"The world cannot be improved if everyone blindly follows the majority. It needs people who have the courage to question the seemingly irrefutable, who dare to question authority and use their own minds."
Mahatma Gandhi
"The shackles of mental control, perceptual filtering and cultural conditioning are harder to throw off today than ever before.
We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever seen. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our entire consciousness seems to be subtly and relentlessly erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely controlled.
It is an exhaustive and endless task to constantly explain to people how most things of their everyday wisdom are scientifically planted in the public consciousness via a thousand media clips."
Dr. Tim O’Shea
"In truth, the belief in "government" is a religion, made up of a set of dogmatic teachings, irrational doctrines which fly in the face of both evidence and logic, and which are methodically memorized and repeated by the faithful. Like other religions, the gospel of "government" describes a superhuman, supernatural entity, above mere mortals, which issues commandments to the peasantry, for whom unquestioning obedience is a moral imperative."
Larken Rose
"What you find in people's minds today is often not reality at all, but a manufactured reality constructed by the media"
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion- When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed."
Ayn Rand
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
Edward Bernays
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow a very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people a sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate."
Noam Chomsky
„The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent. „Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions…“
Gore Vidal
"The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want"
Richard Schickel
"America’s journalists are not 'newshounds'. They are nothing more than salesclerks, hocking the products their employers want to sell. The pretty faces that now function as most television news anchors are no different than the pretty models used to sell other products. The American “free” press is comprised of nothing more than a number of retail outlets which sell stories slanted to please their target audiences. As such, they exist merely to sell snake oil."
John Kozy
"I'm fed up, or to put it even more clearly: I'm fed up with the permanent and increasingly religious climate gibberish, with energy turnaround fantasies, with electric car worship, with scary stories about doomsday scenarios from Corona to conflagrations to weather catastrophes. I can no longer stand the people who shout this into microphones and cameras every day or print it in newspapers. I suffer from having to witness how natural science is turned into a whore of politics.
I am tired of being told what to be ashamed of by abused, pubescent children. I am tired of being told by some deranged people that I am to blame for everything and everyone - but especially as a German for the past, present and future misery of the whole world. [....]"
Prof. Dr. Knut Löschke ( 28. September 2021 via Facebook )