“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”
Niccolò Machiavelli
“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
“Modern man is held in a frenzy of activity, so as not to reflect on the meaning of his life and the world.”
Albert Schweitzer
“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
“It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling whith chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture – drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live.”
H. P. Lovecraft
“Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.”
General Aladeen
“These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”
George Orwell
“One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion”
Voltaire
“All these investigations, the thorough research into the Stasi structures, the methods with which they worked and still work, all this will fall into the wrong hands. One will examine these structures in detail – in order to then take them over. They will be adapted a little to fit a free Western society. They won’t necessarily arrest the troublemakers either. There are more subtle ways to disarm someone. But the secret bans, the watching, the suspicion, the fear, the isolation and exclusion, the branding and muzzling of those who don’t conform – that will come back, believe me. Institutions will be created that will work much more effectively, much more finely than the Stasi. The constant lying will also come back, the disinformation, the fog in which everything loses its contour.”
Bärbel Bohley