dejah_thoris

“Whoever enters into opposition against a dictatorship must accept civil war as a means. Whoever shies away from civil war must abandon opposition and accept the dictatorship.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Thamus, as Socrates told the tale, saw a threat to the very nature of philosophical discourse. Here is what the Egyptian king supposedly told the clever god: Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a recipe for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality. They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”
― Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World – The Remarkable Final Trilogy on Bibliophiles from the Leading Authority

“Wherever collective memory based on selective use of the past holds sway, everyone thinks alike. When everyone thinks alike, no one thinks at all. A society where no one thinks at all is little more than a frenetic and debauched, if picturesque, village bazaar.”
― Aleš Debeljak

“Too many men and governments the life of the human mind is a danger to be feared more than any other danger, and the Word which cannot be purchased, cannot be falsified, and cannot be killed is the enemy most hunted for and hated. It is not necessary to speak of the burning of the books in Germany, or of the victorious lie in Spain, or of the terror of the creative spirit in Russia, or of the hunting and hounding of those in this country who insist that certain truths be told and who will not be silent. These things are commonplace. They are commonplace to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the Word no longer shock us into anger.”
― Felix Frankfurter, Their Correspondence, 1928-45