"Controversy never convinced any man; men can be influenced by making them think for themselves, by seeming to doubt with them, by leading them as if by the hand, without their perceiving it. A good book lent to them, which they read at leisure, produces upon them surer effects, because they do not then blush to be subjugated by the superior reason of an antagonist."
Voltaire
"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent."
John Edgar Hoover
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.[...] Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."
Viktor Emil Frankl
„Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.“
Ayn Rand
"He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see."
Ayn Rand
"While those who can no longer bear the loss of human values are considered insane, those who have separated from their human roots are certified normal."
Arno Gruen
"The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth."
Thomas von Aquin
"There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion."
Daniel Dennett
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust."
Thomas von Aquin
"Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen who took action within the first two minutes of this shooting."
James Ison
"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."
Bill Hicks
"We live in a system in which one must either be a wheel or get crushed by the wheels."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The most beautiful thing for me about Formula E is the great sound of the diesel generators that are used to charge the batteries of the racing cars!"
Ulrich Baretzky
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
Edward Osborne Wilson
"The CIA controls everyone of significance in the major media, where it spent about 30% of its budget on covered press personnel and programs"
William Egan Colby
"The masses are never militaristic until their minds are poisoned by propaganda."
Albert Einstein
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
Ayn Rand
"The holders of authority and those who take advantage of it must convince people of this fiction and put to sleep their realistic, that is to say, critical, faculty of thought. Every thinking person knows the methods of propaganda, methods by which critical judgment is destroyed and the mind is lulled until it submits to clichés that stultify people because they make them dependent, depriving them of the ability to trust their eyes and their judgment. This function, in which they believe, blinds them to reality."
Erich Fromm
"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."
Søren Kierkegaard
"Every four years it elects the Bundestag. The lists or persons submitted to it by the parties are already elected beforehand by the parties. The process of this hidden preliminary election, which is the actual election, is convoluted; the names for the constituency lists and the state lists are not drawn up in the same way. But it is always the party committees, never the people, who would be involved in this decisive beginning. One must be a party member in order to participate somewhere in this election and to be able to be set up. Even those who are party members, as such, have little effect in the nominations. The decisive factor is the party hierarchy and bureaucracy.[...] Even the elections are not really elections, but acclamations to the party oligarchy. [....] The parties, which should by no means be the state, make themselves, withdrawn from the life of the people, the state [....] The governance of the state is in the hands of the party oligarchy [....] Their position, not limited by any tension to other power, seduces [....] the parties to want to occupy the seats by their own people. This is the reward for party work, the spoils of victory after the electoral battle [....]"
Karl Jaspers
"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."
Nikola Tesla
"The German language as a cultural asset belongs to all of us. No one has a right to tamper with it. I wonder how a politically motivated minority comes to want to dictate to a majority how we want to express ourselves in the future. This unspeakable ,'gendern' is absurd and rather supervised speech."
Dieter Hallervorden
"Whoever comes to power has passed through a filter that does not let decent people pass."
Ljudmila Ulitzkaya
"I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, you can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly. We'd have way better CGI if it was fake. The colors all look kind of weird in space. There's no atmospheric occlusion; everything's too crisp. It's just literally a normal car in space — I kind of like the absurdity of that, it's kind of silly and fun, but I think that silly, fun things are important … I think the imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited around the world, and it's still tripping me out. I'm tripping balls here."
Elon Musk
"Deprive a cell 35% of its oxygen for 48 hours and it will become cancerous."
Dr. Otto Heinrich Warburg
"The empire still fears the public. If it didn't it wouldn't bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions—it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they're still afraid of what we'll do to them if we decide we don't consent."
Caitlin Johnstone
"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."
Hermann Karl Hesse
"Of course, we live in a completely corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of businessmen working for a bunch of bigger businessmen and none of them give a shit about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it, because no one knows how to take on the corporations. So I guess we’re stuck with this system until the oil runs out."
Woody Harrelson