“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
“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
“Tyrants must ensure that the people are poor, busy, lonely, distrustful, highly taxed, distracted by trivia, spied on, and at war.”
Aristoteles
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
Aldous Huxley
“I do conscientiously and sincerely believe that the Order of Freemasonry, if not the greatest, is one of the greatest moral and political evils under which the Union is now laboring … a conspiracy of the few against the equal rights of the many …Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong – essentially wrong – a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
John Quincy Adams
“If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World. [….] The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.”
Aldous Huxley
“”Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.””
Aldous Huxley
“The most powerful figment of the imagination is public opinion: no one knows exactly who makes it, no one has ever met it personally, but everyone lets themselves be tyrannized by it!”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The International Space Station is an orbital turkey….No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value.”
Steven Weinberg
“Christof: “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.””
Christof (The Truman Show)