Your mind is programmable – if you’re not programming your mind, someone else will program it for you.
Jeremy Hammond
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a terrible mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
Epictetus
We’ve created a culture that fetishizes the new(s), and we forget the wealth of human knowledge, wisdom, and transcendence that lives in the annals of what we call “history” – art, literature, philosophy, and so many things that are both timeless and incredibly timely.
Our presentism bias – anchored in the belief that if it isn’t at the top of Google, it doesn’t matter, and if it isn’t Googleable at all, it doesn’t exist – perpetuates our arrogance that no one has ever grappled with the issues we’re grappling with, which of course is tragically untrue.
Maria Popova
If you are an approval addict, your behavior is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game.
Harriet B. Braiker, Who's Pulling Your Strings?
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world is the world’s slave from then on.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been deceived long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the deception. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The deception has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness