"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
Carl Sagan
"If your answer to every failure of government is more government, you are like an alcoholic trying to drink yourself sober."
Will Spencer
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
Robert A. Heinlein
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."
Gustave Le Bon
"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder."
Jean-Luc Godard | "Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics..."
"I'm a fan of what Mark Twain said, he said; Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
Neil deGrasse Tyson
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Smedley Darlington Butler
"If it is not in the media... it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media... we believe it has happened."
Charles T. Tart
"The American people don't believe anything until they see it on television."
Richard Nixon
"If people continue to allow themselves to be talked into believing yesterday's lies as today's truths, then tomorrow's whip will make them painfully aware, too late, of the dangers that laziness of thought has in its wake."
Erich Limpach
"But that is precisely why I am also deeply convinced that it is right that we have a representative democracy and not a plebiscitary democracy, and that representative democracy gives us the opportunity for certain periods of time to make decisions, then within these periods of time also to campaign for these decisions and thus to change opinions. Looking back at the history of the Federal Republic, we can say that all the major decisions did not have a demoscopic majority when they were made. The introduction of the social market economy, rearmament, the treaties with the East, the NATO dual decision, the adherence to unity, the introduction of the euro and also the increasing assumption of responsibility by the Bundeswehr in the world - almost all of these decisions were made against the majority of Germans. Only in retrospect did the attitude of the Germans change in many cases. I also think it's reasonable for the population to look at the outcome of a measure first and then form a judgment about it. I think that is an expression of the primacy of politics. And that should also be adhered to."
Dr. Angela Merkel
"Socialism is: The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale. The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence. The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.) The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations. The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses. The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses. The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people. The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all. In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good. It is just another form of top-down tyranny---as old as the hills."
Jon Rappoport
"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing."
Albert Jay Nock
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."
Thomas Jefferson
"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau."
Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
"We also tried this for a long time, to isolate viruses in cell cultures. We never succeeded. That's how it is for many labs around the world that have tried. Zhengli Shi is actually the only lab back in Wuhan that managed to do that, to isolate a virus for once.[....] I know Zhengli Shi used the ones in the lab for that as well. Here you have to say, when you do this, practically the first thing that happens with the SARS-2 virus is that this furin site in the virus is destroyed. So when we isolate SARS-2 virus in Vero cells from patients, that furin site goes away immediately because that's a selection disadvantage for the virus in cell culture."
Christian Drosten
"Being a "conspiracy theorist" is spending endless hours for years & years gathering as much information as possible from as many resources as possible and critically thinking about what that information means then having people who do nothing but watch TV tell you you're crazy."
Just.A.Thought
"The first step in liquidating a people, is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."
Milan Kundera
“I do not like the pretensions of Government -- the grounds on which it demands my obedience -- to be pitched too high. I don't like the medicine-man's magical pretensions nor the Bourbon's Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet's Politique. I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands 'Thus saith the Lord', it lies, and lies dangerously. On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants' 'science'-- they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled.”
C.S. Lewis
"One of the biggest problems with college degrees is they've made a lot of people think they are much smarter than they truly are. This arrogance and smugness makes them dumber because they think they're too smart to receive new information from anybody with fewer 'credentials'."
ZUBY
"I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve been wrong many times but I’m beginning to think I’m right about this: the mainstream media is not your friend, the culture is not your friend, the government is not your friend, big business is not your friend. They are operating collegiately in unison to create a set of systems that are beneficial to them and disadvantage you."
Russel Brand
"...a drifting apart of public opinion and published opinion when the selection rules of the journalists who have been brought into line largely coincide. This creates a consonance of reporting that acts like a confirmation to the audience (everyone says it, so it has to be right) and installs a stereotype-supported pseudo-environment"
Walter Lippmann
"ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice."
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
