« Another way to paralyze the ability to exercise critical thinking is the destruction of any kind of structuralized representation of the world. Facts lose their specific quality that they can only have as part of a structuralized whole and have only a fragmentary and quantitative meaning; every fact is just one more fact and the only thing that matters is whether we know more or less. »

« Even when the king is naked, the people believe that he is wearing beautiful clothes. »

« With regard to all the fundamental issues of individual and social life, psychological, economic, political and moral problems, a broad sector of our culture has only one function: to confuse issues. One of the types of smokescreens used is the assertion that problems are too complicated for the average person to grasp. On the contrary, it would seem that many of the basic questions of individual and social life are very simple, so simple in reality, that one would expect everyone to understand them. Making them seem so complicated that only a "specialist" is able to truly understand them—and again, in his own limited field and often intentionally—tends to deter believing in his own ability to think about the problems that really matter. The individual feels helpless, caught in a chaotic mass of data and, with pathetic patience, waits for the specialists to find what to do and where to go. The result of this type of influence is twofold: the first is skepticism and cynicism towards everything that is said or printed, the second is an infant belief in all that is said with authority. This combination of cynicism and naivety is quite typical of the modern individual. Its main consequence is to discourage him from forming his own opinion and making his own decisions. »