Hannah Arendt

 [ 1974, during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera. https://kottke.org/tag/Hannah%20Arendt ]

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen....  If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Cecil Rhodes

[The quote is everywhere, but no citation found]

Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.

[This is what I've always felt about being born in the U.S. I especially remember the first time I visited Mexico as a boy, with my father remarking on the differences we were seeing and the accidents of birth.]

Christina Anne Knight

[From her letter in Free Inquiry, June/July 2021, p. 64]

Religion: a metaphysical system constructed on an architectural framework of superstition and myth, that attempts to explain the nature of reality and the relationship of our species to it, which along with a body of ritual, and a static code of ethical formulation, is perpetuated via cultural transmission, for the psycho-physiological alleviation of existential angst and is epistemologically dependent on magical thinking, delusion, and confirmation bias.

Mark Twain

According to SkepDoc Harriet Hall, Mark Twain "believed bad habits were good because they can be discarded to promote recovery from illness." 

["Mark Twain and Alternative Medicine", Skeptic, 26:2, 2021, p. 6]

Twain "argued that his experience was a testimony in favor of maintaining deleterious personal habits so that they might be discarded later as a form of ballast — but only when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so in order to promote recovery from an illness." 

[https://silo.pub/mark-twain-and-medicine.html]

And here's the full quote:

[Temporarily giving up smoking, coffee, alcohol and more had seemed to cure Twain's stubborn lumbago.] It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady. She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn’t any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal. Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could have acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. It seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with.

["Following the Equator" by Mark Twain]

Timothy Leary

You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

Steve Cuno

[From his column, 'Ignorance, Shmignorance', in Free Inquiry, June-July 2020]

Choruses of ... "Quarantines will ruin the economy, ever think of that?" echo among ... politicians who know more about epidemiology than epidemiologists and who are, apparently, under the impression that dead people go shopping.

William Irwin Thompson

[from The American Replacement of Nature, 1991]

A just war is just war.

William Irwin Thompson

[from The American Replacement of Nature, 1991]

Political Virtual Reality: Not a sanguinal polity (tribe) based on blood, nor a territorial polity (nation) based on land and boundaries, but a planetary noetic polity, as hierarchical as the Church and as technological as modern science, not or representation in a republic, but of fantasy participation in the electronic state.

Timothy Ferris

[from 'The Wrong Stuff' in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section, April 14, 1997]

[The Heaven's Gate mass suicide is] an object lesson in the hazards of living a life innocent of empirical rigor.... [It] might have been averted had just one of the observers declared, "Gee, the evidence fails to support our belief. Maybe the belief is wrong."...

Tens of millions of people have perished at the hands of leaders who were unwilling to alter their presumptions according to objective evidence....

Science ... remains a minority habit of mind... Blind belief rules the millennial universe.

Neal Stephenson

[Said by a character in Stephenson's novel  Fall, or Dodge in Hell]

The ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible ... ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution ... stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.