None But Ourselves (Can Free Our Minds)

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
-Voltaire

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.” 
― Shannon L. Alder

“Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.” 
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal…. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power….And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.”
– Walter Cronkite

“Who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past.”
– George Orwell

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
– Malcolm X

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

-Germaine Greer

"We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country…. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. MORE IS GOOD. MORE IS GOOD. We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore."
-Morrie Schwartz

"Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot."
- Robert Anton Wilson

"The line between education and brainwashing is paper thin"
-Yana Toboso

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 serve as willing or unwitting instruments.

-Noam Chomsky

We have been brainwashed into craving a diet that is killing us. What we believe tastes good is generally what we have been socially conditioned to enjoy.
-Jane Velez-Mitchell

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."
-Arundhati Roy

"We need to make some dramatic, concrete moves to escape the materialism that seeps into our minds via diabolically clever and incessant advertising. We have been brainwashed to believe that bigger houses, more prosperous businesses, and more sophisticated gadgets are the way to joy and fulfillment. As a result, we are caught in an absurd, materialistic spiral. The more we make, the more we think we need in order to live decently and respectably. Somehow we have to break this cycle because it makes us sin against our needy brothers and sisters and, therefore, against our Lord. And it also destroys us. Sharing with others is the way to real joy."
- Ronald J. Sider