"We just live in an open psychiatric ward, the most serious cases sit on the government bench, the offspring stick on the streets or smear pictures. All of them would probably be better off in the padded cell and yes the world would be saved."
Gerald G. Grosz
"We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
David Graeber
"Nothing can make a demagogue more popular today than when he repeatedly calls for sharp taxes against the rich [...] Wealth levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are quite extraordinarily popular with the masses who do not have to pay them."
Ludwig von Mises
"Ecologism is (among quite a few other ism) a decay product of Marxism. The failed "impoverishment thesis" is replaced by the eco- and climate catastrophe. The goal is the extinction of capitalism - and thus of Western freedom."
Roland Baader
"I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all, frighten people, and secondly, demoralise them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern. And I think there’s an element in the thinking of some people... ‘We don’t want people to be educated, healthy and confident, because they would get out of control."
Tony Benn
"According to the idea of the NSDAP [Nazi party], we are the German left. Nothing is more hateful to us than the right-wing national ownership block."
Joseph Goebbels
“Dictators seek to control men’s thoughts as well as their bodies and so they attempt to dictate science, education and religion. But dictated education is usually propaganda, dictated history is often mythology, dictated science is pseudo-science.”
Edwin Grant Conklin
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
George Orwell
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
Doris Lessing
"Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you."
Dara O'Briain
"It is a great consolation in elections that only one of several candidates can be elected!"
Mark Twain
"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
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it."
Edward Bernays
"We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content."
Eduardo Galeano
"My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier."
Sir Anthony Hopkins
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Marcus Aurelius
"What do you think would be going on here, if more people realized what was going on?"
Volker Pispers
"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
Bertolt Brecht
"Madness becomes invisible when it has reached sufficiently large dimensions."
Bertolt Brecht
"If you believe that the most basic human liberties ought to be contingent on taking a product from a giant pharmaceutical company then you are not liberal or left wing. You’re not a conservative or patriotic. There is only one word to describe you and that is Fascist."
Dave Smith
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
Harry S. Truman
"Children are taught in their geography books, when too young to apprehend aright the meaning of such things, that the world is a great globe revolving around the Sun, and the story is repeated continuously, year by year, till they reach maturity, at which time they generally become so absorbed in other matters as to be indifferent as to whether the teaching be true or not, and, as they hear of nobody contradicting it, they presume that it must be the correct thing, if not to believe at least to receive it as a fact. They thus tacitly give their assent to a theory which, if it had first been presented to them at what are called ‘years of discretion,’ they would at once have rejected. The consequences of evil-teaching, whether in religion or in science, are far more disastrous than is generally supposed, especially in a luxurious laisser faire age like our own. The intellect becomes weakened and the conscience seared."
David Wardlaw Scott
"The first bachelor generation is just climbing the university chairs. People who are perfectly trained in their craft, who have internalized the hegemonic ideology, and who are good advertising media for a system that needs academic confirmation in order to be able to continue to say 'democracy'. This generation already determines what 'good science' is. It fills journals, conference programs, and so eventually textbooks, lectures, and seminars - with topics, perspectives, and terms it has taken from the political agenda and the tenders linked to it, and which it doesn't question because it couldn't learn that anywhere."
Michael Meyen
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
Carl Sagan
"If your answer to every failure of government is more government, you are like an alcoholic trying to drink yourself sober."
Will Spencer
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
Robert A. Heinlein