This quote pretty much exemplifies what people within most of society now subscribe to. So many people don’t give a crap anymore. They stand down, glued to a cell phone, lost within an existence. Emptying their soul with irrelevant things, fearing substance and truth.
Most people don’t live with purpose anymore, they reject anything which requires effort, character and virtue. They stand for nothing but cliches, lies and the massaging of their own ego.
God help those who have been bullied into submission, afraid to act, whose very speech and thoughts have been stifled and lost forever within a black hole. A dystopian society which now exists only to promote a cult-like behavior of group “thought.”
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"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
-Ronald Reagan-
“These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
-Thomas Paine-
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke-
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” He also said “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
-Oscar Wilde-
"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?"
-Ayn Rand-
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
-John Wayne-
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-Thomas Jefferson-
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.' " -St. Anthony the Great-
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -Voltaire-
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” -Lord Acton-
“A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.”
-Booker T. Washington-
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
-George Orwell-
"The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” -St. Augustine-
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
-Helen Keller-
"For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?" -Jesus Christ-
"Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul." -Democritus-
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin-
"I may disagree with you, but I defend to the death your right to say it.”
-Beatrice Evelyn Hall- (often attributed to Voltaire)
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”-Ayn Rand-
"If you have to be persuaded, reminded, pressured, lied to, incentivized, coerced, bullied, socially shamed, guilt-tripped, threatened, punished and criminalized … If all of this is considered necessary to gain your compliance — you can be absolutely certain that what is being promoted is not in your best interest.”
– Ian Watson-
“The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
-John Stuart Mill-
"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." -Aristotle-
"What an irony that a society confronted with plastic bags filled with the remains of aborted babies should be more concerned about the problem of recycling the plastic" -Winifred Egan-
"There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." -Montesquieu-
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -C.S. Lewis-
“The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state.” -Ayn Rand-
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." -Margaret Thatcher-
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.” -George Orwell-
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
-George Orwell-
"Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they've spent their lives following other people's demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?”
-Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical-
“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
-Thomas Edison-
"People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." -Aldous Huxley-
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” -Aldous Huxley-
“Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we also dream.” -Ronald Reagan-
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” -Ronald Reagan-
“When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” – Abraham Lincoln-
"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
-John Adams-
“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
-Ronald Reagan-
"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."
-William F. Buckley-
“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
-Winston Churchill-
‘IF LIBERTY MEANS ANYTHING AT ALL, IT MEANS THE RIGHT TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT TO HEAR’
-ALEXANDER BUTCHER- (often attributed to George Orwell)
Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.” -St. Thomas Aquinas-
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”-Winston S. Churchill-
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
"Evil which is never held accountable thrives. The people who ignore such evil and who don't hold the evil people accountable for their crimes become part of the evil." -therighttothink50-
