Quotes About Indoctrination 4

“A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.”
― James Hervey Johnson

“Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

“…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36)”
― Chrystine Oksana, Safe Passage to Healing: A Guide for Survivors of Ritual Abuse

“If human beings weren’t ‘dumbable’ enough to be made soldiers, war would be nothing but an exchange of swear words between a handful of individuals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.”
― Robert Owen

“I’ve often wondered how the term “’New Atheism”’ gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“Give your typical employee a profitable corporation, and, he is mostly likely to sell it to buy a fancier suit for his next job interview.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment – an attitude that has never again left me.
– Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp”
― Albert Einstein

“God (Nature, in my view) makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He fores one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Ingersoll could not understand the mind of those who, once having been told the truth, preferred to remain under the spell of superstition and in ignorance. He could not understand why people would not accept ‘new truths with gladness.’

He also knew, however, that once a person’s mind had been poisoned with religious superstition, it was almost impossible to free it from the paralyzing fear which destroyed its ability to think.”
― Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto

“…the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.”
― Lee Doren, Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoid Indoctrination at College

“Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion… they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with them, and they always do what they do in the name of an unknowable deity… but sometimes, they wake up. Occasionally, they realize that all religions are man-made and that none of them are ‘right.’ And when they do, they can live happy and fulfilling lives without dogma and without anticipating or fearing an afterlife.”
― David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I’m an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer

“If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you’re conditioned just the same.”
― Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

“Life was never meant to be difficult, we just make it that way so that it fits into societies and our indoctrinated concept of what things should be like.”
― Steven Redhead, The Solution

“To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren’t much different from millions of poor, guilt-ridden souls who, throughout the march of human history, have hitched their hopes to mass movements of one sort or another. Eric Hoffer, in his brilliant treatise, “The True Believer,” explains the attraction of joining a cause: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following ‘by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated by freeing them from their ineffectual selves–and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole’. “Of all the cults and philosophies that competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization.”

Once I realized this, it wasn’t much of a leap out of religion altogether once I flew the Mormon coop. I simply wanted to be free from organizational groupthink. I escaped from the stuffy attic of religion’s “pray, pay and obey” mentality into journalism’s open laboratory of “who, what, where, when and why.”
― Steve Benson

“It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize “crazy”, and of course that’s its main focus”
― Stefan Molyneux

“A specialist’s mind is a slave to his specialization.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A soldier is a killer painted hero.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I think if a story has a message it should be incidental and accidental, otherwise it leans too close to indoctrination.”
― Karen Lord

“School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Give a typical employee a million, and, he is most likely to use the money to print his CV on fancier paper.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The Fanatics have dirtied its fiber, and their mottos have reated a thick layer of mold over its wounds, one of total intolerance, feeding on the indoctrination of the youth cliques.”
― Rami Ollaik

“People who have extremely limited knowledge of The Bible or its implications may still choose to classify themselves as Christians on the basis that their parents do so—they may never even give it a second thought. This phenomenon of our nation’s children inheriting religion is often overlooked because the perpetrator guilty of indoctrination is not a dictator or cult leader, but instead it is most often their own parents or close family members.”
― David G. McAfee, Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings

“Many myths and religions have some kind of threat of retribution from their god or gods, and their doctrines warn of the dangers of doing various forbidden things. Why? Because memes involving danger are the ones we pay attention to! As oral traditions developed, our brains were set up to amplify the dangers and give them greater significance than the rest.”
― Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

“A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana