M L Mencken - Michael Crighton - Howard Zinn - Ray Bradbury - Dorothy Day - Aldous Huxley - Terry Goodkind - e e cummings - Friedrich Nietzsche - George Orwell - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Jodi Picoult - David Icke - John Wooden - Jean Piaget - Bell Hooks - Russell Brand - Rollo May - Albert Einstein - Jacob Bronowski - John F Kennedy - H P Lovecraft - William Burroughs - David Icke - Peter Ustinov - Virginia Woolf - Noam Chomsky - John Stuart Mill - Mark Twain - Luis Bunuel - Rupert Cornwell - Irving Wallace - Game of Thrones TV - Jeffrey Dodo Holland - Herodotus - Glenn Greenwald - The Iron Lady 2011 - Dr James Fox: Bright Lights, Brilliants Minds TV - Jim Marrs - Walter Karp - Janeane Garofalo - Tony Blair - Ian Hislop TV -
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. H L Mencken
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. H L Mencken
The real death of America will come when everyone is alike. James T Ellison
What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs’. The reason is that beliefs guide behaviour which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behaviour may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question. Michael Crichton, The Lost World
I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers. Howard Zinn
‘Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.’
‘Oh, they don’t miss me,’ she said. ‘I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.’ She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. ‘Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around ... I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal.' Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system. Dorothy Day
It must be something voluntary, something self-induced – like getting drunk, or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to society. It’s unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you’re supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it’s pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it? Aldous Huxley, Island
There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity – those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price. Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. e e cummings
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche, also attributed to Rudyard Kipling
For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics), he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events, he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. George Orwell
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face. George Orwell
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it’s no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there’s no room for deviation from the norm. It’s important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don’t fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you’ve ever known is being part of the group. Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth
The reason most people don’t express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, it’s what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them. David Icke
When everyone is thinking the same, no-one is thinking. John Wooden
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. Jean Piaget
To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. Bell Hooks
Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory. Russell Brand
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity. Rollo May
Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. John F Kennedy