Charles Hugh Smith famous quotes

Once a citizen receives a direct payment from the state, the state has purchased their complicity
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Citizens #States #Payment

Reality, unlike perception, cannot be changed by propaganda.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Reality #Perception #Propaganda

The human mind has a superglue-like quality: Once a viewpoint has been plucked from the swirling chaos of beliefs and explanations, then the mind quickly solidifies that view, resisting any future modification.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Views #Mind #Quality

So now that the illusion of infinite growth is being exposed, the corresponding ballooning entitlements that enticed the larger public to become complicit in the illusion are becoming unglued.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Growth #Becoming #Infinite

The notion that better engineering can solve all our problems is rooted in an ignorance of non-linear systems and selective/wishful thinking.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Ignorance #Thinking #Engineering

One of the dirty little secrets of the stock market rally is that the rising corporate profits that powered it are largely phantom profits. They are artifacts of currency devaluation, not an increase in efficiency or production of goods and services.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Dirty #Secret #Rising

Would we as a nation be better off dealing with the truth rather than believing fantasies that prop up the Status Quo and the Fed's dearly beloved measure of the economy, the stock market? How often does accepting illusion help us navigate real life? Short answer: never.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Real #Short Life #Believe

Humans are wired to feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and contingency, and so we gravitate to a position after a short time even if we have no new information.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Information #Uncomfortable #Feels

The problems of the global economy are not based in perception, but in the reality of prices, balance sheets and income statements, vast concentrations of wealth and power, precarious systemic imbalances, ruthless exploitation, and command economies mismanaged by Central State/Bank policy and manipulation.
-- Charles Hugh Smith

#Reality #Concentration Of Wealth #Perception

Citizens who take it upon themselves to do unusual actions which attract the attention of the police should be careful to bring these actions into one of the recognized categories of crimes and offences, for it is intolerable that the police should be put to the pains of inventing reasons for finding them undesirable.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

[W]e must extend the authority of the Union to the persons of the citizens - the only proper objects of government.

Effective resistance to usurpers is possible only provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.

Being a Scotsman, I am naturally opposed to water in its undiluted state.

My manager has a car payment, so I work every night.