"The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and over again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded b the (conjectural) 'primitive language' of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past which we know nothing with certainty--not even that it is false...A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world." --Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius
"Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a few faked photographs would bring him into existence ... Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact ... Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar." --George Orwell, 1984
“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.” -- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children