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
"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
"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
"The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth."
Thomas von Aquin
"There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion."
Daniel Dennett
"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."
Bill Hicks
"We live in a system in which one must either be a wheel or get crushed by the wheels."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
Edward Osborne Wilson
"The CIA controls everyone of significance in the major media, where it spent about 30% of its budget on covered press personnel and programs"
William Egan Colby
"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
"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."
Søren Kierkegaard
"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
"The German language as a cultural asset belongs to all of us. No one has a right to tamper with it. I wonder how a politically motivated minority comes to want to dictate to a majority how we want to express ourselves in the future. This unspeakable ,'gendern' is absurd and rather supervised speech."
Dieter Hallervorden
"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
"Of course, we live in a completely corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of businessmen working for a bunch of bigger businessmen and none of them give a shit about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it, because no one knows how to take on the corporations. So I guess we’re stuck with this system until the oil runs out."
Woody Harrelson
"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Thomas Jefferson
„They feed you the stuff every day on TV and you think it's all different, don't you? All the time, right? And it's always the same. Jesus i can't go on anywhere you know“
Lemmy Kilmister
"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Adyashant
"Political correctness has now reached a level in our society that I see as highly questionable. It starts with the deletion of more and more postings in the social media. Postings, mind you, with content that is clearly not punishable or otherwise legally actionable. The mere fact that a certain group might feel offended by a text is enough. More and more companies and corporations are joining this unfortunate trend and issuing internal memos about required language rules or how to deal with certain topics, the disregard of which can lead to serious consequences for employees. Again, these are not criminal or justiciable matters (which, of course, should rightly be stopped), but rather some of the most harmless formulations and matters that are actually covered by the right to freedom of expression. What I find most alarming, however, is the development at our universities. Places where the free exchange of ideas and opinions should actually be part of the basic equipment. Almost every day, professors, doctoral students and other university staff tell me that they would now be risking their careers if they were to publicly question or criticize current developments at universities. Theses and assertions have even become established there in the meantime, some of which contradict a fundamental scientific factual basis. Unfortunately, I do not see the end of the line. I think it will get much worse."
Vince Ebert
"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
"With the destruction of the family, the spiritual traditions of the family perish forever; when spiritual values are destroyed, then unrighteousness predominates the entire society."
Bhagavad-Gita
"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 mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world
Yuval Noah Harari
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
Gore Vidal
"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
"Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room."
Fr. Leonard E. Feeney
"It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling whith chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture – drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live."
H. P. Lovecraft
"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
"And still, no one knows! And the truth remains hidden. Faith is the graveyard of many truths. And the mortician is the system of the self-appointed rulers of this earth. However, people often decorate it with the flowers of ignorance! Faith is the most dangerous instrument of the system since ancient Babylon.... and nobody notices it!"
Barry Jünemann
"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