"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
"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
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
Winston Churchill
"Educational systems have been developed not to impart genuine knowledge but to make the people docile to the will of the rulers. Without a sophisticated system of deception in schools, it would be impossible to maintain the appearance of democracy. It is not desired that ordinary citizens think for themselves. Because it is believed that people who think for themselves are difficult to handle. Only the elites are supposed to think. The rest are supposed to obey and follow their leaders, like a herd of mutton. This doctrine has corrupted all state education systems from the ground up, even in democracies."
Bertrand Russell
"Universal suffrage did not give the masses the right to decide, but to approve the decision of one elite or another."
José Ortega y Gasset
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know."
Noam Chomsky
"Die ideale Tyrannei ist die, die ignorant von seinen Opfern selbstverwaltet wird. Die perfektesten Sklaven sind deshalb die, die sich glückselig und unbewusst versklaven lassen."
James Dresden
"A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
James Dresden
"Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it."
John Adams
"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool"
Plato
"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
Jean-Claude Juncker
"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
Emile Zola
"Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it."
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
Blaise Pascal
"It is one of the most difficult things that can be imposed on a thinking man, to have to witness the course of a historical process among ignorant people, whose inevitable outcome he has long known with clarity. The time of the error of others, of false hopes, of blindly committed mistakes then becomes very long."
Carl J. Burckhardt
"The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance."
Maximilien de Robespierre
"No one judges more harshly than the uneducated; he knows neither reasons nor counter-reasons and always believes himself to be in the right."
Anselm Friedrich Feuerbach
"We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality."
George Bernard Shaw
"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) irischer Schriftsteller
"Das Auftauchen eines wahrhaft genialen Geistes können Sie untrüglich daran erkennen, dass sich sofort alle Nieten gegen ihn verbünden."
"The problem isn't a lack of money food water or land. The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind"
Bill Hicks