Quotes About Indoctrination
― G.K. Chesterton
― George Carlin
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
― John F. Kennedy
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
― Neal Shusterman, UnWholly
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft
“Thomas Jefferson once said: ‘Of course the people don’t want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’ I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot.”
[Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]”
― Jon Stewart
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
― Peter Hitchens
― Herbert M. Shelton, Getting Well
― Hypatia
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
― Arthur Schopenhauer
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
― Bill Bryson
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.
There’s a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there’s no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn’t be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn’t moved in years; it’s a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. ‘Under construction,’ say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?
…Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.”
― Peter Atkins
― John B. Watson, Behaviorism
But I didn’t learn anything practical, like how to purify water, build a home, start a fire, grow food, or survive without the help of corporations.”
― Joss Sheldon, The Little Voice
― Andrea L’Artiste
“Гитлер раздавлен, варварство — нет. Наоборот, очагов его становится все больше. Смутные дикарские силы бурлят на огромных частях земного шара, угрожая прорваться. Примитивно-сладкие дегенеративные идеи, как заразные вирусы, размножаются и распространяются. Действуют четко разработанные методы, как заражать ими миллионные массы.
Развитие науки и техники — кажется, единственное, чем может похвалиться человечество, — приводит, однако, в таком случае лишь к тому, что рабов не гонят, связанных за шею веревками, а везут электровозами в запломбированных вагонах, что можно инъекциями людей превращать в идиотов, а современный варвар убивает не дубиной, но циклоном «Б» или безукоризненным, технически совершенным огнестрельным автоматом.
Говорят, что наука надеется выйти из холуйского состояния, в котором она находится сегодня, служа политиканам верой и правдой. Тогда, может быть, появится еще один, «научно-технический» гуманизм — и, уж совсем беспросветное, варварство технократическое? [183]”
― Анатолий Кузнецов, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel
― Joss Sheldon, The Little Voice
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost