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“The economically uneducated tend to view wealth as a zero sum game by which one can only be wealthy from taking from someone else's and one is poor since someone took theirs'. Thus, it follows that the richer region in the world, Europe is rich since it exploited the poorest, Africa. They fail to understand that immense poverty is the natural state of man. In reality, Europe is rich and Africa is not since geographic and historical factors incentivized Europe to create institutions that created wealth, which never occured in Africa. Africa and Europe are rich and poor for reasons that have little to do with the other.”
― Anonymous

“What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good, mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History indeed did, at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking loose, overthrowing.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. [...] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”
― Yuri Bezmenov