Quotes about indoctrination
John F. Kennedy -
There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line - no matter how big the lie repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.
A.E. Samaan -
Political scientists and professors are the new clergy the clergy of oppression.
Friedrich A. Hayek -
Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Rami Ollaik -
The Fanatics have dirtied its fiber, and their mottos have reated a thick layer of mold over its wounds, one of total intolerance, feeding on the indoctrination of the youth cliques.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Steve Benson -
To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren't much different from millions of poor, guilt-ridden souls who, throughout the march of human history, have hitched their hopes to mass movements of one sort or another. Eric Hoffer, in his brilliant treatise, "The True Believer," explains the attraction of joining a cause: "A rising mass movement att
David G. McAfee - I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
We are all born free from all religious affiliations and only come to believe in such things after being introduced to it ― so, atheism is the default position. Although some children are not indoctrinated with a specific religion before the age of reason, there are many more who are.
Jeffrey Tayler -
I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Ch
David G. McAfee - I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion... they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with them, and they always do what they do in the name of an unknowable deity... but sometimes, they wake up. Occasionally, they realize that all religions are man-made and that none of them are ‘right.’ And when they do, they can live happy and fulfilling lives without dogma a
Dane Whalen -
Patriotism is the product of successful systematic indoctrination.
Jeffrey Tucker -
Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
Jeffrey Tucker -
The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.
Jeffrey Tucker -
A person who says “every person has a right to a decent education” may not actually mean “people should be robbed to support bad schools” or “all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.
Joaquim Nabuco -
Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.
Lee Doren - Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoid Indoctrination at College
This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe?
Lee Doren - Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoid Indoctrination at College
...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.
Robert Owen -
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.
Haroutioun Bochnakian - The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Are you indoctrinated?Think of anything you believe in be it religious or social, like economic systems or systems of government, etc., and think if you had ALL the information about what you believe in, and ALL the information about all the other/rival systems, and remember if you chose to adopt the one or the other by critical thinking or objective reasoning…No? …
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.
Joseph Devlin - How to Speak and Write Correctly
A child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there.
Abhijit Naskar - 7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All
If you think of your own mother to be the only true mother in the world and thereby start belittling people from other mothers as bastards, that makes you a bigot and a germ on the face of earth. This is an unhealthy bias, even though in your personal mental universe it may provide you extreme comfort. This is exactly what we see in the religious fundamentalists.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
A soldier is a killer painted hero.
Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The nation
Thomm Quackenbush - Artificial Gods
But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter.
Abhijit Naskar - Rowdy Buddha: The First Sapiens
Unlike most other world religions, Buddhism has never been too rigid in its structure.
Karen Lord -
I think if a story has a message it should be incidental and accidental, otherwise it leans too close to indoctrination.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Give a typical employee a million, and, he is most likely to use the money to print his CV on fancier paper.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Information is controlled because the free flow of truth is not always expedient for those wishing to maintain control.
J.E.B. Spredemann -
It’s been said that only the educated are free, but I contend. Only those who are educated with TRUTH can be inherently free. Otherwise, you are simply indoctrinated with error.
Stefan Molyneux -
It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus
Doris Lessing - Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
James Hervey Johnson -
Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.
Alison Miller - Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324
Alison Miller - Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed"
Farah Evers - Origins
Fear mankind most when he fights with a consuming passion for what he perceives to be true." ~ Demo Cratia.
Angelo Codevilla -
Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Chrystine Oksana - Safe Passage to Healing: A Guide for Survivors of Ritual Abuse
…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devas
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Ian McClellan -
I always hear parents talking about how outraged they are because their kid saw a boob or something like that on TV. I never hear anyone say that they're outraged because a cartoon character in a commercial that aired during a children's television program told them it was healthy to eat a bowl of chocolate and marshmallows for breakfast. If I had kids, I'd be outraged about that.
Albert Einstein -
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude t
Robert M. Pirsig -
His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky
George Carlin -
Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
Stefan Molyneux - Against The Gods?
We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.
Stefan Molyneux -
If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.
Stefan Molyneux -
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
Peter Atkins -
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectual
H.P. Lovecraft - Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft
We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexib
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.
Maria Montessori -
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.
Peter Gray -
Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Orlando Figes - The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.
Stefan Molyneux -
Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.
A.S. Neill -
No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness.
John Taylor Gatto -
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
Abhijit Naskar - Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
Be skeptic, be doubtful, be rebellious towards every single dogma of the society. Only then there will be hope of progress for humanity.
Christopher Hitchens - and War: Journeys and Essays
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt;
Hypatia -
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
Abhijit Naskar - Principia Humanitas
I do not hail myself as an atheist, for I am not an atheist. In fact, I have met God, felt God and even lived in God, same as the prophets of human history. But mark you, humanism cannot be compromised because of some doctrines presented as God’s command. In the domain of transcendence, all commands received by the mind, are created by the mind itself. They manifest as divine revelations, but in reality, they are revelations rising from the mind itself. And as such, they have potential to be bot
Abhijit Naskar - Spouse & Thinker
Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.
Abhijit Naskar - Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
Humanism is the purest expression of your soul as a human. It has no God to be concerned with, except for the living Gods, that is the humans. It has no doctrine to abide by, except for the natural doctrine of love and benevolence. That's the religion we need my friend.
Abhijit Naskar - Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
If you want to be drunk, become drunk with an idea. If you want pleasure, have pleasure from the pursuit of your passion. If you want to be indoctrinated, then be so by the natural law of humanism.
Bangambiki Habyarimana - Book of Wisdom
Some beliefs are so strongly held that some believers are ready to lose their heads rather than the belief they carry therein
Abhijit Naskar - The Education Decree
The most sensitive period of their developmental age, when the kids are supposed to be taught to question everything and nourish their reasoning skills, they are taught that God created the world in seven days – that the human race did not evolve from apes through millions of years, rather it came from the amorous congress between two God-made humans, named Adam and Eve. And if you ask why? The answers of the uneducated primordial teachers would be that the scriptures say so. And now if you ask,
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).
Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
Darrel Ray - Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.
Mark Twain - The Autobiography of Mark Twain
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
Herbert M. Shelton - Getting Well
It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.
G.K. Chesterton -
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man
The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
Abhijit Naskar - God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind.
Joss Sheldon - The Little Voice
I learned how to argue. They called it ‘Debate’. I learned how to worship. I learned how to become an eager worker and a passive consumer.But I didn’t learn anything practical, like how to purify water, build a home, start a fire, grow food, or survive without the help of corporations.
Abhijit Naskar - The Krishna Cancer
Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other.
Abhijit Naskar - The Education Decree
Those who preach bookish religion are the greatest atheists of all, because they don’t have the slightest idea of neither God nor religion. Their beloved religion is their book. And their God is in the doctrines.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.
Stefan Molyneux -
History has been stolen from us and replaced with guilt inducing lies.
Jon Stewart -
Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot."[Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]
Angelo Codevilla -
The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Abhijit Naskar - The Education Decree
Excellence doesn’t come by obeying doctrines. Excellence comes through recognizing the flaws in the prevailing doctrines of the society and throwing them away if necessary in the path of progress.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
A specialist’s mind is a slave to his specialization.
Criss Jami -
Much like humans, opinions come in all shapes and forms, but in the end, they are just what they are; and may yet still be categorized in nature. The first you might say is the Indoctrinal, which is, of course, dictated by community and necessity, by the human need for acceptance; secondly, there is the Personal, and this is often dictated by individuality, by the yearning to seem interesting and intelligent, or free, or special; and lastly comes the Emotional. This is most commonly dictated by
Stanley Milgram -
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.