“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”
G. K. Chesterton
“Whenever a king sees that his people are about to revolt against him, he starts a war with another country.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
““To suppress a rebellion, it is not necessary to act violently. Methods like Hitler’s are outdated. It suffices to create such a strong collective conditioning that the very thought of rebellion no longer arises in people’s minds.
The ideal would be to shape people from birth and restrict their innate biological abilities. Afterwards, one would continue with conditioning and strictly reduce education to the acquisition of professional skills. An uneducated person has a limited horizon, and the more their thinking is confined to mediocre aspirations, the less capable they are of rebelling.
We must ensure that access to science becomes increasingly difficult and elitist, that a divide forms between people and science, and that information for the general public contains no subversive content. Above all, no philosophy. Here too, we must use the power of persuasion, not open violence.
On television, large-scale entertainment programs are broadcast that appeal exclusively to feelings or instincts. The mind will be occupied with the useless and playful. They can distract their minds from thinking through constant chatter and music.
We will place sexuality at the very top of a person’s interest list. There is no better social tranquilizer.
In general, we will do this so that the serious part of existence is eliminated, everything valuable is ridiculed, and frivolity is constantly supported, so that public euphoria becomes the measure of human happiness and a model of freedom.
In this way, conditioning leads to such integration that our only fear is being excluded from the system and thus losing access to the conditions necessary for happiness.
The mass person thus formed must be treated as what he is: like a cow, and one must care for him like a herd. Everything that leads to the apathy of his clear mind is a public good, and everything that could awaken this good must be mocked, suppressed, and fought.
Any doctrine questioning the system must be branded as subversive and terrorist. And those who support it will then be treated as terrorists.””
Günther Anders
“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
“In the United States, the majority takes on the task of supplying a multitude of ready-made opinions, freeing the individual from the necessity of forming his own.”
Alexis De Tocqueville
“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
“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
“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
“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