Quotes, thoughts, and philosophy — a treasury of extraordinary ideas.

A collection for those who don’t just read words, but seek to truly understand them.

yoice.net is a growing treasury of quotes, ideas, and reflections — for people who want to explore, question, and be inspired.

Inspirational quotes by Leonardo da Vinci on art, science, and lifeCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. Learning never exhausts the mind. Art is never finished, only abandoned. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. Water is the driving force of all nature.”" Leonardo da Vinci
Inspirational quote by Mark Twain about exploring, dreaming, and discoveringCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain
Inspirational quotes by Leonardo da Vinci on art, science, and lifeCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. Learning never exhausts the mind. Art is never finished, only abandoned. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. Water is the driving force of all nature.”" Leonardo da Vinci
Inspirational quote by Mark Twain about exploring, dreaming, and discoveringCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain
Quote by Nesta Webster about Illuminism, power, and conspiracyCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"The art of Illuminism lay in enlisting dupes as well as adepts and by encouraging dreams of honest visionaries or the schemes of fanatics. By flattering the vanity of ambitious egotists, by working on the unbalanced brains or by playing such passions as greed and power to make men of totally divergent aims serve the secret purpose of the sect. People with money were welcomed but kept oblivious of actual secrets. The purpose is to win power and riches, to undermine secular or religious government and to attain the masters of the world." Nesta Webster
Quote by Carl Gustav Jung about the collective unconscious and archetypesCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents." Carl Gustav Jung
Inspirational quote by Bertrand Russell about truth, love, and toleranceCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say…I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more closely and closely interconnected we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet." Bertrand Russell
Neil Postman quote about technological progress, invention, and the consumer perspectiveCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets." Neil Postman
Quote by Yuval Noah Harari about truth, power, and societyCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Truth was never the highest priority of human society. It was the highest priority of some individuals, but never of society as a whole — because society as a whole does not function on the basis of truth. If you take two of the most powerful institutions of humankind — science and the scientific community, and religion and churches — neither of them has truth as their chief value. For individuals, yes. But as institutions, no. The chief value of science is power. The chief value of religion is order — organization. Religion is all about maintaining order in society, and science is mainly about gaining power." Yuval Noah Harari
Neil Postman quote about the scientific method, learning, perspective, balance, and humilityCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning." Neil Postman
Quote by Mark Passio about freedom, morality, truth, tyranny, and slaveryCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"The more moral a population is, the freer it becomes. The more immoral a population is, the deeper into bondage and slavery it goes. Another way of saying this is to say that the presence of truth and morality in the lives of the people of any given society is always inversely proportional to the presence of tyranny and slavery in that society. The more truth and morality there is, the less tyranny and slavery there is. The less truth and morality there is, the more tyranny and slavery there is. That's the Law of Freedom. And many people don't want to understand that; that these two things are inextricably interwoven and connected and can never be separated from each other: the presence of truth and morality in a society and the presence of freedom or its lack in a society." Mark Passio
Quote about liberty, wisdom, and virtue by Edmund BurkeCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths." Edmund Burke
C.S. Lewis quote about tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victimsCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." C.S. Lewis
Quote about freedom and control from Neil Patrick Harris in The Matrix ResurrectionsCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Right now, you’re feeling good about what you’ve done. You should. It was a victory. Bravo. Now what? You’ve come here to negotiate some kind of deal? You think you hold all the cards, because you can do whatever you want in this world. I say, go for it. Remake it. Knock yourselves out. Paint the sky with rainbows. But here’s the thing. The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty. And that means you two, back in your pods, unconscious and alone, just like them." Neil Patrick Harris
Quote by Michael A. Hoffman II about modern perceptions of freedom and controlCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"These blind slaves are told they are 'free' and 'highly educated' even as they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant to run screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror. The symbols that modern man embraces with the naive trust of an infant would be tantamount to billboards reading, ‘This way to your death and enslavement,’ to the understanding of the traditional peasant of antiquity" Michael A. Hoffman II
Quote by Roland Baader about laws being political tools in democracyCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Laws are - even and especially in modern democracy - rarely instruments that enforce right against wrong, but mostly political tools with which the politically weak are exploited, robbed, suppressed and instrumentalized in favor of the politically strong." Roland Baader
Quote by Montagu Norman about political parties and elections manipulating the publicCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Give the people a toy to keep them busy long enough, give them 'political parties'! Then they will waste all their energy and wit on meaningless occupation with individuals and other trivialities. So they won't bother us anymore, and we can run our business at will. But to keep the toy from getting boring eventually and the population's discontent from boiling over, a ritual game with a cathartic function as a pressure valve must be inserted at regular intervals. We call it "parliamentary elections," which sounds important. Then there is peace for the next four years, especially since everyone believes they decided something themselves. The media? They play our game all by themselves—without realizing it. Occasionally we give them a morsel when we want to functionally neutralize a somewhat more alert, and thus unwelcome, person or group. Then they are satisfied, and so is the population; after all, they have something to gossip about. By splitting the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energy fighting for battles over issues of no importance." Montagu Norman
Quote by Wolfgang Streeck about markets deciding economic order and political powerlessnessCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"We don't decide anything. It's decided for us: by the 'markets' and, following their lead, by governments. One has to be careful with language, not to talk oneself into a responsibility one doesn't actually have or that's being taken away from one. 'We' don't need to consider what we'd prefer, because it doesn't matter anyway. Questions of economic order and the distribution of economic benefits are currently decided by summits and central bankers under pressure from large corporations, especially the financial sector. 'We' will only have a say when we understand that, fundamentally, we have no say at all." Wolfgang Streeck
Quote about power and science by Michael CrichtonCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"…Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought. Scientists fall in line with the dominant power structure. They have to, because the power structure pays the bills. You don’t play ball with the power structure, you don’t get money for research, you don’t get an appointment, you don’t get published, in short you don’t count anymore. You’re out. You might as well be dead." Michael Crichton
Neil Postman quote image about society's growing obsession with entertainmentCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death." Neil Postman
Thomas Sowell quote image about fairness and politicsCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'." Thomas Sowell
Quote by Markus Krall explaining the dangers of Modern Monetary Theory and money creationCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"There was this wonderful book called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and there's a chapter in it where there's a planet where another planet sends all of its lunatics to do no more damage at home. And on this lunatic planet, the Keynesian economists have come to power and decided that they can abolish the scarcity of goods by abolishing the scarcity of money. They then declared the leaves of trees to be money, which of course immediately led to hyperinflation. This was then countered with a forest defoliation program. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, some of these "foliage faction" have made it here. They're sitting in the central banking worlds today, in the Governing Council of the ECB and at the Fed, and they're telling us with their Modern Monetary Theory that it's possible in all seriousness to overcome the scarcity of goods by abolishing the scarcity of money and being able to buy everything, anything, everything, if we just print enough money." Markus Krall
Quote by John Adams about the cause of America's troubles being ignorance about coin credit and circulationCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"All the Perplexities, Confusions and Distresses in America arise not from defects in their Constitutions or Confederation, not from a want of Honour or Virtue, So much as from downright Ignorance of the Nature of Coin, Credit and Circulation." John Adams
Quote by Montagu Norman on capital protection, power, and control from 1924Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished." Montagu Norman
Quote by Benjamin Netanjahu on the strategy behind the isolation of Palestinians in Gaza and West BankCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas [...] This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank" Benjamin Netanjahu
Billy Corgan quote about the exploitative nature of the music industry and lack of money in music businessCopyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"The problem is that there’s not enough money in music as a business model. Where in television and vis-a-vis the advertisers and movies, there’s so much money that the controlling forces still circle around the stars in the right way, stars are taken care of better in those industries. In the music industry it’s still very much this exploitative thing, it’s still very much people signing their lives away, the old deal-with-the devil stuff. That is still going on, it’s unbelievable in this day-and-age that this is still going on." Billy Corgan
Quote by Roland Baader on the importance of the market economy in securing freedom.Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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"It may be too late to avert the financial disaster that lies ahead of us, but we must at least prevent the road to financial ruin from also becoming a road to servitude. Let's talk our heads off and write our fingers to the bone, let's make ourselves outsiders and ridiculed figures if necessary, but let's fight to ensure that the basis of people's freedom, the market economy, is not presented to them as the alleged culprit and executed by the henchmen of power under the false pretext. Otherwise, it is we ourselves, our happiness and prosperity and freedom, who die with the market. Let us free ourselves from the true evil, from the fuel of presumptuous domination and destructive lies: from state counterfeit money." Roland Baader