Solvita > Solvita's Quotes

“Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“All who have come to me must have enema each day.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.”
― G. I. Gurdjieff

“What is possible for individual man is impossible for the masses.”
― Gurdjieff

“As long as our ideas are the same, we will never be apart.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
― Noam Chomsky

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”
― Noam Chomsky

“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines that everybody else is saying,... [o]r else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.”
― Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind

“It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence”
― Noam Chomsky

“The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.”
― Noam Chomsky

“That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”
― Noam Chomsky

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
― Noam Chomsky

“Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”
― Noam Chomsky

“Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”
― Noam Chomsky

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”
― Noam Chomsky