"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
Gore Vidal
"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."
Henry Louis Mencken
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
George Orwell
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
Niccolò Machiavelli
"What is a president, then? He is the mouthpiece of the corporations - and nothing else. [....] We are no longer a democracy. We gave up our constitution long ago. [....] The modern dictatorship doesn't come with brown or black uniforms. We do it with entertainment, with television, with fun, fun. And an education that dumbs down."
Gore Vidal
"Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room."
Fr. Leonard E. Feeney
"Modern man is held in a frenzy of activity, so as not to reflect on the meaning of his life and the world"
Albert Schweitzer
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. "
Clarence Darrow
"It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling whith chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture – drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live."
H. P. Lovecraft
"Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests."
General Aladeen
"These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you."
George Orwell
"And still, no one knows! And the truth remains hidden. Faith is the graveyard of many truths. And the mortician is the system of the self-appointed rulers of this earth. However, people often decorate it with the flowers of ignorance! Faith is the most dangerous instrument of the system since ancient Babylon.... and nobody notices it!"
Barry Jünemann
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell
"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."
Mahatma Gandhi
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Give people more sleep - and they will be more awake when they are awake."
Kurt Tucholsky
"One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion"
Voltaire
"One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams."
Salvador Dalí
"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a Golden Age: but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and that dragon is religion."
Bertrand Russell
"All these investigations, the thorough research into the Stasi structures, the methods with which they worked and still work, all this will fall into the wrong hands. One will examine these structures in detail - in order to then take them over. They will be adapted a little to fit a free Western society. They won't necessarily arrest the troublemakers either. There are more subtle ways to disarm someone. But the secret bans, the watching, the suspicion, the fear, the isolation and exclusion, the branding and muzzling of those who don't conform - that will come back, believe me. Institutions will be created that will work much more effectively, much more finely than the Stasi. The constant lying will also come back, the disinformation, the fog in which everything loses its contour."
Bärbel Bohley
“The Masonic Movement when it can be divorced from politics and social ends and from its present paralyzing condition of inertia, will meet the need of those who can, and should, wield power. It is the custodian of the law; it is the home of the Mysteries and the seat of initiation. It holds in its symbolism the ritual of Deity, and the way of salvation is pictorially preserved in its work. The methods of Deity are demonstrated in its Temples, and under the All-seeing Eye the work can go forward. It is a far more occult organization than can be realized, and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists. In its ceremonials lies hid the wielding of the forces connected with the growth and life of the kingdoms of nature and the unfoldment of the divine aspects in man. In the comprehension of its symbolism will come the power to cooperate with the divine plan. It meets the need of those who work on the first Ray of Will or Power.”
Alice Bailey
"I buy the FAZ on paper - and read NZZ, Spiegel and Bild online before the paywall. But I am just as informed as if I had subscribed to it. When I see the headline and the author, I already know what the text says. I also know who among the authors is currently behind with their alimony payments and therefore has to write in a certain direction."
Harald Schmidt
"The process of struggling for public opinion has nothing to do with truth, but with domination."
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
"I'm known for my irony. But the idea of erecting a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor would not have occurred to even me."
George Bernard Shaw
"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer."
Joseph Sobran
"If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same."
Marjane Satrapi
"When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men. They shall then know truth and, more than that, they shall realize that from the beginning truth has been in the world unrecognized, save by a small but gradually increasing number appointed by the Lords of the Dawn as ministers to the needs of human creatures struggling co regain their consciousness of divinity."
Manly P. Hall