1087 – “To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”

-James Madison, 4th President of the United States of America

831 – “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

–Hannah Arendt

Support journalism and a free press on World Press Freedom Day!

337 – “[Capitalism is] remarkably resilient and can be traced to a process [called] ‘cheapness.’ … Seven ‘things,’ [which] aren’t physical objects as much as they are a hidden social, ecological and economic infrastructure: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. [Where] cheapness is a process of responding to economic crises by devaluing each of those [structures] so that capitalism can continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the already-wealthy…. Capitalism values cheapness above all else.”

–Chris Winters

He was discussing Jason W Moore and Raj Patel’s book The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with Raj Patel

107 – “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. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. Its simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.”

– Carl Sagan

106 – “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be”

– P C Hodgell [Often misattributed, see note]