“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”
Marcus Aurelius
“One cause is rooted in the sad human truth that ‘slaves’ usually dream less of what it would be like to be free than of what it would be like to be ‘slave overseers'”
Dr. Dr. Florian Willet
“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
“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
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Marcus Aurelius
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Carl Sagan
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”
Gustave Le Bon