"We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content."
Eduardo Galeano
"My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier."
Sir Anthony Hopkins
"What do you think would be going on here, if more people realized what was going on?"
Volker Pispers
"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
Bertolt Brecht
"Madness becomes invisible when it has reached sufficiently large dimensions."
Bertolt Brecht
"If you believe that the most basic human liberties ought to be contingent on taking a product from a giant pharmaceutical company then you are not liberal or left wing. You’re not a conservative or patriotic. There is only one word to describe you and that is Fascist."
Dave Smith
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
Harry S. Truman
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
Carl Sagan
"If your answer to every failure of government is more government, you are like an alcoholic trying to drink yourself sober."
Will Spencer
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
Robert A. Heinlein
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."
Gustave Le Bon
"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder."
Jean-Luc Godard | "Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics..."
"I'm a fan of what Mark Twain said, he said; Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
Neil deGrasse Tyson
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Smedley Darlington Butler
"If it is not in the media... it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media... we believe it has happened."
Charles T. Tart
"The problem is that there’s not enough money in music as a business model. Where in television and vis-a-vis the advertisers and movies, there’s so much money that the controlling forces still circle around the stars in the right way, stars are taken care of better in those industries. In the music industry it’s still very much this exploitative thing, it’s still very much people signing their lives away, the old deal-with-the devil stuff. That is still going on, it’s unbelievable in this day-and-age that this is still going on."
Billy Corgan
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."
Aldous Huxley
"I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident, and violence. I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrement and human flesh. I have mastered every mode of my mind and made myself a mortality more severe than any other in the world. 1000 years from now the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowlianity"
Aleister Crowley
"for what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle has always been—truth alone."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The first step in liquidating a people, is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."
Milan Kundera
“I do not like the pretensions of Government -- the grounds on which it demands my obedience -- to be pitched too high. I don't like the medicine-man's magical pretensions nor the Bourbon's Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet's Politique. I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands 'Thus saith the Lord', it lies, and lies dangerously. On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants' 'science'-- they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled.”
C.S. Lewis
"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell. And so it is with science."
Richard P. Feynman
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
André Gide