[Yarikoff]

Isn't it interesting how those in power will suggest any means, fair or foul, to restrict our freedom? Of course its all wrapped up in a "its-good-for-you" package which they try to sell us, but what they're really seeking is ultimate control over us - what we do, what we think, what we say, where we go, etc etc. I don't know about you folks in the US but already in the UK many people feel their hard-won freedoms are being slowly but surely trampled under foot by the jackboots of our Labour government.

One book everyone should read before they die is Orwell's 1984, it's all there, starkly laid out, we deny it or ignore it at our peril.

• "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
  - George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3

• "Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
  - George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3

• "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
  - George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5