SimplyNeo Quotes

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that — it’s astonishing. These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There’s been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments.”

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

How do I define God? I don’t…. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don’t. That’s why you haven’t found my “thoughts on this [for you] critical question.” I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the — often extremely interesting and revealing — inquiry into human culture an history).

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.