WISE WORDS

QUOTATIONS

• "The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual." - Carl Jung
• "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." - Carl Jung
• "Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.” - Noam Chomsky
• "The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same." - Stendhal
• "There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• "All orthodox opinion - that is, today, revolutionary opinion either of the pure or impure variety - is anti-man." - Wyndham Lewis
• "In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." - Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (1848)
• "It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - Douglas MacArthur
• "Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." - Aldous Huxley
• "In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.” - Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
• “It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.” - Alain de Botton
• “But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us [by corporations, political parties and oligarchs] with military efficiency... Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile that lets companies know you better than you may know yourself... Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false. This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or 'crazy.'" - Tim Cook, Apple CEO
• "Convention is so often a mask for injustice. The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.” - Edith Hamilton
• "Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern government, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age... People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." - Soren Kierkegaard
• "Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed." - Arthur S. Miller
• "Landed power, built on theft, slavery and colonial looting, crushes our freedoms. It is time to reclaim them." - George Monbiot
• "The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities." - Karl Marx, Das Kapital
• "Governments have built a heaven for landlords and a hell for tenants. It’s time to change the system." - George Monbiot
• "Capitalism steals from the young and the unborn. It’s time for a new system, that respects their rights." - George Monbiot
• “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” - James Baldwin
• "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals." — Bill Joy (One Huge Computer, 1998)"
• "Responsibility... accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power." - Noam Chomsky
• "You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some moist bint threw a sword at you. The power to govern derives from a mandate from the masses. Not from some farcical aquatic ritual." - Oppressed Peasant
• "There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." - Roger Bacon (Opus Magus, 1267)
• "Most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few. A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of middle England put together." - Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England?
• “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” - George Orwell
• "I am not crazy about Biden. I don’t endorse him. But I believe we gotta vote for him. I am not in love with neoliberal elites either. I think they have to take some responsibility for this neo-fascist moment. But in the end, this white supremacy is soooo lethal … and it cuts so deep." - Cornel West (2020)
• "America, ably supported by Britain and a rotating cast of collaborators, is the source and fuel for the dark money network whose tendrils stretch into every nation and every major corporation on the planet."
• "Neural networks don’t give you a direct route from, say, a flash of light straight to your consciousness. There are all kinds of committees that vote along the way, whether that flash of light is going to go straight to your consciousness or not. And if there are enough ‘yes’ votes, then yes you can see it. If there aren’t, you could miss it. But here’s the thing: What does your brain like? What gets the “yes” vote? It likes the stuff it already recognizes. It likes what is familiar. So you will see the familiar stuff right away. The other stuff may take longer, or it may never impinge on your consciousness. You just won’t see it." - Robert Burton, Psychologist
• "Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random — there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek is formed, water is more likely to follow this newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops." - Robert Burton, Psychologist
• "Awareness, in this case and so many cases, is realizing when something’s challenging and deciding not to take the easy way out." - Caroline Beaton, Psychology Today agony aunt
• “No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth. [1948 "Democratic Party" speech]” - John F. Kennedy (35th President of the United States)
• "If you cannot convince them, confuse them." - Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States
• "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain
• "Life is like a poker game and any time you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." - Paul Newman
• "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Göhring (NAZI)
• "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." - Charles Mackay (1841)
• "He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense." - Joseph Conrad (1900)
• "In the ethical sense, Propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse." - Edward Louis Bernays (Propaganda, 1928)
• “The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.” - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• "The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• "The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment." - Albert Einstein
• "School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." - Ivan Illich
• "The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils." - Pope Leo XIII
• "When all think alike, no one is thinking very much. A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society." - Walter Lippmann
• "Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs." - Mark Berley
• "Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." - Aldous Huxley
• "Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent." - David Herbert Lawrence
• "Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?" - Bertrand Russell
• "The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status." - John McEvoy
• “Propaganda is what gives us the freedom to do as we are told.” - Markus W. Lunner
• "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." - Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
• “Terrorism is in good part an effect of government propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy” - Mark Poster
• “Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship." - Herman Göring
• "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Göring