“"Religion is the opiate of the masses.""I did masses of opiates religiously.”
Carrie Fisher book Postcards from the Edge
Source: Postcards from the Edge
“"Religion is the opiate of the masses.""I did masses of opiates religiously.”
Carrie Fisher book Postcards from the Edge
Source: Postcards from the Edge
“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.”
Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States
"The Muscular Opiate," The New York Times (1967-10-03)
“Marx was wrong--religion is not the opiate of the masses, baseball is.”
Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) Atheist activist
Quoted without citation by Nathaniel J. Ehrlich, Psychology and contemporary affairs, p. 78 (1972)
Attributed
Thomas Mann book Deutsche Ansprache
On German fascism, in "An Appeal to Reason" ["Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft"] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (1942), p. 57
Context: This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist
Source: Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995: An Exhibition Catalogue
“If religion was the opium of the masses, then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses.”
Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ <br class="br">Biblical Lectures
Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist
Interview with Oriana Fallaci (2 December 1979), Corriere della Sera
Interviews
Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician
"Peace as a Civil Right" from A Prayer for America (2003) [Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-510-2], p. 76
Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic
Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 12
Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.