“War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.”
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry
“Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that’s institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody’ll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don’t want students to think, they’re afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won’t have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they’ll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they’re told. And privelage and power typically doesn’t want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on.”
Noam Chomsky
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
Howard Zinn
“In entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student’s first endeavours ought to be, to prepare his mind for the reception of truth, by dismissing, or at least loosening his hold on, all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.; and to strengthen himself, by something of an effort and a resolve, for the unprejudiced admission of any conclusion which shall appear to be supported by careful observation and logical argument, even should it prove of a nature adverse to notions he may have previously formed for himself, or taken up, without examination, on the credit of others.”
John Frederick William Herschel
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed […] One of the effects is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore. So what a responsibility you all have; to tell the truth, not to just be first, but to tell the truth. We live in a society now where it’s just first. Who cares? Get it out there. We don’t care who it hurts, we don’t care who we destroy, we don’t care if it’s true. Just say it, sell it. Just say it, sell it. Anything you practice you’ll get good at — including BS.”
Denzel Washington
“For if you give the state, the authority to grant you your rights….in that same breath, you have just given them the authority to also take them away”
G. Edward Griffin
“Democracy is the method of implementing the will of the financial aristocracy in such a way that the people believe that humanity wanted it that way.”
Matthias Lubos
“The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.”
Murray Rothbard