George Washington | a frightful despotism
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"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."
George Washington
Philip K. Dick | Today we live in a society in which spurious realities
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
Philip K. Dick
Mind control isn’t hard to understand
"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control."
Unknown
Matt Kahn | the simple difference between clarity and confusion
"Most people don’t see their beliefs. Instead their beliefs tell them what to see. That’s the simple difference between clarity and confusion."
Matt Kahn
Stephen Hawking | Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun
"Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination."
Prof. Stephen Hawking
Aldous Huxley | The victim of mind-manipulation
"The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."
Aldous Huxley
Edward L. Bernays | the manipulation of public opinion
"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."
Edward L. Bernays
Viktor Schauberger | The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound
"The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly into the heart"
Viktor Schauberger
Richard Syron | the structure of the Federal Reserve System
"The System is just like the Church. That’s probably why I feel so comfortable with it. It’s got a pope, the chairman; and a college of cardinals, the governors and bank presidents; and a curia, the senior staff. The equivalent of the laity is the commercial banks. If you’re a naughty parishioner in the Catholic Church, you come to confession. In this system, if you’re naughty, you come to the discount window for a loan. We even have different orders of religious thought like Jesuits and Franciscans and Dominicans only we call them pragmatists and monetarists and neo-Keynesians."
Richard Syron
Viktor Schauberger | The whole of science and all its appendages
"I will return to my forest to die in peace. The whole of science and all its appendages are just a bunch of thieves hanging like marionettes on strings and having to dance to whatever tune their well-hidden slave masters deem necessary."
Viktor Schauberger
Friedrich August von Hayek | voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
Friedrich August von Hayek
Edward L. Bernays | Mindless Conformity
"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine."
Edward L. Bernays
Hannah Arendt | The power of independent thinking
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
Hannah Arendt
G. Edward Griffin | They’ve been programmed
"They've been programmed and I'm sad because I know that it's hard for people like that to take an interest - serious interest in world affairs - taken serious interest in what their elected officials are doing and they're not going to be really inclined to study and or discover the deception that's being used against them and so I'm sad because I I see all of that in the flash in my mind as being an indication of how easy it is for the masses to be manipulated"
G. Edward Griffin
Susan Sontag | Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear
"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."
Susan Sontag
The combination of the silence of the masses and the sometimes overwhelming volume
"The combination of the silence of the masses and the sometimes overwhelming volume of this greatest global crime of all time in my mind is, in its relentless daily presence, the most eerie and surreal feeling I have ever experienced."
Unknown
Voltaire | It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere
"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."
Voltaire
Johann Nestroy | Censorship is the living confession
"Censorship is the living confession of the powerful that they can only trample on dumb slaves, but cannot govern free peoples. Censorship is something that stands far beneath the executioner, for the same ray of enlightenment that sixty years ago helped the executioner achieve honesty has recently branded censorship with the stigma of contempt."
Johann Nestroy
Heiner Geißler | The fame of some contemporaries
"The fame of some contemporaries is linked to the stupidity of their admirers."
Heiner Geißler |
Paul Henri Spaak | Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases
"Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases. The sick person never suffers from it. Those who suffer painfully are the others."
Paul Henri Spaak
Klaus Schwab | frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack
"We all know, but still pay insufficient attention, to the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack, which would bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber attack."
Klaus Schwab
Dr. Drew | alles in den Nachrichten Unsinn ist, alles
"I am open to everything now. I'm open to things that I never thought I would have been open to. And I -- I really think that the door fully came open. I've realized that everything in the -- in the news is BS, everything. There's nothing that I can consume on any legacy media that I can trust. And that is shocking. And that's disturbing. And it makes you wonder how long it's been going on for. And I'm concerned, it might have been a very long time."
David Drew Pinsky
George Bernard Shaw | Every faltering regime
"Every faltering regime has tried to bind its subjects by war as a last resort."
George Bernard Shaw
Naval Ravikant | doubt is the foundation of science
"One reason that freedom of speech is so important is that doubt is the foundation of science."
Naval Ravikant
George Orwell | Narrative Essays
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
NATO | Cognitive Warfare
"[....]Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives."
NATO
George Bernard Shaw | All great art and literature is propaganda
"All great art and literature is propaganda."
George Bernard Shaw
Etienne de Harven | Research hypotheses
"Research hypotheses covering these areas of virus research are practically never scientifically verified with appropriate controls. Instead, they are established by "consensus." This is then rapidly reshaped into a dogma, efficiently perpetuated in a quasi-religious manner by the media, including ensuring that research funding is restricted to projects supporting the dogma, excluding research into alternative hypotheses. An important tool to keep dissenting voices out of the debate is censorship at various levels ranging from the popular media to scientific publications."
Etienne de Harven
It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself
"It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself in order to free oneself from one's own blindness."
Unknown author
Augustinus von Hippo | The truth is like a lion
"The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself."
Augustinus von Hippo
Bertrand Russell | When all experts agree, you need to watch out
"When all experts agree, you need to watch out."
Bertrand Russell
Robert Simmon | That ball became the famous Blue Marble
"The hard part was creating a flat map of the Earth’s surface with four months’ of satellite data. Reto Stockli, now at the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, did much of this work. Then we wrapped the flat map around a ball. My part was integrating the surface, clouds, and oceans to match people’s expectations of how Earth looks from space. That ball became the famous Blue Marble."
Robert Simmon
Chris Hedges | Empire of Illusion
"A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control."
Chris Hedges