Plato's Cave

Quotes

"No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth."

- Plato

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

- Voltaire

“A 'conspiracy theory’ is something that, if true, you couldn’t handle it.”

- Mark Crispin Miller

"So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries."

- A. Solzhenitsyn

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

- Mark Twain

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

- H.L. Menken

"Countless, similar stories across thousands of years of human history point to this simple conclusion: the people in charge don’t always tell the truth. Duh. Is that really a controversial statement?"

- Simon Black

"Complaining about the existence of conspiracy theories is power-serving behavior. Instead, complain about the existence of government, corporate and financial secrecy which causes people to form speculative theories about what the powerful are up to behind that veil of opacity.

"They concentrate all the power in these tiny little elitist circles, then say 'You don’t get to know what we’re doing with all our power over here. Not only that, but you don’t even get to talk to each other about what we might be doing, even though it could directly affect you.'

"How crazy is that? At the very least don’t play along with them and police each other about it on top of that.

"It’s fine to discuss and debate the validity of individual theories (I do it all the time), but to complain about the fact that people form theories about possible conspiracies when we know for a fact that powerful people conspire is just infantile."

- Caitlin Johnston

"And wouldn’t they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?"

- Socrates

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

- Gustav Le Bon

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

- Edward L. Bernays

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

- Theodore Dalrymple

"The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found."

- Allan Bloom

"In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

- James Fenimore Cooper

“Advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government ... will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.”

- Bertrand Russell

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.”

- Donald James aka Dresden James

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

- H.L. Menken

Friday, April 2, 2021