“I'm really creating abstract shapes and relationships that work together. They come together and give the illusion of reality, but they're really abstract shapes. If you look at individual shapes, they aren't the shape of anything, but together they give you the illusion of hills and sun and flowers.” IfsGivingLooksRealityTogetherIndividualSunFlowerShapesCreatingIllusionHillsAbstractWorking Together Author:John Newman
“Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.” StatesGovernmentIndividualExerciseAuthorityIllusionVotePressureMajorityOrganizedMinoritiesVotersRegulationEvidentBureaucracyFragmentsCompulsionComprehensiveSusceptible Author:Walter Lippmann
“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.” IfsWorldGivingMeanSeemsValuesIndividualInterestIllusionBackgroundsSecurePreservesStreamsCosmosMeaninglessArtificialArbitraryEnglishmen Author:H. P. Lovecraft
“It is the shared bad faith by which individuals help each other sustain the illusion that they can shirk their spiritual destiny by joining the public.” HelpingSpiritualIndividualDestinyIllusionJoiningHelping Each OtherShirk Book:Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society Source: Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society
“Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.” ChildrenWisdomLightFormUsedPoliticsIndividualSocialInterestCommonClassEconomyShareCryParticularIllusionInstrumentsPropertyMiseryLiberalismDelusionCreedsOptimistMarxismSnares Author:Reinhold Niebuhr
“It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the "struggle" of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force.” StatesWould BeLawIndividualForcePowerfulStruggleGroupsSubjectsMaterialsIllusionDecidedCompetitionInternationalSuperiorsOrganizedContestsNegotiationTransfersRivalryRaw MaterialsFrictionRecourseRoad To Serfdom Author:Friedrich August von Hayek