Quote on Perception and Reality by Leo Tolstoy
“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”
Leo Tolstoi
Author Archive for: Jan
Entries by Jan
Beauty and Goodness – Quote by Leo Tolstoi
“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
Leo Tolstoi
Dictatorship and Scapegoats – Ayn Rand on Totalitarian Power Mechanisms
“Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.”
Ayn Rand
The Wise Man Does Not Discriminate – Quote by Umberto Eco
“The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.”
Umberto Eco
“Every great thinker is someone else’s moron” – Umberto Eco
“Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco on Belief and Doubt
“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
Umberto Eco
“Absence is to love as wind is to fire” – Umberto Eco
“Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.”
Umberto Eco
Political Power and Communication – Quote by Umberto Eco
“Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes…. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.”
Umberto Eco
Hermann Rotermund on ARD Tagesschau: The Gently Authoritarian Truth in Your Living Room
“The tone is gently authoritarian, leaving no doubt that this is the way the world is and no other way [….]Proclaimers of unassailable truths [….] The broadcast gives the impression of a short devotional in a living room chapel.”
Hermann Rotermund
Entertained Not Informed by News by Neil Postman
“I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.”
Neil Postman