Philip Dormer Stanhope | A weak mind is like a microscope
"A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones."
Philip Dormer Stanhop
Zitate
Christian Slater | We live in a kingdom of bullshit
"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this, look at it! A world built on fantasy! Synthetic emotions in the form of pills! Psychological warfare in the form of advertising! Mind altering chemicals in the form of food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media! Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century! We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs, while we tossed the remnants into the ever expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses, trademarked by corporations, built on bipolar numbers, jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You'd have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, that even you have lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real: I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your big mac. As far as you are concerned, Elliot, I am very real. We are all together now, whether you like it or not."
Christian Slater
Philip K. Dick | Today we live in a society in which spurious realities
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
Philip K. Dick
Mind control isn’t hard to understand
"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control."
Unknown
Matt Kahn | the simple difference between clarity and confusion
"Most people don’t see their beliefs. Instead their beliefs tell them what to see. That’s the simple difference between clarity and confusion."
Matt Kahn
Stephen Hawking | Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun
"Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination."
Prof. Stephen Hawking
Aldous Huxley | The victim of mind-manipulation
"The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."
Aldous Huxley
Edward L. Bernays | the manipulation of public opinion
"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
Edward L. Bernays | Mindless Conformity
"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine."
Edward L. Bernays
G. Edward Griffin | They’ve been programmed
"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
Susan Sontag | Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear
"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."
Susan Sontag
Etienne de Harven | Research hypotheses
"Research hypotheses covering these areas of virus research are practically never scientifically verified with appropriate controls. Instead, they are established by "consensus." This is then rapidly reshaped into a dogma, efficiently perpetuated in a quasi-religious manner by the media, including ensuring that research funding is restricted to projects supporting the dogma, excluding research into alternative hypotheses. An important tool to keep dissenting voices out of the debate is censorship at various levels ranging from the popular media to scientific publications."
Etienne de Harven
It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself
"It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself in order to free oneself from one's own blindness."
Unknown author
Chris Hedges | Empire of Illusion
"A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control."
Chris Hedges
Lester Neil Smith | It’s often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth
"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."
Lester Neil Smith
Wolfgang Reinhard | But it is the central ritual of the democratic theater state
"Politicians who want to stay in power have to keep the voters happy, even though the election itself is only symbolic. But it is the central ritual of the democratic theater state. After all, it is no longer about substantive decisions, but only about the confirmation or replacement of political figureheads, who are legitimized by the fact that citizens are allowed to perform this ritual. This symbolically reinforces the fiction of popular sovereignty on which modern constitutional states are founded. In this way, and not through substantive decisions, elections contribute to its stabilization."
Wolfgang Reinhard
Aldous Huxley | … the greater part of the population is not very intelligent
"... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled."
Aldous Huxley
Dave Chappelle | Being “awake” isn’t cool
"Being "awake" isn't cool. It means having to dumb down 98% of your conversations every day so you don't sound like a lunatic."
Dave Chappelle
Friedrich Nietzsche | Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Avro Manhattan | No political event or circumstance can be evaluated
"No political event or circumstance can be evaluated without the knowledge of The Vatican's part in it. And no significant world situation exists in which The Vatican does not play an important explicit or implicit role."
Avro Manhattan
Henry Louis Mencken | And what is a good citizen?
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
Henry Louis Mencken
Franz von Holtzendorff | The worst and most dangerous slavery
"The worst and most dangerous slavery is that which people no longer feel because they have become accustomed to it."
Franz von Holtzendorff
Franz von Holtzendorff | The highest conceivable degree of lying is reached
"The highest conceivable degree of lying is reached when judgment between truth and falsehood ceases and the liar believes his own lie and is indignant that others place doubt in his words."
Franz von Holtzendorff
Frantz Fanon | Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong
"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
Frantz Fanon
Adam Weishaupt | The hankering of the mind is irresistible
"Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?. Of all the means I know to lead men, the most effectual is a concealed mystery.The hankering of the mind is irresistible."
Adam Weishaupt
Robbie Williams | We’re in a post-truth world
"We're in a post-truth world where you can't believe the media, you can't believe Big Pharma, you can't believe politicians, you can't believe what you're eating, you can't believe yourself. Since we've existed, (if) there is a time where this whole empire could fall, it's now. Of course these things are going to arise because we can't trust anybody or anything. And I personally just believe and invest in my wife and my kids and my family. And yeah, I believe in them,"
Robbie Williams
Howard Zinn | Our problem is civil obedience
"As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."
Howard Zinn
The Analyst | Die Schäfchen gehen nirgendwo hin. Sie mögen meine Welt
"Die Schäfchen gehen nirgendwo hin. Sie mögen meine Welt. Sie wollen diese Sentimentalität nicht. Sie wollen weder Freiheit noch Selbstbestimmung. Sie wollen kontrolliert werden. Sie sehnen sich nach dem Komfort der Gewissheit. Und das bedeutet, ihr zwei, zurück in euren Kapseln, bewusstlos und allein, genau wie sie."
The Analyst (Matrix Resurrections (2021))
Julian Assange | Every time we witness an injustice
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice."
Julian Assange