"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
Woodrow Wilson
"Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
George Orwell, 1984
So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the Truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth. But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he's gonna win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night -- all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here! You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you -- You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I'm speaking to you now."
Howard Beale
“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.“
Fred Hoyle
"Activating collective consciousness is probably one of the most difficult tasks to attempt because people are largely unaware of the extent to which their thinking is governed by tacit rules and predetermined as given, assumed notions that, because they appear as self-evident truth, render ideology invisible. Truly unrestricted intellectual debate feels threatening because it strives to break out of this cognitive cage. Worse, this cage is so insidious that it influences even those who are already outside the mainstream."
MOYO-Film
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
Howard Zinn
"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read it, you're misinformed [...] One of the effects is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore. So what a responsibility you all have; to tell the truth, not to just be first, but to tell the truth. We live in a society now where it’s just first. Who cares? Get it out there. We don’t care who it hurts, we don’t care who we destroy, we don’t care if it’s true. Just say it, sell it. Just say it, sell it. Anything you practice you'll get good at — including BS."
Denzel Washington
"There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft'."
Murray Rothbard
"Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.... These organisations (i.e. Fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins."
Joseph Stalin
"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly."
Thomas Sowell
„Our number-one enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the number-one enemy of everyone. It’s not understanding what is actually going on in the world. It’s only once you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now the question is: who is promoting this ignorance? […] It is bad media. It really is my opinion that the media in general are so bad we have to question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them all together. They’re so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is we see wars and we see corrupt governments continue on. One of the hopeful things that I have discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could have stopped it if they had searched deep enough — if they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda — they could have stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means, basically, populations don’t like wars. Populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don’t willingly, with open eyes, enter into war. So, if we have a good media environment, we might also have a peaceful environment.“
Julian Assange
"The very first thing we have to understand is that the mainstream media are not a mirror of reality. Not even a distorted mirror of reality, but provide us with a reality that is constructed according to its very own points of view. Which is made to influence us in a certain way."
Prof. Dr. Michael Meyen
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them."
Philip K. Dick
"The Germ Theory of infectious contagious disease is convenient because it provides what every simplistic view of a problem seeks before all else: a culprit, an invisible hare for the hounds to chase in their costly research labs, universities, hospitals, and drug factories. The fact that the hare can never be caught is the perfect guarantee that their race will never finish, their demands for funding will never cease, and their ability to generate profits for the drug and chemical corporations will continue to grow."
Montague R. Leverson
“For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.”
John F. Kennedy
"The most dangerous Weapons of Mass Destruction are the Mass Media. For they destroy the people's spirit, creativity and courage, replacing them by fear, mistrust, guilt and self-doubt."
M.A.Verick
"We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest."
James Paul Warburg
"I have spent many years loathing journalism and the intellectual corruption that emanates from it with all the strength of my soul."
Karl Kraus
"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
"Dass gesunde Menschen, die noch dazu bereit wären, dies zu ‚beweisen‘, künftig vom gesellschaftlichen Leben ausgeschlossen werden sollen, entbehrt nicht nur jeder medizinischen, sondern auch rechtlichen Grundlage. Das ist Diskriminierung auf höchstem Niveau. Wenn wir das akzeptieren, werden wir uns tatsächlich noch wundern, was alles möglich ist!"
Nina Proll
