... Television is a god-damned amusement park; television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troop of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players – we’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We‘ll tell you anything you want to hear. We’ll lie like hell ... We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds, where are you now? You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that you’re own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like a tube. You eat like a tube. You raise your children like a tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name: you people are the reality. We are the illusion. Network 1976 starring Faye Dunaway & Peter Finch & William Holden & Robert Duvall & Ned Beatty & Beatrice Straight & Jordan Charney & William Prince & Lane Smith & Marlene Warfield & Conchata Ferrell & Carolyn Kirgbaum et al, director Sidney Lumet
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. Martin Luther King
What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard P Feynman
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard P Feynman
The concept of model-dependent reality. Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: The Meaning of Life, Discovery 2012
A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls ... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Stephen Hawking
Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travellers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history ... We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future ... A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die. Margaret Mead, Man on the Moon 1969
The insight to what became known as the Holographic principle simply happened one day when I was walking in the Physics department and came upon a hologram. Well when I saw the hologram it occurred to me that there is a very big difference between a hologram and an ordinary picture ... I said jokingly maybe the horizon of a black hole is something like a hologram. The stuff that falls into a black hole is three-dimensional; the stuff of the horizon is two-dimensional. But maybe in some way the stuff of the horizon is a hologram capturing the full three-dimensionality of the things that fall into the black hole. Professor Lenny Susskind, theoretical physicist
It is actually unreasonable how mathematics works. Why should the world behave according to mathematical laws?
It is not only that it becomes easier to describe with mathematics. As you got deeper and deeper into reality mathematics becomes the only way to describe reality. Professor Lenny Susskind
I’m going to be honest with you. I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, or whatever you want to call it. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell. The Matrix 1999 starring Keanu Reeves & Laurence Fishburne & Carrie-Anne Moss & Hugo Weaving & Joe Pantoliano & Gloria Foster & Marcus Chong & Julian Arahanga & Matt Doran & Belinda McClory et al, directors Andy & Lana Wachowski, man in black to Morpheus
Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. T S Eliot, 1888-1965, Four Quartets: ‘Burnt Norton’, 1936
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very experience of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. George Orwell, 1984
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. ibid.
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality ... And were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. ibid.
And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit. Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture
Inside a simulation you can’t tell any difference between the simulated environment – the virtual reality – and the real environment. In fact this environment we now find ourselves in could be just a simulation. Professor Frank Tippler
The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has usurped power and is acting as an outlaw government, it is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and reality of what we are doing in the world, and act responsibly to change it. Daniel Ellsberg
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Oscar Wilde
When I say violence I mean violence of Life itself ... To think how disturbing what is called Reality is. Francis Bacon
In order to approach the spiritual in art, one employs reality as little as possible. Piet Mondrian
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Friedrich Nietzsche
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. Friedrich Nietzsche
Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this ... is unreal. Star Trek s3e6: Specter of the Gun, Spock
You do understand don’t you that thought is the basis of all reality. Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e6: Where No One Has Gone Before, alien to Picard
Our reality may be very much like theirs. And all this might be just an elaborate simulation. Star Trek: The Next Generation s6e12: Ship in a Bottle, Picard
The barriers between quantum realities are breaking down. Other realities are emerging into our own. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Parallels s7e11, Data
I can see further beyond the subatomic ... It’s a new level of reality. It’s beautiful. Star Trek: Voyager s4e2: The Gift, Kes
It was an escape from reality. The Bridge on the River Kwai 1957 starring Alec Guinness & William Holden & Jack Hawkins & Ann Sears & Sessue Hayakawa & James Donald & Geoffrey Horne & Heihachiro Okawa & Keiichiro Katsumoto et al, director David Lean, camp big knob
Total loss of contact with Reality. Hitler’s Henchmen: Goering the Marshall, History 2001
In a telegram to Hitler he suggested he become Hitler’s successor ... He was immediately stripped of all his offices. ibid.
Goering was now in full flight from reality ... Hitler accused Goering of living in a world of his own. Goering: A Career II
Whom should a man trust in this world when there is no thing real in it? Henry VIII and His Six Wives 1973 starring Keith Michell & Donald Pleasence & Charlotte Rampling & Jane Asher & Frances Cuka & Lynne Frederick & Jenny Bos & Barbara Leigh-Hunt & Brian Blessed et al, director Waris Hussein Henry
So how can we determine what’s real and what’s not? We can’t. We can just pick and choose what we want to believe and rationalize it as best we can. Reality, after all, is basically a movie projected inside our heads. It’s based on the colors our senses permit us to see, the sounds they permit us to hear and whatever else our brains let slip through the gates. But outside our limited senses, surrounding us, there is, unquestionably, a much greater reality, a universe we live in but cannot see. Well, most of us, anyway. Out there, in the dark, All Things Are Possible. Richard B Spence, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories From the Orphan Trilogy
Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. Where did the totality of reality come from? Did time have a beginning? Brian Greene
The so-called Holy Grail is actually a set of higher magical teachings; it is not an object, but a piece of information. Utterly Kabbalistic in its origin, the Holy Grail is the highest Kabbalistic secret. That is that physical matter can be transformed molecule by molecule by the use of incantations of ancient Hebrew letters and numbers. And that the nature of reality is really an illusion. Chris Everard