“The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions—it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.”
Caitlin Johnstone
“Of course, we live in a completely corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of businessmen working for a bunch of bigger businessmen and none of them give a shit about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it, because no one knows how to take on the corporations. So I guess we’re stuck with this system until the oil runs out.”
Woody Harrelson
“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
Thomas Jefferson
“It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.”
George Orwell
“The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”
Rose Wilder Lane
“The conception of democracy is the one that I mentioned. The bewildered herd is a problem. We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling. We’ve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like “Support our troops.” You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them.”
Noam Chomsky
“It is not the use of violence that seems to me condemnable, but its mysticism, the religion of violence in the service of the totalitarian state, in the service of the dictatorship of the general welfare, considered not as a means but as an end.”
Georges Bernanos
“I mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world — to be able to gain control over diseases, over the human body, over the environment, over rivers and animals and forests. You have to submit a grant to somebody to fund, it all comes down to money, in many cases. It’s also an institution- If you’re a freelance scientist, you just explore the truth. Okay. But in an institution, a university, you need money to finance so you submit a research grant, and you have to convince the authority not of the truth. You have to convince the authority that what you want to do will somehow make us more powerful. Will somehow enable us to produce a new weapon. Will somehow enable us to produce more food. Will somehow enable us to gain control over previously uncontrollable, or deadly disease. And this is really what gets the money. Of course, it means to also be truth to some extent. Does it work and who wants it?”
Yuval Noah Harari
“What is a president, then? He is the mouthpiece of the corporations – and nothing else. [….] We are no longer a democracy. We gave up our constitution long ago. [….] The modern dictatorship doesn’t come with brown or black uniforms. We do it with entertainment, with television, with fun, fun. And an education that dumbs down.”
Gore Vidal
“You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”
Clarence Darrow