Heiner Geißler Quotes: Why Fame Often Reflects the Intelligence of Admirers
“The fame of some contemporaries is linked to the stupidity of their admirers.”
Heiner Geißler
“The fame of some contemporaries is linked to the stupidity of their admirers.”
Heiner Geißler
“Stupidity is the strangest of all diseases. The sick person never suffers from it. Those who suffer painfully are the others.”
Paul Henri Spaak
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
“Cognitive warfare is waged on the battlefield of the human mind. Tactical or strategic objectives are achieved by pursuing warfare by other means. This method of warfare directly exploits advances in digital technology, applied both at individual and networked levels, to manipulate the psychological, social, and information environment. This shapes not only what people think individually and as social networks but also influences how they collectively act and interact.
Launched by a sophisticated adversary, cognitive warfare manipulates individual and group representations or beliefs with the desired effect of amplifying targeted behaviors and actions that favor the adversary. Pursued to the fullest, cognitive warfare has the potential to destabilize societies, military organizations, and fracture alliances.
Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives.”
NATO
“It requires a high degree of mastery to turn the sword of truth against oneself in order to free oneself from one’s own blindness.”
Unbekannter Verfasser
“A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes—for example, as foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.”
Chris Hedges
“We are the generation without ties and without depth. Our depth is the abyss. We are the generation without happiness, without home and without farewell. Our sun is narrow, our love is cruel and our youth is without youth. And we are the generation without boundaries, without restraint and protection – cast out of the playpen of childhood into a world prepared for us by those who despise us for it.”
Wolfgang Borchert
“People often say, with pride, ‘I’m not interested in politics.’ They might as well say, ‘I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.’ … If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.”
Martha Gellhorn
“The form in which all European states are governed today allows the services demanded of citizens to be squandered on foolish, frivolous and criminal undertakings. The whim of individuals, the self-interest of vanishingly small minorities, all too often determines the goal towards which the efforts of the whole are directed. Thus the individual citizen works and bleeds so that wars may be waged which destroy his life or his prosperity, so that fortresses, palaces, railroads, harbors or canals may be built from which neither he nor nine-tenths of the nation will ever derive the slightest benefit, so that new offices may be created, which will make the state machine still more cumbersome, the friction of its wheels still harder, in which he will lose still more of his time, still more of his freedom, so that officials may be highly paid who have no other purpose than to lead an ornamental existence at his expense and to make his existence more difficult; In a word, he works and bleeds in order to make his yoke heavier and his chains tighter and to create the possibility of obtaining even more work and even more blood from him….”
Max Nordau
“The eternal recurrence of new forms of unbearable servitude, and with them, new forms of resistance, demonstrates that human history is not a progressive march toward absolute knowledge, the demise of the state, or the end of history, but rather a constant struggle for our own subjugation, a battle that must be fought anew to establish our subjectivity, ourselves as subjects. Once we grasp the recurring nature of this struggle, only then will we recognize the task that confronts us today and in the future: to resist the ever-pressing forms of tyrannical power, that brutal desire for subjugation, and the ongoing, ever-renewed attempts to rule through fear, terror, and absolute domination.”
Bernard Edouard Harcourt
