Michael

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.”
― Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

“Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem—unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and ani­mals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years