DUNCAN O’FINIOAN: ‘You’re not going to wake anyone up, anymore. We’re basically at end game. There are things about to start happening everywhere that’s going to freak the shit out of people. Back away from trying to wake them up. They’re comfortably asleep. They are where they want to be. And unfortunate as it is, when the crap does hit the fan, they are going to look around and say, ‘why didn’t someone say something?’ ~ Duncan O’Finioan.

ALDOUS HUXLEY: ‘Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. 

In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modify into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World’.  ~ From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949. From Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.

NOAH WEBSTER: If the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.’: Noah Webster – (1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the 1806 edition of the dictionary that bears his name, the first dictionary of American English usage.

LECH WALESA: ‘In many countries the majority of people don’t go and cast their vote. So I am asking you, how is this democracy then? In the near future, though, we’ll face a truly grave problem. Politicians will have disappointed people so much with their lying and stealing that the only ones to turn up for elections will be the candidates themselves.’ ~ Lech Walesa, Former Polish President.

MARCUS CICERO: A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. Marcus Tullius Cicero.

The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.