Plato | Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture
"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
"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
"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie."
Miyamoto Musashi
"Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth."
Erich Fromm
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Whoever comes to power has passed through a filter that does not let decent people pass."
Ljudmila Ulitzkaya
"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Adyashant