Rachel Abel

“It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones - a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ... is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics ... we were deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”
― Max Weber

“When a population loses any sense of a shared story—when each segment of a population believes that only its own perceptions are valid—then that population can become ungovernable.”
― Andrew G. McCabe, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

“People do not knowingly join “cults” that will ultimately destroy and kill them. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is mostly the innocent and naive who find themselves entrapped. In their openhearted endeavor to find meaning in their lives, they walk blindly into the promise of ultimate answers and a higher purpose. It is usually only gradually that a group turns into or reveals itself as a cult, becomes malignant, but by then it is often too late.”
― Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple

“I know there are some “decent” Republicans who are inwardly cringing at what their party has become. But the key word is “inwardly”: few Republican officeholders or media personalities are willing to oppose Trumpism publicly because to do so would likely be ruinous to them personally. So these invertebrates become accomplices to misdoing on a scale that would have revolted the Founding Fathers. For the time being, I echo the thirteenth-century French abbot who, when asked by Crusaders how to tell devout Catholics from apostates, reportedly advised them to kill them all and let God sort them out.”
― Max Boot, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right