Knowledge Itself Is Power
Cover. Aristotle with a Bust of Homer [1653]. Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn [1606 - 1669].
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'Some of the same people who profess to be repelled by the monotonous rows of identical human dwellings in so-called subdivisions, seem to admire rows of identical boxes in art galleries.'15
- Rudolf Amheim
'More irritating than someone’s actual stupidity is their mouthing a scientific vocabulary... One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intelligences.'
- Nicolas Gomez-Davila
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'Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.'
- Leonardo da Vinci
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'And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. 2 He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. 3 He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.'
- Revelation. 20 [NIV]
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'Science finds - Industry applies - Man conforms'
- Robert Skidelski*
*The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a War
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Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?'
Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.'
Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'
- Anonymous
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'America tells you that the only things worth knowing are those which can be known. America is wrong.'
- Outer Range [S1:EP7]
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'I am utterly disgusted. I would never wish to incorporate this technology ['AI'] into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.'
- Hayao Miyazaki [Studio Ghibli]
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'The lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.'
- Tywin Lannister
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'The best answer to a fool is silence.'
- Leo Tolstoy
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'Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.'
- Carl G. Jung
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'I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.'
- Soren Kierkegaard
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'Why don't you really know what you want? Two reasons, that you don't really know what you want. Number one, you have it! Number two, you don't know yourself, because you never can.'
― Alan Watts
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'There's a saying in Japan that every man has three hearts [or faces]. One in his mouth for the world to know, another in his chest just for his close friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, buried deep where no one can find it. That is a heart a man must keep hidden if he wants to survive.'
― James Clavell [Shōgun]
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'What could be a greater luxury than a sofa, a book and a cup of coffee? To be able to read and be happy while reading is a blessing.'
- Anthony Trollope
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'I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.'
- Groucho Marx
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'The form of constitution that replaced feudalism and absolutism was democracy; the form of government, plutocracy.* Today, democracy is a façade of plutocracy: since nations would not tolerate a pure form of plutocracy, they were granted nominal powers, while the real power rests in the hands of plutocrats. In republican as well as monarchical democracies, the statesmen are puppets, the capitalists are the puppeteers; they dictate the guidelines of politics, rule through purchase the public opinion of the voters, and through professional and social relationships, the ministers.'
*plutocracy [n.] government by the wealthy; a state or society governed by the wealthy; an elite or ruling class whose power derives from their wealth.
– Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
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'I could always live in my art,
but never in my life.'
– Ingrid Bergman
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'Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.'
– John Lubbock
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'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.'
- Soren Kierkegaard
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'The populace must think their ruler is a greater man than they, else why should they follow him. Above all a leader must be a Showman, giving his people the bread and circuses they require.'
- Duke Paulus Atreides
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'I am completely empty and I have nothing to offer in order for my relationship with anyone to last, and you can take these words as sufficient reason to stay away from me.'
- Fyoder Dostoevsky
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'... what happened, happened and couldn't have happened any other way.'
- Morpheus [The Matrix Reloaded]
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'Playing against a defensive opponent is just as bad as making love to a tree.'
- Jorge Valdanoe
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'Common sense is not so common.'
- Voltaire
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'In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.'
- Friedrich Nietzsche
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'I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one.'
- Mawlana Jalal-Al-Din Rumi
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'It's the beauty that hurts you most, not the ugly.'
- Rectify [S1.E5]
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'An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off the boredom from a dullard.'
- Arthur Schopenhauer
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'A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!'
- Oscar Wilde
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'Man Proposes, God Disposes [Man Plans, God Laughs].'
- Thomas à Kempis [Yiddish Proverb]
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'We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.'
― Martin Luther King Jr.
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'Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.'
- Karl Marx
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'If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.'
- Arthur Schopenhauer
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'It's said that when people don't know, they talk a lot; but when you know, you say nothing. I guess you're just at peace. Maybe, there's nothing left to say.'
- Jon Levi
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'You say we're on the brink of destruction and you're right. But it's only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.'
- Professor Barnhardt
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'For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.'
- Timothy 6:10 [KJV]
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'It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.'
- Ernest Becker
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'Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.'
- Roy Batty [Blade Runner]
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'The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor'.
- Voltaire
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'The eyes, Chico, they never lie.'
- Tony Montana
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'Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.'
- Frank Zappa
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'Love yourself first because this is the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with.'
- Paulo Coelho
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'The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.'
– Leo Tolstoy
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'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
- Carl Sagan
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'... in consequence [of the decline of Christianity] the [religious] projections have largely fallen away from the divine figures and have necessarily settled in the human sphere…the [modern] 'enlightened' intellect cannot imagine anything greater than . . . those tin gods with totalitarian pretensions who call themselves State ...'
- Carl G. Jung
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Mayor Tilman: 'Do you like baseball, do you, Anderson?'
Anderson: 'Yeah, I do. You know, it's the only time when a black man can wave a stick at a white man and not start a riot.'
- Agent Rupert Anderson [Mississippi Burning]
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'We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.'
- Eric Hoffer
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'Our football [Brazilian football], with its creativity and joy, is an expression of our social formation, our rebellion at excessive internal and external order, against excesses of uniformity, of geometrisation, standardisation, and the totalitarianisms that do for individual variety or personal spontaneity’
- Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira,
simply known as Socrates
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'Tain't What You Do [It's the Way That You Do It]'
— Melvin 'Sy' Oliver & James 'Trummy' Young
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'I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe, hmmm.
... attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I've watched C Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain...
[... time to die ...]'
... attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I've watched C Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain...
[... time to die ...]'
— Roy Batty [Bladerunner]
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'The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.'
— René Descartes
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'Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.'
- Shakespeare
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'A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. … he will refuse to believe it… That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralisation.'
- Yuri Bezmenov
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Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part.
- William R. Somerset [Seven]
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'Where do you go when you're the best in the world? What's next?'
- Boris Becker
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'Comparison is the thief of joy.'
- Dr. Ray Cummings
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'I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.'
― Marilyn Monroe
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'I’ve always gone my own way, always swam against the tide, and I think I’ve reaped the benefits of this.'
- Steffan Effenberg
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'The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.'
- George Orwell
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'If you're lonely when you're alone,
you're in bad company.'
- Jean-Paul Sartre
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'Hard times create strong men,
strong men create good times,
good times create weak men,
and weak men create hard times.'
- G. Michael Hopf
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'There are voices, which we hear in solitude, [that] grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson [Self-Reliance]
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'Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes what have you ... It fetishes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, forms of false understanding. in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines.'
- Terence McKenna
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'Depression can be seen as a kind of spiritual dryness, a Dark Night of the Soul, that calls for a deeper more meaningful connection to something larger than the self. Religious and spiritual practices can provide a powerful antidote to depression by restoring a sense of connection, purpose and meaning to life.'
- Carl G. Jung
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'Advertising exists only to purvey what people don’t need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point.'
- Jerry Mander
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'Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.'
- Mark Twain
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'Can you remember who you were, Before the world told you who you should be?'
- Charles Bukowski
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'We live in a time when the art [and architecture] all around us, accustoms men to, and insinuates into their souls, the most erroneous and degrading ideas imaginable, about themselves and their world. A humane society can hardly be expected to grow out of such an adverse cultural environment.'
- Nikos Salingaros
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'Fixation is the way to death. Fluidity is the way to life.'
- Miyamoto Musashi
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'The lady doth protest too much, methinks.'
- William Shakespeare
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'To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.'
- Manly P. Hall
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'An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way, an artist says a hard thing in a simple way.'
- Charles Bukowski
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'Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.'
- Katharine Hepburn
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'To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty.'
- Karl Friedrich Schinkel
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'Sport is something that does not matter, but is performed as if it did. In that contradiction lies its beauty.'
- Simon Barnes
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'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.'
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
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'I don’t like to judge the others, I don’t go on TV. I see former colleagues who act as professors, but I remember they couldn’t even do kick-ups with their hands.'
- Roberto Baggio
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'Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.'
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.'
- Robert Montgomery
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'Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.'
- Friedrich W. Nietzsche
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'O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!'
- Walter Scott
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'The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.'
- Ecclesiastes 1:9 [KJV]
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'Before we break through the last bushes and out of cover to the free expanse of the meadow, we do what all wild animals and all good naturalists ... would do under similar circumstances: we reconnoiter, seeking, before we leave our cover, to gain from it the advantage which it can offer alike to hunter and hunted - namely to see without being seen.'
- Konrad Z. Lorenz
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'I would rather be alone by myself, than alone with someone else.'
- Manly P. Hall
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'Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.'
- A.J. Liebling
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'Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.'
- Al Capp
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'What is history but a fable agreed upon.'
- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
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'For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere ... [my italic].'
- Jedi Master Yoda [The Empire Strikes Back]
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'You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.'
- Caspar David Friedrich
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'The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced, and permanent change of life, that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide.
They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people's door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy ... but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.'
- Anonymous
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'No drunkard can inherit the Kingdom of Heaven' for acids and alcohol cut, or chemically split, the oil that unites with the mineral salts in the body and thus produces the monthly seed.'
- Dr. George W. Carey [The Anti-Christ]
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'Cruelty to animals is as if a man did not love God.'
- Cardinal John Henry Newman
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'As it is said, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and humans as a species are prone to amnesia. It is thus imperative that these all-important matters of religious ideology and doctrine be thoroughly explored and not left up to blind faith.'
- Acharya S
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'Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because everything is simple and clear with a manifest and limited purpose.'
- Carl G. Jung
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Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure 'which has no relation to reality.'
- Nikola Tesla
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'The hardest thing to predict is the past. It keeps changing according to the politics of the present [my italic].'
- Soviet saying
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'Dreams are messages from the deep.'
- Dune [2021]
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'A patient cured is a customer lost.'
- 'Big Pharma'
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'My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes… most of which never happened.'
- Mark Twain
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'There are two types of architecture - good architecture, and the other kind.'
- Anonymous
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'Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding.'
- Plato
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'But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.'
- Neil Kramer
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'The forest kept shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe. For the axe was clever and convinced them that since his handle was wood, he was one of them.'
- West Asian Fable
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'Brevity is the soul of wit.'
- William Shakespeare
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'Time is an artificial construct, young Bickle. A methodology utilised by simple minds to arrange events and thoughts in a linear fashion. Even though straight lines do not exist in nature!'
- Rofschild
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'We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.'
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.'
- Pink Floyd
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'Those who don't believe in magic, will never find it.'
- Roald Dahl
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'The flame that burns Twice as bright, burns half as long.'
- Lao Tzu
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'The judge never finds himself guilty.'
- Arnold Beichman
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'World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.'
- Denis Healey
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'Change no one. Change nothing. React to no one, react to nothing. Do not live in the past and do not, worry about the future. Stay in the eternal now, where all is well. After all you are me and I am you. There's no difference. Do not react to the world. Do not even react to your own body. Do not even react to your own thoughts. Learn to become the witness. Learn to be quiet.'
- Robert Adams
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'If I was in a white dress at a wedding and a muddy ball arrived... I would stop it from the chest, without thinking about it.'
- Diego Armando Maradona
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'To travel in silence
By a long and circuitous route.
To brave the arrows of misfortune
And fear neither noose nor fire.
To play the greatest of all games
And win, foregoing no expense.
Is to mock the vicissitudes of fate
And gain at last the key
That will unlock the Ninth Gate.'
By a long and circuitous route.
To brave the arrows of misfortune
And fear neither noose nor fire.
To play the greatest of all games
And win, foregoing no expense.
Is to mock the vicissitudes of fate
And gain at last the key
That will unlock the Ninth Gate.'
- Boris Balkan