Rome Didn't Fall in a Day

I've flown among the clouds and looked down upon primordial mountain ranges, dense with pine, etched with cul-de-sacs of development.

Propaganda

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing ... the dozens … of brands … which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda….

There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.
- 38

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[T]oday, because ideas can be instantaneously transmited to any distance and to any number of people … geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping so that persons having the same ideas and intersts may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.

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[G]overnment is government only by virtue of public acquiescence.

-64

Innocence

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is askew. The mirror is not an instrument of enlightenment but of illusion....

What the body creates is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself. The spider's web. Coral. The beaver's dam. If the essence of life is the information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems....