W. H. Auden Quotes

When a wrong thought is told a thousand times and impressed on one’s brain, one starts feeling the falsehood as truth. Similarly if the mind of slave is hammered of slavery, he starts enjoying his slavery

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

Animals... don't have a sense of time. You just have to do things over and over with animals until they happen to do it right because they don't really know what you want.

MKULTRA

This system of encouragement proves serviceable as a preventive of punishment, the attainment of the tickets being a reward, the forfeiture of them the reverse; and, as such, boys seem often more affected by their loss than by coercion.

Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source.

Fear works. It is more effective than any drug, tactic, or torture device.

All we can do is apply the physical stimuli which we have at our disposal to bring about a change of mind in these recalcitrant persons. Of this you may be sure: we shall continue to operate on the Italian donkey at both ends, with a carrot and a stick.

The Church warns against the attempts to use the scientific and technological progress for establishing control over the inner world of the personality, for creating any technologies making it possible to infuse and manipulate the human consciousness or sub-consciousness.

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

… cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years. Worldwide figures are even greater.

Physical restraint is an obvious condition, which seems particularly useful in defining freedom, but with respect to important issues, it is a metaphor and not a very good one. People are indeed controlled by fetters, handcuffs, strait jackets, and the walls of jails and concentration camps, but what may be called behavioral control--the restraint imposed by contingencies of reinforcement--is a very different thing.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.

It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

It works. People respond to it.

To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force.

It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force of arms than to subjugate the minds of a single village... .

We must form men so that they can only will what we wish them to will.

You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it wholeheartedly.

There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world. Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.