“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”
Adyashanti
“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
Winston Churchill
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan
“Educational systems have been developed not to impart genuine knowledge but to make the people docile to the will of the rulers. Without a sophisticated system of deception in schools, it would be impossible to maintain the appearance of democracy. It is not desired that ordinary citizens think for themselves. Because it is believed that people who think for themselves are difficult to handle. Only the elites are supposed to think. The rest are supposed to obey and follow their leaders, like a herd of mutton. This doctrine has corrupted all state education systems from the ground up, even in democracies.”
Bertrand Russell
“Universal suffrage did not give the masses the right to decide, but to approve the decision of one elite or another.”
José Ortega y Gasset
“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”
Noam Chomsky
“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.”
James Dresden
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
James Dresden