Zitate

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld | The leading media as well as the mass media are business models

"The leading media as well as the mass media are business models and serve no more to convey "truth" than the pharmaceutical industry serves to promote public health. Indoctrination is part of the essence of media."

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

Prof. Christoph Degenhart | The broadcasters adopt government lines in an undifferentiated manner

"In the portrayal of political processes, I often see a certain political one-sidedness. For example, when it comes to the topics of ecology or Europeanization, critics are always put in the right-wing corner. [....] The broadcasters adopt government lines in an undifferentiated manner. ARD and ZDF are increasingly acting as an acclamation forum for politics."

Professor Christoph Degenhart

Fjodor Dostojewski | The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping

"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison."

Fjodor Dostojewski

George Bernard Shaw | We want a few mad people now

"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!"

George Bernard Shaw

George Orwell | If you want a picture of the future

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."

George Orwell

Friedrich August von Hayek | all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny

"Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny."

Friedrich August von Hayek

Tom Clancy | What the government is good at is collecting taxes

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else."

Tom Clancy

Erich Fromm | Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable

"Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth."

Erich Fromm

Dr Mike Yeadon | have taken as fact that viruses exist without ever reviewing the original papers

"I’m aware this two page backgrounder & experimental proposal aims to show whether or not viruses exist, focussing on SARS-CoV-2. I’m a signatory because, having given a lot of thought to the entire proposition, I now believe it’s yet another of the lies to which we’ve been subject. In the case of scientists, even those in commercial drug discovery, have taken as fact that viruses exist without ever reviewing the original papers."

Dr Mike Yeadon

John Edgar Hoover | a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists

"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent."

John Edgar Hoover

Jean de la Bruyère | The exact contrary […] is often the truth.

"The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth."

Jean de la Bruyère

Ayn Rand | He is free to evade reality

"He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see."

Ayn Rand

Arno Gruen | While those who can no longer bear the loss of human values

"While those who can no longer bear the loss of human values are considered insane, those who have separated from their human roots are certified normal."

Arno Gruen

Friedrich Nietzsche | We live in a system

"We live in a system in which one must either be a wheel or get crushed by the wheels."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ayn Rand | The smallest minority on earth

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

Ayn Rand

Erich Fromm | The holders of authority and those who take advantage of it

"The holders of authority and those who take advantage of it must convince people of this fiction and put to sleep their realistic, that is to say, critical, faculty of thought. Every thinking person knows the methods of propaganda, methods by which critical judgment is destroyed and the mind is lulled until it submits to clichés that stultify people because they make them dependent, depriving them of the ability to trust their eyes and their judgment. This function, in which they believe, blinds them to reality."

Erich Fromm

Karl Jaspers | Where is the Federal Republic headed?

"Every four years it elects the Bundestag. The lists or persons submitted to it by the parties are already elected beforehand by the parties. The process of this hidden preliminary election, which is the actual election, is convoluted; the names for the constituency lists and the state lists are not drawn up in the same way. But it is always the party committees, never the people, who would be involved in this decisive beginning. One must be a party member in order to participate somewhere in this election and to be able to be set up. Even those who are party members, as such, have little effect in the nominations. The decisive factor is the party hierarchy and bureaucracy.[...] Even the elections are not really elections, but acclamations to the party oligarchy. [....] The parties, which should by no means be the state, make themselves, withdrawn from the life of the people, the state [....] The governance of the state is in the hands of the party oligarchy [....] Their position, not limited by any tension to other power, seduces [....] the parties to want to occupy the seats by their own people. This is the reward for party work, the spoils of victory after the electoral battle [....]"

Karl Jaspers

Dr. Otto Heinrich Warburg | dangerous breeding ground for cancer cells

"Deprive a cell 35% of its oxygen for 48 hours and it will become cancerous."

Dr. Otto Heinrich Warburg

Caitlin Johnstone | The empire still fears the public

"The empire still fears the public. If it didn't it wouldn't bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions—it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they're still afraid of what we'll do to them if we decide we don't consent."

Caitlin Johnstone

Thomas Jefferson | When government fears the people

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Thomas Jefferson

Georg Orwell | What counts is that we don’t betray each other

"It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other."

Georg Orwell

Friedrich Nietzsche | the advent of nihilism

"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism […] For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Henry Louis Mencken | The whole drift of our law

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."

Henry Louis Mencken

George Orwell | A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

George Orwell

Niccolò Machiavelli | majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances

"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."

Niccolò Machiavelli

George Orwell | These people don’t see that

"These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you."

George Orwell

Bertrand Russell | Fear is the main source of superstition

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

Bertrand Russell

Noam Chomsky | bludgeon is to a totalitarian state

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."

Noam Chomsky

Voltaire | our hope our illusion

"One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion"

Voltaire

Bärbel Bohley | the thorough research into the Stasi structures

"All these investigations, the thorough research into the Stasi structures, the methods with which they worked and still work, all this will fall into the wrong hands. One will examine these structures in detail - in order to then take them over. They will be adapted a little to fit a free Western society. They won't necessarily arrest the troublemakers either. There are more subtle ways to disarm someone. But the secret bans, the watching, the suspicion, the fear, the isolation and exclusion, the branding and muzzling of those who don't conform - that will come back, believe me. Institutions will be created that will work much more effectively, much more finely than the Stasi. The constant lying will also come back, the disinformation, the fog in which everything loses its contour."

Bärbel Bohley