The Great Quotes thread

[Ioneo]

This moment contains all moments.

C. S. Lewis

The fruit of silence is tranquility.

Arabian Proverb

[Raskolnikov]

"It’s an astounding thing how man believes in words. If he’s told he’s a fool, for instance, though he’s not thrashed, he’ll be wretched; call him a clever fellow, and he’ll be delighted if you go off without paying him."

Ivan Turgenev

[kfm27917]

Mark Twain is claimed to have said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”

[Raskolnikov]

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H. L. Mencken

[Eva2]

"To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces ... but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate - and expected - action."
by Jacques Ellul

[kfm27917]

"Being unconquerable
lies within yourself."

Sun Tzu


"To win true freedom
you must be a slave to philosophy."

Seneca

[Kryztian]

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Raskolnikov]

"They are a satanic cult of a$$holes."

Alex Jones

Think he needs some help from the "a$$hole hippies from outer space."

[Tintin]

George Orwell (Eric Blair), from 1943:

“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

[Michel Leclerc]

William Burroughs, from his lesser known masterpiece from 1963, Dead Fingers Talk, the first paragraph of the chapter with the title “the board books”:

"In three-dimensional terms The Board is a group representing international big money who intend to take over and monopolize space—They have their own space arrangements privately owned and consider the governmental space programs a joke—The Board Books are records pertaining to anyone who can be of use to their program or anyone who could endanger it—The Board Books are written in symbols referring to association blocks—Like this: $—"American upper middle class upbringing with maximum sexual frustration and humiliations imposed by Middle Western Matriarchs;" %—"Criminal street boy upbringing—Oriented towards money and power—Easily corrupted" and so forth—The board agents learn to think in these association blocks and board instructions are conveyed in the board book symbols—The Board is a three dimensional and essentially stupid pressure group relying on money, equipment, information, files, and the technical brains they have bought—As word dust falls and their control machine is disconnected by partisan activity they'll be in the bread line without clothes or a dime to buy their "dogs" their "gooks" their "errand boys" their "human animals"—Liars—Cowards—Collaborators—Traitors—Liars who want time for more lies—Cowards who can not face your "human animals" with the truth—Collaborators with Insect People, with Vegetable People—With any people anywhere who offer them a body forever—Traitors to all souls everywhere sold out to s**t forever—"

(Burroughs writing the penultimate word without asterisks)

[edina]

"Cultivate the ability to see the ridiculous, and to retain the ability to laugh."
Edgar Cayce reading 2984-1

Looks like we're going to need this skill in the coming times.

[Bill Ryan]

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Honore de Balzac (1799—1850)

[kfm27917]

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite

Bertrand Russell

[ZenBaller]

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

[Kryztian]

[norman]

"You're making it too complicated. You're counting the herd by counting the legs and dividing by four" - Dr Lee Merit, during a round table podcast.

[Kryztian]

[Kryztian]

vvvvv

[Bill Ryan]

An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.

Misattributed to Sun Tzu and probably more recent — but a great quote anyway

[kfm27917]

There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millennia of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climate changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge.

- George Ivanovich Gurdjieff