"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
"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
"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
"The power of government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this and therefore will always fight against enlightenment."
Leo Tolstoi
"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
"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
Reginald McKenna
"If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent, on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar, we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity, of our hopeless position, is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most, important subject, intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse, unless it becomes widely understood, and the defects remedied very soon."
Robert H. Hemphill
"Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…"
Emma Goldman
"Measured against what had gone before, we achieved a huge success. We replaced the entire leadership of almost all of Berlin's security agencies and brought in some pretty good people. In the fire department, the police, the public prosecutor's office and also the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I very much hope that this will have a noticeable effect in the future."
Benedikt Lux
"Since we can’t change the way the universe began, the question of whether time travel is possible is one of whether we can subsequently make space–time so warped that one can go back to the past. I think this is an important subject for research, but one has to be careful not to be labelled a crank. If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel. Yet it is a very serious question."
Stephen Hawking
"It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting."
Aristoteles
"Anyone who actually feels the need to get their hands on the levers of power in order to control other people, to tell them what to do, to scare them, is mentally disturbed."
Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert
"After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ’abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit."
George Orwell | 1984
"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
"... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled."
Aldous Huxley
"Men and women ... do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters. Like naïve children you put your trust in your political leaders. You make it possible for them to creep into your confidence, only to have them betray you to the first bidder. But even where there is no direct betrayal, the labour politicians make common cause with your enemies to keep you in leash, to prevent your direct action. The State is the pillar of capitalism, and it is ridiculous to expect any redress from it."
Emma Goldman
"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all."
Michael Rivero
"Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death."
Alexis de Tocqueville
"Your future depends on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis – like climate catastrophe – it would be very tempting, and easy, to toss you overboard."
Yuval Noah Harari
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
Henry Louis Mencken
"The worst and most dangerous slavery is that which people no longer feel because they have become accustomed to it."
Franz von Holtzendorff
"If a product or service costs you nothing, you are the product - because you pay with your personal data"
Michael Kroker
"More than 50 years of elite democracy have shown us where this road leads. It is the path of destruction. The destruction of community, the destruction of the idea of community, the destruction of life by the millions, the destruction of cultural and civilizational substance - especially in the Third World - and the destruction of our ecological foundations. The beneficiaries of this destruction have no reason to change this path of destruction. The necessary energy for change can only come from below - from us. That is our task and that is our responsibility."
Professor Dr. Rainer Mausfeld,
“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”
John Francis Clauser
"Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?"
Vladimir Lenin
"When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them, after suitable build-ups, as Fascist or Nazi or anti Semitic ... to discredit them. In the public mind, constantly associate those who oppose us with those names which already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become 'fact' in the public mind."
Communist Party
"All political entities are violent entities. But the type and degree of the use or threat of external violence against other similar entities plays a specific role in the structure and fate of political communities. Not every political entity is equally "expansive" in the sense that it seeks power externally, i.e., making force available for the purpose of acquiring political power over other territories and communities, whether in the form of incorporation or [of] dependency. The political entities are thus, to varying degrees, outwardly turned entities of violence."
Max Weber
"We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us."
Vladimir Lenin
"My work is about the effect of the sun on climate, and if the sun has a decisive influence on climate, that means that the influence of CO2 is smaller. That doesn't fit with the narrative that CO2 is supposed to be such a dominant factor in global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN organization that admits members based on area, political affiliation, and in some cases merit. My work is in fact ignored by it. In the Climategate emails, that went public in 2011, I noticed an email discussing possible authors for the IPCC's fifth assessment report. One qualification for an author had to be that he was 'anti-Svensmark'."
Henrik Svensmark
"The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."
Zbigniew Brzeziński