John Perry Barlow Quotes

We try to make sensible decisions with the facts in front of us. The problem with sensible decisions is that so is everyone else.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.

Everything popular is wrong.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

Just because everybody else does something isn't a good enough reason to do anything.

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

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

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Incredulity is not wisdom.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

As a kid, I was searching for my tribe of other people who saw through the matrix. Even as a kid I could never buy into the status quo. I just thought it was a joke; I couldn't believe other people weren't laughing at it.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're gonna be alright. But if you go beyond that then you're gonna have these grave doubts that give you stomach problems, headachesmake you want to go out and do something else. So, I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming out.

Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from where it comes.

One thing about prejudices -- once you break one of them, you're screwed, because then they all have got to go.

Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.