Sunday, July 21, 2019 – Paranoia Nation
“Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep / It starts when you’re always afraid / You step out of line, the man come and take you away…” ~ Stephen Stills, For What It Is Worth
As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats. ~ David Horsey
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors. ~ William Ralph Inge
Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? ~ Henry Miller
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ~ Thomas Pynchon
There’s a deep-seated paranoia that Americans have about not being Americans or something. ~ Billy Joel
I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire. ~ Howard Hughes
Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant. It tends to get worse. ~ Molly Ivins
There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts. ~ William S. Burroughs
My paranoia wasn’t always right, but just to be on the safe side, I never went to sleep with a clown in the room. ~ Mark Henwick
Fear of Vikings builds castles. ~ Charles Manson
The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios – the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preemptive paranoia. ~ Adam Gopnik
We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It’s not much, but it’s always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid. ~ Philip K. Dick
Even a paranoid can have enemies. ~ Henry Kissinger
This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you’ve got it when you can’t think of anything that’s your fault. ~ Robert M. Hutchins
Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face. ~ Jim Butcher, Storm Front
One cannot properly appreciate the human realities so long as one labors under the adolescent delusion that people get the fates they deserve. ~ Nicholas Rescher
The utter absence of proof for a proposition is proof of a successful conspiracy to destroy all proof. ~ George F. Will
The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary. ~ David Ignatius
Just because they really are out to get you doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid. ~ Steven Brust
The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia is to keep careful track of your persecutors. ~ Tyrone Hayes
People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most. ~ Shannon L. Alder
Paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right: you can never have too much. ~ Thomas Pynchon
America is in a state of somnolence. It’s an avoidance of paranoia through ignoring reality. ~ John McAfee
African-Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us. ~ Cynthia McKinney
Among the Internet’s many gains for humanity, decreasing paranoia has not been one of them. Anything from that lump under your armpit to what’s lurking in the sea, just type it into a search engine and watch your nerves explode. ~ John Niven
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. ~ Andy Grove
I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. ~ J. D. Salinger
Guerrilla leaders win wars by being paranoid and ruthless. Once they take power, they are expected to abandon those qualities and embrace opposite ones: tolerance, compromise and humility. Almost none manages to do so. ~ Stephen Kinzer
Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion. ~ Jim Rohn
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. ~ Saul Bellow
On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact. ~ Gore Vidal, Julian
If one has not influence to stem the torrent of popular delusion he is reduced to the melancholy part of a spectator in the midst of the ruin. ~ James L. Petigru
Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth. ~ Ludwig Borne
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ~ Carl Sagan
However we may labour for our own deception, truth, though unwelcome, will sometimes intrude upon the mind. ~ Samuel Johnson, Idler #80 (October 27, 1759)
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ~ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. ~ Jonathan Swift
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? ~ Sam Harris
When enough people understand reality, tyrants can literally be ignored out of existence. They can’t ever be voted out of existence. ~ Larken Rose
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them. ~ Rose Macaulay
Just Above Sunset 