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
"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Thomas Jefferson
"How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."
Karl Kraus
"The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men."
Rose Wilder Lane
"The bewildered herd is a problem. We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling. We’ve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops." You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them."
Noam Chomsky
"I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them."
Noam Chomsky
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."
Milton Friedman
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
Winston S. Churchill
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
George Orwell
"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
"What is a president, then? He is the mouthpiece of the corporations - and nothing else. [....] We are no longer a democracy. We gave up our constitution long ago. [....] The modern dictatorship doesn't come with brown or black uniforms. We do it with entertainment, with television, with fun, fun. And an education that dumbs down."
Gore Vidal
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. "
Clarence Darrow
"Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests."
General Aladeen
"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
"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
“The Masonic Movement when it can be divorced from politics and social ends and from its present paralyzing condition of inertia, will meet the need of those who can, and should, wield power. It is the custodian of the law; it is the home of the Mysteries and the seat of initiation. It holds in its symbolism the ritual of Deity, and the way of salvation is pictorially preserved in its work. The methods of Deity are demonstrated in its Temples, and under the All-seeing Eye the work can go forward. It is a far more occult organization than can be realized, and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists. In its ceremonials lies hid the wielding of the forces connected with the growth and life of the kingdoms of nature and the unfoldment of the divine aspects in man. In the comprehension of its symbolism will come the power to cooperate with the divine plan. It meets the need of those who work on the first Ray of Will or Power.”
Alice Bailey
"The process of struggling for public opinion has nothing to do with truth, but with domination."
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
"I'm known for my irony. But the idea of erecting a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor would not have occurred to even me."
George Bernard Shaw
"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer."
Joseph Sobran
"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power."
Leo Tolstoy
"And last: devilish is he who erects the kingdom of lies and forces other people to live in it. This still goes beyond the humiliation of spiritual separation, then the kingdom of the perverse world is erected, and the Antichrist wears the mask of the Savior (...). The devil is not the slayer, he is Diabolos, the slanderer, is the 'God' in whom the lie is not cowardice, as in man, but domination. He spills the last resort of despair, the knowledge, he instigates the realm of madness, because it is madness to settle in the lie."
Arnold Gehlen
"Ideology is what is still holding the whole system together and when that is no longer there.... When people really wake up and realize that they are being held in a mental prison by mental dwarfs, that power dwindles exponentially fast and that is where we are headed. Everything is based on mental, moronic, anti-nature and anti-people concepts. A positive development, however, is that it is becoming more and more transparent."
Alexander Wagandt
"Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile."
William Lyon Mackenzie King
"The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy."
Thomas Sowell
“You can live in a dictatorship and be free – on one condition: that you fight the dictatorship. The man who thinks with is own mind and keeps it uncorrupted is free. The man who fights for what he thinks is right is free. But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you’re lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, you’re not free. Even without any violent coercion, you’re a slave. You can’t beg your freedom from someone. You have to seize it – everyone as much as he can."
Ignazio Silone
"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."
George Bernhard Shaw
"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave."
Lew Nikolajewitsch Tolstoi
"When a business or an individual spends more than it makes, it goes bankrupt. When government does it, it sends you the bill. And when government does it for 40 years, the bill comes in two ways: higher taxes and inflation. Make no mistake about it, inflation is a tax and not by accident."
Ronald Reagan
"The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen....At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties."
John F. Hylan
"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
James Abram Garfield