Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Quotes

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions.

Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they were bred. The priest continues where the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man.

Custom is our nature …

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don't go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish.

For this reason, if you believe proverbs, let me tell you the common one: "It is unlucky to marry in May.

We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.

What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.

Superstition is rooted in a much deeper and more sensitive layer of the psyche than skepticism.

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)

Through my observations, it became clear that most of society's rules and customs are rooted in fear and superstition!

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

In all superstition wise men follow fools.

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life.