Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
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