"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
“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
"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
"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
„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
"The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance."
Maximilien de Robespierre
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.'"
St. Antony the Great
"No one judges more harshly than the uneducated; he knows neither reasons nor counter-reasons and always believes himself to be in the right."
Anselm Friedrich Feuerbach
"In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific."
George Bernard Shaw
"The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one."
Joost A.M. Meerloo
"Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims."
Arthur Versluis
"When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illuminated faith, and fear into love."
Manly P. Hall
"Confusing a targeted audience is one of the necessary ingredients for effective mind control."
Joost A.M. Meerloo
"The media may constitute the most powerful education system ever known to man."
Fred Fedler
"[...] All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.[...] All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical. [...] Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.[...]"
Marshall McLuhan
"How fortunate for governments that people do not think. There is no thinking except in giving and executing commands. If it were otherwise human society could not exist."
Adolf Hitler
"The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies, and this lie drones on from its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people'."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove
"In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. [...] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore."
Yuval Noah Harari
"[The Moon Landing] is essentially the adult version of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. What primarily motivates them is fear. But it is not the lie itself that scares people; it is what that lie says about the world around us and how it really functions. For if NASA was able to pull off such an outrageous hoax before the entire world, and then keep that lie in place for four decades, what does that say about the control of the information we receive? What does that say about the media, and the scientific community, and the educational community, and all the other institutions we depend on to tell us the truth? What does that say about the very nature of the world we live in?"
David McGowan
"The welfare of the people…has always been the alibi of tyrants…giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."
Albert Camus
"I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions."
Graham Hancock
"Nothing in this world operates the way you think it does. Banks do not loan money, governments are not empowered to protect you, the police department is not there to serve you, institutions of higher learning, colleges and educational institutes, are not there to educate you. The entire superstructure of civilization in the Western world is a combination of brilliantly put together and planned, well-planned, schemes to direct the minds of the people in such a way as to serve their masters."
Jordan Maxwell
"People are addicted to mass hysteria because it’s a way for them to funnel their very real anxieties, fears, sadness and neurotic behaviors into something relatable to other people. It doesn’t feel so lonely if everyone collectively loses their grip on reality together."
Just.A.Thought