to any situation, love always gains. It is an empirically determined fact. Love is the best policy. The best not only in regard to those loved, but also in regard to the one who loves. For love is self-energizing. Produces the means whereby its policy can be carried out. In order to go on loving, one needs patience, courage, endurance. But the process of loving generates these means to its own continuance. Love gains because, for the sake of that which is loved, the lover is patient and brave. And what is loved? Goodness and the potentialities for goodness in all human beings — even those most busily engaged in refusing to actualize those potentialities for goodness in relation to the lover himself. If sufficiently great, love can cast out the fear even of malevolently active enemies.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

“Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For those whose nature demands personality as a source of energy, but who find it impossible to believe that the universe is run by a person in any sense of the word that we can possibly understand — what’s the right policy? In most cases, they reject any practice which might be called religious. But this is throwing away the baby with the bath water. The desired relationship with a personality can be historical, not ontological. A contact, not with somebody existing at present as manager of the universe, but with somebody known to have existed at some time in the past. The Imitation of Christ (or of any other historical character) is just as effective if the model be regarded as having existed there, then, as it is if the model be conceived as existing here, now. And meditation on goodness, communication with goodness, contemplation of goodness are demonstrably effective means of realizing goodness in life, even when that which is meditated on, communicated with and contemplated, is not a person, but a general mind, or even an ideal supposed to exist only in human minds.” — Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

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).