The Same Tale

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.  "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."  And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.  Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. 

-- George Orwell (1903 - 1950), pen name of British novelist, essayist, and journalist Eric Arthur Blair, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Chapter 3