John Twelve Hawks Quotes

In Orwell’s 1984, all Party members must assemble for a “Two Minutes Hate” session where they watch a propaganda film showing the Party’s enemies. The establishment of the Virtual Panopticon insures that these group meetings aren’t necessary. Those in power now have the resources to deliver a political message tailored to the specific fears of the individual citizen. Yes, we’ll still have political rallies and conventions, but these will be empty gestures retained from the past.

A Vast Machine watched and evaluated them, remembering their past actions and predicting their future behavior.

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

Lying, not love, is the fundamental indication of humanity.

All language – everything we say – is just an approximation of reality.

Any monitoring system that is invisible, pervasive, automatic, and permanent gives those in power the means to create a modern surveillance state. And these new states will have an authority that has detached itself from ethics and ideology. Politicians and dictators will continue to make speeches, but their words will become meaningless. This new system will see and know us. It will even predict our future behavior.

Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings.

Children defer to adults because they’re older, bigger and stronger. But it’s also because children believe that adults have reasons for what they do. There was nothing magical about the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s flute. The Piper acted like he knew where he was going and the children followed him into the dark mountains where they were never seen again.

It took me years to realize that a computer would never truly be able to say cogito ego sum although dozens of lurid Hollywood movies about robots want to leave that impression. A computer thinks....that is, it realizes it has been switched on...but it doesn't know it exists.

We drink our morning coffee with a drop of fear.

Peace and prosperity were possible only if people stopped asking new questions and accepted the available answers.

You don't need to watch everyone if everyone believes they're being watched.

It's all just fear and distraction. Fear will get people into our Virtual Panopticon and then we'll keep them happy. People will be free to take antidepressant drugs, go into debt, and stare at their television sets. Society might seem disorganized, but it will be very stable. Every few years we'll pick a different mannequin to give speeches from the White House Rose Garden.

There was no need to worry about religion or philosophy; the truth was determined by whoever was in power.

Modern authority is based on a system of lies that are accepted by the general population. If you pull away the curtain and show the reality of power, people are motivated to question the fictions that govern their own lives.