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The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth. It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
— Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist
We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.
— Henri Frederic Amiel, Swiss philosopher
It is easier to think of the world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Militarism is fetish worship. It is the prostration of men’s souls before, and the laceration of their bodies to appease, an idol. What they do not see is that their reverence for economic activity and industry, and what is called business, is also fetish worship.
— Thorstein Veblen, American social scientist
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.
— Henry Adams
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
— Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President
In comparison with monarchy and other heirlooms from the cannibals and cave-dwellers, democracy is of course a great conquest, but it leaves the blind play of forces in the social relations of men untouched.
Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force — that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent actions.
— Auberon Herbert (1838-1906), British journalist
Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the lowbrow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.
— Lee Loevinger, Federal Communications Commission, 1966.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal
