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Beautiful German of the week except she’s French.

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A public opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

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Important Terminology

Abilene Paradox
Affect Bias
Asch Conformity Experiment
Availability Heuristic
Capitalism
Cognitive Dissonance
Collective Intelligence
Collective Narcissism
Condition Branding
Conspiracy Theory of Society
Conditioned Reflex
Confirmation Bias
Crowd Psychology
Cultural Identity
Disease Mongering
Fear Marketing (FUD)
Feedback Loop
Goodwin's Law
Group Polarization
Groupthink
Herd Mentality
Historicism
Hypocrisy
Hysteria
Interventionism
Mean World Syndrome
Misery-line
Posthypnotic Suggestion
Probability Blindness
Risk Society
System One Thinking
The Halo Effect
The Lizard Brain
The Open Society
The White Male Effect
Transference

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
- Frederic Bastiat

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H.L. Mencken

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
- Marshall McLuhan

It is like information theory; it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.
- Philip K. Dick

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
- Henry Kissinger

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama — one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological. …The criticism of America has always been a bit infantile. One is familiar with the theory from psychoanalysis, when people talk about transference, or when suppressed feelings or emotions are overcome by projecting them onto others. It may work for a while, improving one’s feeling of self-worth by devaluing an imagined adversary. But it always falls short. Which is why the ritual must be constantly carried out anew.
- Jan Fleischhauer

Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, "cannot operate at room temperature." They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during the 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual "systems" but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality.
- Steven Pinker

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature... The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period.
- William James

A doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self.
- Eric Hoffer

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Les hommes ne croient jamais les autres capables de ce qu' ils ne le sont pas eux-mêmes.

The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of course to be 'one and only' and to be 'infinite'; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its mono-ideistic bent, both 'pass to the limit' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.
- William James

Die Furcht gehört zu den Symptomen unserer Zeit... Tatsächlich hängen wachsender Automatismus und Furcht ganz eng zusammen, und zwar insofern, als der Mensch zugunsten technischer Erleichterungen sich in der Entscheidung beschränkt... Der Einzelne steht nicht mehr in der Gesellschaft wie ein Baum im Walde, sondern er gleicht dem Passagier in einem sich schnell bewegenden Fahrzeug, das "Titanic" oder das Leviathan heißen kann. Solange das Wetter gut ist und die Aussicht angenehm, wird er den Zustand minderer Freiheit kaum gewahren, in dem er geraten ist. Es tritt im Gegenteil ein Optimismus auf, ein Machtbewusstsein, das die Geschwindigkeit erzeugt. Das wird dann anders, wenn feuerspeiende Inseln und Eisberge auftauchen. Dann wechselt nicht nur die Technik vom Komfort auf andere Gebiete über, sondern es wird zugleich der Mangel an Freiheit sichtbar - sei es im Sieg elementarer Kräfte, sei es dadurch, dass Einzelne, die stark geblieben sind, absolute Kommandogewalt ausüben.
- Ernst Jünger

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