Noam Chomsky

So you can control people. Make him believe that he is the reason for his delay and that you are coming to save him.

Noam Chomsky

The world is a very mysterious and confusing place. If you are not willing to get confused, you become a replica of someone else’s mind.

Noam Chomsky

There is a purpose in distorting history and making it seem like great men did it all. It’s part of how you teach people who can’t do anything, that they are powerless.

Noam Chomsky

One of the clearest lessons in history: Rights are not granted, they are taken by force.

Noam Chomsky

There is no such thing as a poor country. There’s only one failed system in resource management.

Friedrich Engels

The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but makes a bargain with the poor, saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery.’

Robert A. Heinlein - Lost Legacy

When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Albert Camus

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your way of existence is an act of rebellion.

Erich Fromm

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

Erich Fromm

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.

Erich Fromm

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

Erich Fromm

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.

Erich Fromm

The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

Erich Fromm

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

Erich Fromm

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Michel de Montaigne

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.

Zhuangzi

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Confucious

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Tibetan Proverb

The secret of living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.

Epictetus

He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.