Tag Archive for: Society

Zitate

George Washington | a frightful despotism

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."

George Washington

Philip K. Dick | Today we live in a society in which spurious realities

"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

Philip K. Dick

Mind control isn’t hard to understand

"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control."

Unknown

Matt Kahn | the simple difference between clarity and confusion

"Most people don’t see their beliefs. Instead their beliefs tell them what to see. That’s the simple difference between clarity and confusion."

Matt Kahn

Aldous Huxley | The victim of mind-manipulation

"The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."

Aldous Huxley

Edward L. Bernays | the manipulation of public opinion

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

Edward L. Bernays

Viktor Schauberger | The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound

"The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly into the heart"

Viktor Schauberger

Viktor Schauberger | The whole of science and all its appendages

"I will return to my forest to die in peace. The whole of science and all its appendages are just a bunch of thieves hanging like marionettes on strings and having to dance to whatever tune their well-hidden slave masters deem necessary."

Viktor Schauberger

Friedrich August von Hayek | voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

Friedrich August von Hayek

Edward L. Bernays | Mindless Conformity

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine."

Edward L. Bernays

Hannah Arendt | The power of independent thinking

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

Hannah Arendt

G. Edward Griffin | They’ve been programmed

"They've been programmed and I'm sad because I know that it's hard for people like that to take an interest - serious interest in world affairs - taken serious interest in what their elected officials are doing and they're not going to be really inclined to study and or discover the deception that's being used against them and so I'm sad because I I see all of that in the flash in my mind as being an indication of how easy it is for the masses to be manipulated"

G. Edward Griffin

Voltaire | It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."

Voltaire

Johann Nestroy | Censorship is the living confession

"Censorship is the living confession of the powerful that they can only trample on dumb slaves, but cannot govern free peoples. Censorship is something that stands far beneath the executioner, for the same ray of enlightenment that sixty years ago helped the executioner achieve honesty has recently branded censorship with the stigma of contempt."

Johann Nestroy

Heiner Geißler | The fame of some contemporaries

"The fame of some contemporaries is linked to the stupidity of their admirers."

Heiner Geißler |

Paul Henri Spaak | Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases

"Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases. The sick person never suffers from it. Those who suffer painfully are the others."

Paul Henri Spaak

It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself

"It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself in order to free oneself from one's own blindness."

Unknown author

Bertrand Russell | When all experts agree, you need to watch out

"When all experts agree, you need to watch out."

Bertrand Russell

Wolfgang Borchert | We are the generation without ties and without depth

"We are the generation without ties and without depth. Our depth is the abyss. We are the generation without happiness, without home and without farewell. Our sun is narrow, our love is cruel and our youth is without youth. And we are the generation without boundaries, without restraint and protection - cast out of the playpen of childhood into a world prepared for us by those who despise us for it."

Wolfgang Borchert

Martha Gellhorn | to keep any control over our world and lives

"People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics."

Martha Gellhorn

Max Nordau | The citizen is in chains

"The form in which all European states are governed today allows the services demanded of citizens to be squandered on foolish, frivolous and criminal undertakings. The whim of individuals, the self-interest of vanishingly small minorities, all too often determines the goal towards which the efforts of the whole are directed. Thus the individual citizen works and bleeds so that wars may be waged which destroy his life or his prosperity, so that fortresses, palaces, railroads, harbors or canals may be built from which neither he nor nine-tenths of the nation will ever derive the slightest benefit, so that new offices may be created, which will make the state machine still more cumbersome, the friction of its wheels still harder, in which he will lose still more of his time, still more of his freedom, so that officials may be highly paid who have no other purpose than to lead an ornamental existence at his expense and to make his existence more difficult; In a word, he works and bleeds in order to make his yoke heavier and his chains tighter and to create the possibility of obtaining even more work and even more blood from him...."

Max Nordau

Bernard Edouard Harcourt | The eternal recurrence of new forms of unbearable servitude

"The eternal recurrence of new forms of unbearable servitude, and with them, new forms of resistance, demonstrates that human history is not a progressive march toward absolute knowledge, the demise of the state, or the end of history, but rather a constant struggle for our own subjugation, a battle that must be fought anew to establish our subjectivity, ourselves as subjects. Once we grasp the recurring nature of this struggle, only then will we recognize the task that confronts us today and in the future: to resist the ever-pressing forms of tyrannical power, that brutal desire for subjugation, and the ongoing, ever-renewed attempts to rule through fear, terror, and absolute domination."

Bernard Edouard Harcourt

Nick Cohen | Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you

"Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world."

Nick Cohen

Roland Baader | We have the entire political elite against us

"We have the entire political elite against us. [...] The development will be a bad one. [...] I see nothing good, nothing good at all, I see no approach anywhere. The problems have been dealt with by the same means that created the problems in the first place. [...]
We will get more and more socialism, new kinds of socialism, new kinds of fascism. In any case, more totalitarianism, less freedom and an overall radicalization. We will also experience riots, we will have unrest and explosive growths in crime."

Roland Baader

George Orwell | Who controls the past controls the future

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

George Orwell

Lenin | Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world

"Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world."

Vladimir Lenin

Neil deGrasse Tyson | If you want to assert a truth

"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

Leo Tolstoi | The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people

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

Leo Tolstoi

Viktor Schauberger | progressive decline of culture

"Despite its apparently high technical culture, ‘civilized humanity’ has reached such a low ethical level that it no longer realizes that such physical and moral decay is nothing other than the progressive decline of culture. For this reason, the sacred duty of people who are aware of the gravity of their mistakes is to constantly strive for the final correction of the consequences of mistakes."

Viktor Schauberger

Yuval Noah Harari | In a world flooded with irrelevant information

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

Yuval Noah Harari