Eric > Eric's Quotes

“What we’ve discussed is how the darkest forces never give up. The French Revolution, the Soviet one, all the others, appear first as a liberating struggle. But they soon morph into military dictatorship. The early heroes look like idiots, the thugs show their true faces, and the cycle (which isn’t what revolution means) is complete.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“Modern culture is an inverse panopticon. Not a drunk father, but a vigilant mother. The masses elect a single person to the hot seat for their five minutes of fame. We, the periphery, are the judges and jury. Because we’re separated (like prisoners, we can’t connect to each other through these impossible walls), we’ve no option but to connect via the sacrificial lamb we’ve placed dead center. Even when we privately dispute the censure or praise we heap upon them, publicly, we echo popular sentiment. To avoid loneliness, we become a single, unthinking mass. And yet, the mother and father both reveal their very limited ability to connect. The proverbial child cannot attach. We participate in this mass identity, but it does not serve us. Our language is reduced to a series of agreed-upon signs reflecting not nuance, but binaries: like/dislike; good/bad; yes/no. We are even more lonely for the failure of it…”
― Sarah Langan, Good Neighbors

“As Harry Truman used to say: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
― Adam Gorightly, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius

“there is nothing worse than an opponent who is suddenly revealed to be understanding and compassionate.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere

“Our thesis is simply this: left–right ideologies are bundles of unrelated political positions connected by nothing other than a group. A conservative or liberal is not someone who has a conservative or liberal philosophy, but someone who belongs to the conservative or liberal tribe. This means that ideologies do not define tribes, tribes define ideologies; ideology is not about what (worldviews), it is about who (groups); there is no liberalism or conservatism, only liberals and conservatives; and the political spectrum does not model an essential value, but only tribes and what they stand for at a specific time and place.8 Ultimately,”
― Verlan Lewis, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America