societal delusions Quotes

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

Sex and children are the two things that delude logic the most in this society.

Nothing goes on forever. I think that's one of the illusions of life. When I talk about my life being an extension of my dreams and fantasies, there's a tendency to think of them as immature. I live in a mature world. The majority of the people in this society live with delusions and illusions much more irrational and hurtful than mine. They deal with mortality, with fantasies relating to heaven and hell, and they don't really deal with their problems at all.

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

One of society's absurd delusions is that the spending of money can cure something.

America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the "broad, sun-lit uplands."

I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.