False Consciousness pt.2, 2006.

“The problem of obedience, therefore, is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when men were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor among men, things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and vary special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own action.”
-Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974, page 11.

“We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.”
-Daniel Boorstin

"They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness."
-John Milton, 1642

“To deny the possibility of false consciousness is to assume there has been no indoctrination, no socialization… no control of information and commentary, no limitation of the topics to be considered in the national debate, no predetermination of issue agendas, and that a whole array of powers have not helped prestructure how we see and define our own interests and options.”
-Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, 1996, page 210.

“You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
-George W. Bush, 'joking' at a Gridiron Club dinner, Washington, D.C., March 2001.

"All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
-George Orwell, 1984, 1949, page 74.

“...there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, `and this will always be the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology... Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals.”
-Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., The Goebbels Diaries, 1977, page xx.

"To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.’’
-William Blase

"People avoid the truth because the first bit of truth uttered and lived would draw more truth into action and so on indefinitely, and this would rip most people right off the customary tracks of their lives. But people, basically, know what is true and what is not, even if they so often render help to the lie. They support the lie because the lie has become a crutch without which life would not be possible. Therefore, in common human intercourse, the truth, and not the lie, is suspected as being phony."
-Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ, 1953.

"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."
-Martin Luther King,  Strength to Love, 1963, page 14.