"All the Perplexities, Confusions and Distresses in America arise not from defects in their Constitutions or Confederation, not from a want of Honour or Virtue, So much as from downright Ignorance of the Nature of Coin, Credit and Circulation."
John Adams
"The last war among men will be a war for truth. This war will be in every single person. War - with its own ignorance, aggression, irritation. And only a radical transformation of each individual person can become the beginning of a peaceful life for all people."
Nikolaus Roerich
"I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the Covid crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveilled all the time, not just in authoritarian regimes, but even in democracies and maybe most importantly, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, because really we haven’t seen anything yet. I think that the big process that’s happening right now, the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what’s happening within you, what makes you go.
For that, the most important data is not what you read and who you meet and what you buy, it’s what’s happening inside your body. We have these two big revolutions-the Computer Science revolution or the infotech revolution and the revolution in the biological sciences and they are still separate, but they are about to merge. They are merging around I would say, the biometric sensor. It’s the thing, it’s the gadget, it’s the technology that converts biological data into digital data that can be analyzed by computers and having the ability to really monitor people under the skin, this is the biggest game changer of all because this is the key for getting to know people better than they know themselves."
Yuval Noah Harari
"The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion."
Murray N. Rothbard
"The certainly stirring but decisive lesson of our trials, however, demands a readiness to say an unequivocal no to state injustice." The trials demand that people renounce private and family advantages and are also prepared to make personal sacrifices if they are required to do or tolerate evil, even if it is the state that makes itself the advocate of evil."
Fritz Bauer
"Unfortunately, it is a typical German trait to think that obedience par excellence is a virtue. We need the civil courage to say 'no'."
Fritz Bauer
"Tyrants must ensure that the people are poor, busy, lonely, distrustful, highly taxed, distracted by trivia, spied on, and at war."
Aristoteles
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."
Aldous Huxley | Schöne neue Welt
"I do conscientiously and sincerely believe that the Order of Freemasonry, if not the greatest, is one of the greatest moral and political evils under which the Union is now laboring ... a conspiracy of the few against the equal rights of the many ...Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good."
John Quincy Adams
"If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World. [....] The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown."
Aldous Huxley |
The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
"The most powerful figment of the imagination is public opinion: no one knows exactly who makes it, no one has ever met it personally, but everyone lets themselves be tyrannized by it!"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The International Space Station is an orbital turkey....No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value."
Prof. Steven Weinberg
Mike Michaelson : Christof, let me ask you, why do you think that Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now?
Christof : We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that.
Truman Show
“There is absolutely no basis at all for thinking the world is flat. Nobody in human history, as far as I know, has thought the world was flat. The Greeks measured the radius of the Earth. I cannot conceive of a reason why anybody would think the world is flat. There are interesting bits of physics that tell you you live on a spinning planet and one of them is called the Coriolis force, which is the force that's responsible for causing storm systems to rotate on the planet. So when you see those beautiful pictures of storms spinning around and rotating, the reason for that is that we live on a spinning planet. It's probably the most nonsensical suggestion that a thinking human being could possibly make. It is drivel.”
Brian Edward Cox
"Why do we think that? Because we have a theory called string theory, it is fantastic it is incredible. It has astounded the world of mathematics, and physics and now you can't move in the physics world without bumping into somebody who wants to talk about the 10th Dimension the 11th Dimension the Multiverse hyperspace time travel. All the things that were once considered science fiction are now centerpiece in our understanding of the nature of everything."
Dr. Michio Kaku
"All government agencies lie part of the time, but NASA is the only one I've ever encountered that does so routinely. "
George A. Keyworth
"These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."
Theodore J. Kaczynski
"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
"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
“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
"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
"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
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Marcus Aurelius