"In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party - democratic or totalitarian - through study and comparison of principles."
Joost A.M. Meerloo
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
"And they were sawing off the branches on which they were sitting. While shouting across their experiences to one another on how to saw more efficiently. And they went crashing down into the deep. And those who watched them shook their heads and continued sawing vigorously"
Bertolt Brecht
"Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it."
John Adams
"What is true, just, and beautiful is not determined by popular vote. The masses everywhere are ignorant, short-sighted, motivated by envy, and easy to fool. Democratic politicians must appeal to these masses in order to be elected. Whoever is the best demagogue will win. Almost by necessity, then, democracy will lead to the perversion of truth, justice and beauty."
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"There is no more good-natured, but also no more gullible people than the Germans. No lie can be conceived treacherous enough, the Germans believe it. They follow a slogan which was given to them, to act against their own countrymen, rather than the real enemies of their country."
Napoleon Bonaparte
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
Jean-Claude Juncker
“The real goal of totalitarian ideology is not the transformation of the external conditions of human existence and not the revolutionary reorganization of the social order, but the transformation of human nature itself, which, as it is, constantly opposes the totalitarian process. … What is at stake in total domination is really the essence of man.”
Hannah Arendt
"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
Emile Zola
"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice."
Gore Vidal
"If at a future moment fascism will return, it will not be so stupid as to say: 'I am fascism.' It will say: 'I am antifascism.'"
Ignazio Silone
"American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor."
Upton Sinclair
"that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal."
Henry Kissinger
"Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it."
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
"Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy."
Noam Chomsky
"The function of the statist ideologists is to weave the false set of Emperor's clothes, to convince the public of a massive double standard: that when the State commits the gravest of high crimes it is really not doing so, but doing something else that is necessary, proper, vital, and even – in former ages – by divine command. The age-old success of the ideologists of the State is perhaps the most gigantic hoax in the history of mankind"
Murray Rothbard
"In Washington 52 years now I've seen a lot of change but there's one change the dwarfs all the other changes in importance and that is that we no longer have in any real sense a free media and that is big that could not be bigger"
Ray McGovern
"The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren’t true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth."
Caitlin Johnstone
"I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there."
Erich Maria Remarque
"You wish to know my "confidential opinion as to the honesty of the Associated Press." My opinion, not confidential, is that it is the damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth--the wet-nurse for all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe, only obey orders."
James H. Barry
„Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.“
Upton Sinclair
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
Blaise Pascal
„That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does by the name of patriotism--how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.“
Albert Einstein
"It is one of the most difficult things that can be imposed on a thinking man, to have to witness the course of a historical process among ignorant people, whose inevitable outcome he has long known with clarity. The time of the error of others, of false hopes, of blindly committed mistakes then becomes very long."
Carl J. Burckhardt
"What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?"
Padmé Amidala