“Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. Common parlance alludes to this weakness in the frequently heard phrase: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK.”

“Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State."”

“He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”

“[H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. […] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. […] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

“When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.”

“I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts… And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else.”

“Be careful of your word, even in keeping the most trifling appointment. But do not blame another for a failure of that kind till you have heard his excuse.”

“When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.”

“Other people, and it doesn't matter if they are Scandinavians or Celts,
Think that anything is better than theirs just because it belongs to somebody else.”