"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
"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
"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
"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
"The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself."
Augustinus von Hippo
"A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control."
Chris Hedges
"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
"Truth is not a whore who throws herself at those who do not desire her: Rather, she is such a brittle beauty that even those who sacrifice everything to her cannot be sure of her favor."
Arthur Schopenhauer
"The truth , when it arrives is always different from what we thought it would be..if we imagine that we already know the truth, that imaginations based on old and habitual ideas. But the truth is always something entirely new to the mind; so we cannot possibly imagine it. Just as we cannot know what a new day is like before we experience it, we cannot think accurately about a new truth until we first live it. As we dare to drop our conditioned opinions, we make room for the truth..."
Vernon Howard
"Whoever wants to deceive people must first of all make absurdity plausible."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses."
Plato
"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road."
Voltaire
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
Thomas Paine
"Being "awake" isn't cool. It means having to dumb down 98% of your conversations every day so you don't sound like a lunatic."
Dave Chappelle
"When you're happy you enjoy the music, but when you're sad you understand the lyrics."
Frank Ocean
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The highest conceivable degree of lying is reached when judgment between truth and falsehood ceases and the liar believes his own lie and is indignant that others place doubt in his words."
Franz von Holtzendorff
"The more moral a population is, the freer it becomes. The more immoral a population is, the deeper into bondage and slavery it goes. Another way of saying this is to say that the presence of truth and morality in the lives of the people of any given society is always inversely proportional to the presence of tyranny and slavery in that society. The more truth and morality there is, the less tyranny and slavery there is. The less truth and morality there is, the more tyranny and slavery there is. That's the Law of Freedom. And many people don't want to understand that; that these two things are inextricably interwoven and connected and can never be separated from each other: the presence of truth and morality in a society and the presence of freedom or its lack in a society."
Mark Passio
"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible."
Carl Gustav Jung
"If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance."
Marcus Aurelius
"One cause is rooted in the sad human truth that 'slaves' usually dream less of what it would be like to be free than of what it would be like to be 'slave overseers'"
Dr. Dr. Florian Willet
"The last war among men will be a war for truth. This war will be in every single person. War - with its own ignorance, aggression, irritation. And only a radical transformation of each individual person can become the beginning of a peaceful life for all people."
Nikolaus Roerich
"The most powerful figment of the imagination is public opinion: no one knows exactly who makes it, no one has ever met it personally, but everyone lets themselves be tyrannized by it!"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Marcus Aurelius
"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
"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