Quote collection
679 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
"What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda."
"One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them."
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."
"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."
"Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity."
"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."
"All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it."
"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."
"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."
"The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not."
"The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."
"The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free."
"Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget."
"Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking."
"Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well."
"Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman."