Psychology Quotes – Insights and Reflections

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"

George Orwell

"If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it’s not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this and therefore will always fight against enlightenment."

Leo Tolstoi

"In a world flooded with irrelevant information, clarity is power."

Yuval Noah Harari

"Almost a hundred years ago, the philosopher John Dewey said that we are living in the greatest flood of mass suggestion that mankind has ever seen. But in 100 years, the superlative has only swelled, albeit without this being publicized today. Edward Bernays called propaganda the “executive arm of the invisible government”. And he recognized that propaganda is to democracies what violence is to dictators. Perhaps that would be a contemporary definition of propaganda: it is a Permanent Toxic Rape of Consciousness, or PTRC for short. It is a permanent mindfuck by governments and corporate business, mediated by the media, carried out by bought comedians à la Böhmermann, pseudo-journalists à la Lanz, pseudo-intellectuals à la Precht, pseudo-health politicians, such as the pharmaceutical and drugs minister Lauterbach, pseudo-defence politicians such as Strack-Rheinmetall-Zimmermann, and other parvenus such as Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Eckart von Hirschhausen, Sarah Bosetti and other stirrup holders in editorial offices, theaters or foundations."

Milosz Matuschek

"If the Government or NASA had said to you that the Earth is stationary, imagine that. And then imagine we are trying to convince people that ‘no, no it’s not stationary, it’s moving forward at 32 times rifle bullet speed and spinning at 1,000 miles per hour.’ We would be laughed at! We would have so many people telling us ‘you are crazy, the Earth is not moving!’ We would be ridiculed for having no scientific backing for this convoluted moving Earth theory. And not only that but then people would say, ‘oh then how do you explain a fixed, calm atmosphere and the Sun’s observable movement, how do you explain that?’ Imagine saying to people, ‘no, no, the atmosphere is moving also but is somehow magically velcroed to the moving-Earth. The reason is not simply because the Earth is stationary.’ So what we are actually doing is what makes sense. We are saying that the moving-Earth theory is nonsense. The stationary-Earth theory makes sense and we are being ridiculed. You’ve got to picture it being the other way around to realize just how RIDICULOUS this situation is. This theory from the Government and NASA that the Earth is rotating and orbiting and leaning over and wobbling is absolute nonsense and yet people are clinging to it, tightly, like a teddy bear. They just can’t bring themselves to face the possibility that the Earth is stationary though ALL the evidence shows it: we feel no movement, the atmosphere hasn’t been blown away, we see the Sun move from East-to-West, everything can be explained by a motionless Earth without bringing in all these assumptions to cover up previous assumptions gone bad."

Allen Daves

"The truth , when it arrives is always different from what we thought it would be..if we imagine that we already know the truth, that imaginations based on old and habitual ideas. But the truth is always something entirely new to the mind; so we cannot possibly imagine it. Just as we cannot know what a new day is like before we experience it, we cannot think accurately about a new truth until we first live it. As we dare to drop our conditioned opinions, we make room for the truth..."

Vernon Howard

"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. Let's stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It's the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers."

Noam Chomsky

"Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behavior that communicate and encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus moulding the character of its citizens. To the degree that the individual is made an object of constant mental manipulation, to the degree that cultural institutions may tend to weaken intellectual and spiritual strength, to the degree that knowledge of the mind is used to tame and condition people instead of educating them, to that degree does the culture itself produce men and women who are predisposed to accept an authoritarian way of life."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself"

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"advertising symbolizes the art of making people dissatisfied with what they have."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them."

Edward Bernays

"Whoever wants to deceive people must first of all make absurdity plausible."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money."

Henry Louis Mencken

"You can be scared - but you can't depend on it."

Unbekannt

"Ideas are easy. Implementation is difficult."

Guy Kawasaki

"The starting point of all success is desire."

Napoleon Hill

"Politicians who want to stay in power have to keep the voters happy, even though the election itself is only symbolic. But it is the central ritual of the democratic theater state. After all, it is no longer about substantive decisions, but only about the confirmation or replacement of political figureheads, who are legitimized by the fact that citizens are allowed to perform this ritual. This symbolically reinforces the fiction of popular sovereignty on which modern constitutional states are founded. In this way, and not through substantive decisions, elections contribute to its stabilization."

Wolfgang Reinhard