In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
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.
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
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.
Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one?s self.
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
The more you know, the more you see
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