Patrice

“Gingrich’s goal was to tar the Democrats as the party of corruption. In 1984, one of his advisers wrote a strategy memo saying that Gingrich and his allies should view themselves as the Viet Cong fighting the South Vietnamese government (the Democrats) while accepting support from the North Vietnamese (the Republican establishment). Both, he stated, were the “enemies.” The Democrats, he noted, “we must destroy” and the Republicans “we must take advantage of, lie to, sidetrack, confound, and possess by recruitment and propaganda.” The goal was to cast Democrats as “the oppressor,” a tyrannical enemy warranting the utmost despisal. This memo, as Gingrich’s biographer Julian Zelizer later said, was his “road map.” When”
― David Corn, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy

“But Jesus had to speak through a public-address system—the only one available—which distorted his words, so that they came forth as the bombastic claim to be the one and only appearance of the Christ, of the incarnation of God as man. This is not good news. The good news is that if Jesus could realize his identity with God, you can also—but this God does not have to be idolized as an imperious monarch with a royal court of angels and ministers. God, as “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” is something much more inward, intimate, and mysterious—in the sense of being too close to be seen as an object.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action,reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism,into an alienated and alienating "blah". It becomes an empty word that cant denounce the world.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed