Ernest Renan Quotes

American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they’re an elite, that they’ve got a mission, that they’re making history, that they’re fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up 'humble,' 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It's a controlling word. It's a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

Politics and church are the same. They keep the people in ignorance.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.

I think the greatest lesson that power has to teach us is, once you've had it, once you are a part of it, you're never free.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

Fears, insecurities, and the need to please can rule our lives. Our society is economically and socially set up for us to live under these pressures in order to maintain its control and survival.

I think having a healthy distrust of authority is a good thing, within certain parameters, obviously.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

Our politicians want to keep us in a negative state because they can easily manipulate us.

The Western media is a Ministry of Truth that operates full-time in support of the artificial existence that Westerners live inside The Matrix where Westerners exist without thought. Considering their inaptitude and inaction, Western peoples might as well not exist.

I recognize the person that wanted to help people, working hard - naively maybe - to make the world a better place. But I don't recognize the person who was drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid.

It's amazing how sports is a way to control the masses. But it also unites people.

Educate yourself, because this society is geared to have us hate each other. The longer we hate each other, the more we can't come together as humanity and look at the knuckleheads screwing it up for everybody.

Without followers, evil cannot spread.

If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.

These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.