Date Night at the Track
"Bread and circuses” has come to be a derogatory phrase that can criticize either government policies to pacify the citizenry, or the shallow, decadent desires of that same citizenry. In both cases, it refers to low-cost, low-quality, high-availability food and entertainment that have become the sole concern of the People, to the exclusion of matters that the speaker considers more important: e.g. the Arts, public works projects, human rights, or democracy itself. The phrase is commonly used to refer to short-term government palliatives offered in place of a solution for significant, long-term problems.
~ Wikipedia
"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
George Orwell, "1984"
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
George Orwell
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
Mark Twain
"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office."
Ambrose Bierce
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