“To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.”
Walt Whitman
“All the Perplexities, Confusions and Distresses in America arise not from defects in their Constitutions or Confederation, not from a want of Honour or Virtue, So much as from downright Ignorance of the Nature of Coin, Credit and Circulation.”
John Adams
“The last war among men will be a war for truth. This war will be in every single person. War – with its own ignorance, aggression, irritation. And only a radical transformation of each individual person can become the beginning of a peaceful life for all people.”
Nikolaus Roerich
“I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the Covid crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveilled all the time, not just in authoritarian regimes, but even in democracies and maybe most importantly, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, because really we haven’t seen anything yet. I think that the big process that’s happening right now, the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what’s happening within you, what makes you go.”
Yuval Noah Harari
“”When did this Modern Age begin? Historical epochs merge into one another, and it may be arbitrary to seek for points of absolute beginning. When, for example, did the Middle Ages begin? When end? It would be futile here to seek an absolute point of division between the past and the epoch that succeeded it. But sometimes there are points at which we can see clearly that by this time something new has already arrived and is bound to transform human history radically. Accordingly, we may take the beginning of our Modern Age to be the early-seventeenth century. For that was the century that created modern science and its accompanying technology; and these two, science and technology, have become, as we have seen, the driving forces within modern civilization.””
William Barrett
“If you kill one person, you’re prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you’re famous; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you’re invited to a peace conference.”
Haris Silajdžić
“The certainly stirring but decisive lesson of our trials, however, demands a readiness to say an unequivocal no to state injustice. The trials demand that people renounce private and family advantages and are also prepared to make personal sacrifices if they are required to do or tolerate evil, even if it is the state that makes itself the advocate of evil.”
Fritz Bauer
“All princes and other persons of rank and name must be compelled by all means to listen to us and feel secure in doing so. By this approach, they all become our creatures, and no one will dare to offer the slightest resistance to our society… Ultimately, our society must ensure that every prince is either gracious to us or otherwise in our power, so that everyone who does not love us at least fears us.”
Ignatius von Loyola
“Unfortunately, it is a typical German trait to think that obedience par excellence is a virtue. We need the civil courage to say ‘no’.”
Fritz Bauer