Quotes
Things people have said[-ish].
Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.
A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
Be the change that you want to see in the world.
Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong.
First they ignore you; then they abuse you; then they crack down on you and then you win.
Siddhartha Gautama (c. 500BCE–400BCE)
When one feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil, I tell you, he will not do.
If people become accustomed to lying, they will unconsciously commit every possible wrong deed.
Better is to speak unpleasant truth than to tell lies.
Life is like the harp string, if it is strung too tight it won't play, if it is too loose it hangs, the tension that produces the beautiful sound lies in the middle.
Noam Chomsky (1928–)
The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.
He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.
The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.
The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything ... that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.
The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.
It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.
You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.
If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.
To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person.
Whoever sets the agenda controls the outcome of the debate.
Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial.
You keep plugging away–that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968)
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the "good-will"- that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology - everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!
Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?
American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.
There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.
All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.