Quotes

Aside from the quotations I've incorporated into my writing, here are more words of wisdom and perspective from those with more credentials than me:


“I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.” – Richard Feynman

“To understand is to perceive patterns.”- Isaiah Berlin

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin

"Above all, the spirit of science is the spirit of progress... It can afford men ever newer horizons and higher peaks to climb, materially, mentally, and spiritually.  It can afford ever greater and more inspiring opportunities for cooperative as well as individual achievement.  Its pathway leads not only outwards into space and to other worlds than ours, but also inwards into the recesses of life, of the mind, and of the heart.  By its means we will ourselves assume the role of creators of ever lovelier worlds and more sublime beings." - Herman J. Müller

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work; but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“In the worldwide city of the future...a society of total automation, the need to work is replaced by a nomadic life of creative play, a modern return to Eden.  The 'homo ludens' whom man will become once freed from labor will not have to make art, for he can be creative in the practice of his daily life.” - Constant Niewenhuys

“Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it.” - unknown

"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction.  They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible.  2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing.  3- I said it was a good idea all along." - Arthur C. Clarke

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.” – Albert Einstein

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods.” - Aristotle

“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful.” – Ludwig Van Beethoven

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." - Socrates

"Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

“I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” – Douglas Adams

“To the extent that your notions about the world are unreal, you will suffer.” - Jacque Fresco

“Tyranny does not like publicity.” – Salman Rushdie

“The viability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of King George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war.” – Benjamin Franklin

"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe, these bankers were afraid that the United States if they remained as one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence which would upset their financial domination over the world." – Otto Von Bismarck

"Through the Fed the people are losing their rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution ... When the Fed was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here ... a super state controlled by international bankers, and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure." – Louis T. McFadden

"Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, (so) that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank ... To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers." – Milton Friedman

"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

"If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but it is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite." – Gary Allen (journalist, researcher)

“The disaster of the Dark Ages was caused by decreasing money and falling prices… At the Christian era the metallic money of the Roman Empire amounted to $1,800,000,000. By the end of the 15th century it had shrunk to less than $200,000,000… History records no other such disastrous transition as that from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages.” – 1876 US Silver Commission

“The most dangerous form of violence is poverty.” - Gandhi

“War is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are measured in dollars and the losses in lives.” – General S. D. Butler

“The Third World War has already started.  It is a silent war, not for that reason any less sinister... Instead of soldiers dying, there are children.  Instead of millions wounded, there are millions unemployed...  It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon, interest: a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.” – Luiz Inacio da Silva (Brazilian politician)

“War is the supreme failure of nations to bridge their difference in values.” - Jacque Fresco

“Peace cannot be achieved through violence; it can only be attained through understanding.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“9/11 was a false flag operation, intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization.” – David Ray Griffin

“They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as the authority.” – G. Massey

"This is very important to understand. The dominant values of any social system do not come from the people. Rather, they represent the power elite such as the church, the military, the banks, and the corporations. For the most part, they determine the public agenda to serve their own interests, while they perpetuate the illusion that society’s values are determined from the ground up. They do this with such notions as Freedom, Patriotism and Democracy." - Roxanne Meadows

“Nationalism is an infantile disease.  It is the measles of mankind.” – Albert Einstein

"Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious." - Oscar Wilde

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.” – Voltaire

“My country is the world, and to do good is my religion.” – Thomas Paine

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein

“When we go from one culture to another, when Americans go to Sweden or China, they compare China with our system.  They can’t do that; they have to remember that in China people have a different value system, the Arab world has a different value system, and we can’t communicate with each other as long as we believe our values are real rather than environmentally determined.” - Jacque Fresco

“Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics.” – CJ Keyser

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking

"Philosophy is dead." - Stephen Hawking

"Philosophy is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat.  Metaphysics is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.  Theology is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!"  Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat with a flashlight." – unknown

“Concepts such as life and death are mere intellectual constructs.  And any speculative spiritual ideas of an afterlife that takes place in a realm where the rigid mathematical underpinnings of this reality come to an end are equally fabricated.” – Athene’s Theory of Everything

“My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” – Thomas Paine

"The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it." - Robert Swann

“Your god is your ultimate barrier.” – Joseph Campbell

“Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing?  Then whence cometh evil?  Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him god?” - Epicurus

R.B. Fuller was a predecessor of Jacque Fresco, and his quotes are good enough to earn him his own section:

“It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.”

“The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.  This dark ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks.  Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation...We are powerfully imprisoned in these dark ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.”

“Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena.  They are socioeconomic ploys, legally-enacted game playing, agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals, and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.”

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desireable.  Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief...In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.  Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals.  It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.  Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn, leads to war.”

“There's no such thing as race...Racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance, and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”

“Up to the 20th Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear.  Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.  99% of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.”

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

“Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.”

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.   It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.  The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.  We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.  So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.  The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

“The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies.  The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity.  Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions...shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday.  They can lead all humanity into omnisuccesful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.”

“It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, therefore making all the right moves for all the right reasons.”