“‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’” ~~ George Orwell

“I believe it is vital – to civilization, to liberty, to everything we wish for our species, especially for our young. Reading shapes the way we think. Not the content (that too, but it is near irrelevant). It shapes the way we CAN think, which opens our capacity to think. It requires translating and assembling symbols into words, words into concepts, images -things in themselves far bigger than the little word. It’s a process the brain uses to process and store information, but more importantly, to create from. Reading is training this, the younger a child starts, the easier it becomes and more building blocks they have. It is also compound interest for there on in.

It is a genie repressed in illiterate societies. It is a genie that, once freed, cannot ever be put back. Those who champion freedom, must champion reading, and particularly reading fiction, because that trains the mind in taking symbolic logic into creating what is not. Into building something far beyond the mere literal meaning of words, transforming them. That is what drives us, makes us human, gives us dreams. That will give us the stars.

Without that we’re little more than sheep.

With it, we have a key to being far more.” ~~ Dave Freer

“How do you know when you’ve made it in America? When your grown-up kid declares he’s a socialist. It means you’ve given your family a level of material comfort and security so unquestionable that your child has never even thought about how it happened. The very life you’ve provided him is like a seamless work of art in which all the grueling spadework has been successfully hidden. Good for you. Bad for everyone else.” ~~ Abe Greenwall

“But let’s be serious about these condescending leftists. They knew Arday was a phony. They also knew he was useful. His existence supported their narrative, so that irritating objective truth thing could be dispensed with. But he was never their peer; he was their pet. They tried to make Jason Arday into something he wasn’t — an intellectual and a genius — because he was a good-looking black guy with the kind of lengthy dreads that send a tingle down the legs of childless liberal wine women who spend their endless free time reading Ibram X. Kendi’s tomes (that relic of Woke 1.0 is yet another clown whose scamming was too much even for left-wing academia to bear) and doing the work to ameliorate their appalling residual whiteness.” ~~ Kurt Schlichter

“So you want to abolish an agency that found 151,000 children. You want to abolish an agency that seized enough fentanyl to kill every American three times over again. You want to abolish an agency that is attacking sex trafficking” ~~ Tom Homon