Benjamin Wittes Quotes

Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.

In a cult intervention information is presented about the group that the member is most often not aware of.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I had preconceived notions going in and it was even stranger than I thought it would be …. It is a total cult of personality.

I'm not like recruiting people and starting a cult and telling people to be fat.

We explored cults in 'Sound of My Voice.' I think cults have an underlying spiritual quality.

Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.

When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.

Instead of educating students, these professors are trying to indoctrinate them.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

I don't think that anyone should think for you. And that's exactly what cults do. All cults, including Scientology, say, "I am your mind, I am your brain. I've done all the work for you, I've laid the path open for you. All you have to do is turn your mind off and walk down the path I have created.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?

It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Screw the truth into men's minds.

Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

The most effective way to close down the human mind and to manipulate its sense of self is to program into it some form of dogma. A dogma will always vehemently defend itself from other information and repel any alternative opinion which contradicts its narrow, solidified view. Dogmas become a person's sense of security and means of retaining power, and humanity tends to cling to both until its knuckles turn white. Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy.

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.

From now on, we're home schooling you. Whatever we don't know, you don't know. When did the Korean War start? I don't know, and neither do you!

All it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and convince them that reality doesn't exist

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

It's a big culture of mind control too, MK-Ultra mind control rules in Hollywood. If you don't know that, google it and look into it. It's really hard for artists to find their voice in the media. It's levels of brainwashing and mind control.

It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.