The Sixth Estate: 2007-06-17

Monday, June 18, 2007

Proto-Fascism + Skull and Bones: A Preppy KKK

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Bush Told Biographer Went AWOL and Planned to Invade Iraq if [s]Elected

Bush Told Biographer He Went AWOL in Alabama and Planned to Invade Iraq (If "Elected" or "Selected")

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Bush Told Biographer He Went AWOL in Alabama - and Planned to Invade IraqBy Bob FertikCreated 2004-10-28 11:16

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Investigative reporter Russ Baker has written a bombshell!

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It turns out George W. Bush was a little too honest with his campaign biographer - so Karen Hughes fired him and rewrote the book herself.

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What did Hughes leave on the cutting room floor? Plenty!

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While the headline - Bush's 1999 plan to invade Iraq - is something every American should learn, there is much more here. In fact, this article may contain more revelations about Bush's shocking plans for his Presidency than anything yet written.

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Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:59:47 -0700By Russ Baker

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Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer.

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Houston: Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

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Of course, this contradicts Bush's Big Lie that his decision to invade Iraq was the result of 9-11. (Of course, there was never any connection between 9-11 and Iraq, but Bush and Cheney adamantly refuse to admit it.)

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"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

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Hold on - this short paragraph contains a road map to the entire Bush presidency!

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1. Way back in 1999, Bush wanted to be "seen as a great leader." What the f***? At that point in his life, his only accomplishment was being elected Governor of Texas, which is arguably the weakest governor's office in the nation. He had failed as a Guardsman, as a businessman, and even as General Manager of the Texas Rangers, trading away Sammy Sosa. So where did he suddenly get the delusion he could be a "great leader"? Did he have a conversation with God - or with the bottle? Or was he on a personal quest to succeed where his father had failed: in rising to the level of a "great leader"?

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2. Way back in 1999, Bush realized the best way to be "seen as a great leader" was "to be seen as a commander-in-chief." In other words, long before he was even the Republican nominee, Bush lusted for a war - so he could be "seen as a commander-in-chief." Bush didn't care for a minute about the reality of war - namely the death, devastation, and cost - all he cared about was the glory that would shine upon the commander-in-chief. It is essential to contrast this with Bush's empty statements about how difficult it was for him to send troops into battle and to console the families of those who died following his orders. Someone needs to ask the families of the soldiers who died how they feel about Bush's scheme to start a war for his personal glory!

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3. Bush wanted a war, but where? The country that immediately came to Bush's mind was Iraq. This is confirmed further down by the Boston Globe's David Nyhan, who reported in December 1999 on Bush's "offhand declaration of war" at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.

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4. Bush was obsessed with his father's failed presidency. "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it." That's a pretty harsh judgment - although it's not clear whether that's a judgment about his father as a person or as a politician.

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5. Bush was determined to succeed where his father failed. "If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."

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6. Bush's dream was greater than personal glory - he wanted to enact his political agenda. "I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." The only thing left unstated is what he "want[ed] to get passed" in Congress - but we've since learned what that was: tax cuts for the rich, plus contract and regulatory giveaways to big corporations.

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Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow.

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We're now in the realm of psychology. Does W have a serious problem with his father - one that subconsciously governs his decisions on crucial issues of national policy? We'll leave this to Dr. Justin Frank - or Maureen Dowd.

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The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

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That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work – and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war – has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

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O'Neill's recollections received media coverage for about one day-until Karl Rove counterattacked. When he was interviewed by 60 Minutes, O'Neill said he had nothing to fear because he was telling the truth. But O'Neill soon learned the truth wasn't enough! He soon found himself being threatened in various ways, and quickly backed off from the more shocking revelations in the book about him, "The Price of Loyalty." Interestingly, the relatively low-profile author of that book was Ron Suskind, who made headlines last week with his eye-opening article in the New York Times Magazine about Bush's blind "faith."

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However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush's unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters – well before he became president.

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In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House," and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

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LoL! We know what that means - the book dared to resemble the truth, which is the only reason anyone hired by the Bush family ever gets fired.

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According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.

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The revelations on Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.

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Herskowitz also revealed the following:

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--In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.-Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."

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--Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.

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--Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.

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Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews-in which he expressed consternation that Bush's true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people -Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.

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Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. "I don't know anybody that's ever said a bad word about Mickey," said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz's account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.

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One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. "I can't go near this," he said.

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-According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

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Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

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Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents – Grenada and Panama – and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

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"I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has. 'It's very disturbing that GWB would not discuss Iraq with his father, who had a lifetime's worth of experience in foreign policy - including intensive experience with Saddam Hussein during Gulf War I. As Bob Woodward discovered, GWB's problem with seeking advice from his father is profound:

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Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’" (CBS 60 Minutes, 4-18-04)

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Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

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Herskowitz's revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush's pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. 'I'd take 'em out,' [Bush] grinned cavalierly, 'take out the weapons of mass destruction…I'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s father…It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker. "

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The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties. In addition, in recent days, high-ranking US military officials have complained that the White House did not provide them with adequate resources for the task at hand.

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Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush's father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)

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In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush's staff expressed displeasure -often over Herskowitz's use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush's own words to describe the Texan's unprofitable business ventures, writing: "the companies were floundering". "I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, 'You've got some wrong information.' I didn't bother to say, 'Well you know where it came from.' [The lawyer] said, 'We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.' "

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In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "

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"They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it," he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.

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According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard – and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was "excused." This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush's claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama – though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial "rewards" for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.

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Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 – which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane – military or civilian – again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.

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In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush's father to write a book about the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. "Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his office…He said, 'I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.' "

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"He said to me, 'I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it's amazing how many times something good will come out of it.' I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush senior], 'Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?' He said yes."

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That book, Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush, was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family's perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. "I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying 'Watch your back.' "

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Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing – a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself – it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.

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So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush's true feelings.

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"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader."

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Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

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Russ Baker is an award-winning independent journalist who has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Washington Post, The Telegraph (UK), Sydney Morning-Herald, and Der Spiegel, among many others.

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-Source URL:http://www.democrats.com/node/35

Quotations for all Times

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”

–Malcolm X
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Ratking '...A ratking is something that happens when too many rats have to livein too small a space under too much pressure. Their tails become entwined and themore they strain and stretch to free themselves the tighter grows the knot binding them, until at last it becomes a solid mass of embedded tissue. And the creature thus formed, as many as thirty rats tied together by the tail, is called a ratking.You wouldn't expect such a living contradiction to survive would you? That's the most amazing thing of all. Most of the ratkings that are discovered, in the plaster of old houses or beneath the floorboards of a barn, are healthy and flourishing. Evidently the creatures have evolved some way of coming to terms with the situation. That's not to say they like it! In fact the reason their discovered is because of their diabolical squealing. Not much fun, being chained to each other for life. How much sweeter it would be to run free! Nevertheless, they do survive, somehow. The wonders of nature, eh?' (Michael Dibdin, Ratking 1989)
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"Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectives which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all power in his own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a political organization which would seek power exclusively through constitutional means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his henchmen Karl Ludeke, while still in prison: 'When I resume active work it will be necessaary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow...Sooner or later we shall have the majority--and after that Germany.' On his release from Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the NaziParty would henceforth act within the framework of the constitution. But he allowed himself to be carried away with the enthusiasm of the crowd in his appearance at the Buergerbraukeller on February 27. His threats against the State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime, as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was 'the enemy'. And in his peroration he had shouted: 'To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!' " ("The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, 30th Anniversary Edition, Fawcett-Cress Publishers, N.Y.1992, pp 169-170)
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"We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a governmentby the wealthy." : Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
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"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyrannyof mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy" : John Pierpont Morgan
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"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." : Thomas Jefferson
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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." : Abraham Lincoln
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"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.": Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." : Benito Mussolini
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Q. "Mr. President, have you approved of covert activity to destablise the present government of Nicaragua?" A. "Well, no, we're supporting them, the - oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador, because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just - I will not comment.": Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13th 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in 'Heroes'
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'The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace: James Madison
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"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.": John Flynn, 1944
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"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent and labour power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen. There is none that disperses its control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.": Howard Zinn, from A People's History of the United States,first published 1981
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"...we are all capable to believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." (George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose")
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"In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."(George Orwell)
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"You will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck."(Dan Rather on why he couldn't ask tough questions)
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"You can crush a man with journalism" (William Randolph Hearst)
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"Did we shoot it down or did it crash?" (George W. Bush, Sept 11, 2001)
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"We did not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem." (Mark Twain, "An Anti-Imperialist",N.Y. Herald, 1900)
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"The AVIP (Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program) raises an ominous question: Who protects the force from ill-conceived force protection?" (U.S. Cong. Comm.on Gov't Reform, 2000)
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"With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy's best friend." (Bill Moyers, Keynote Address, Nat. Conf. on Media Reform)
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"Evil is no faceless stranger,
living in a distant neighborhood.
Evil has a wholesome, hometown face,
with merry eyes and an open smile.
Evil walks among us, wearing a mask
which looks like all our faces."
(The Book of Counted Sorrows)
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"Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilent and consistent." (Samuel Johnson)
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"Tell the truth and run." (Yugoslav Proverb)
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Arturo Ui, referring to Adolf Hitler:
Let none of us exult too soon,
The womb is fruitful
From which this one crawled...
(Bertolt Brecht, "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui")
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"Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme brutality the nucleus of our new movement." (Adolf Hitler, Speech to Nuremberg Congress, Sept. 3,1933
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"As long as the economic system provides an acceptable degree of security, growing material wealth and opportunity for further increase of the next generation, the average American does not ask who is running things or what goals are being pursued." (Daniel Fusfeld, "The Corporate State in America", in Journal of Economic Issues, March, 1972)
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"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.": Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi - (1828-1910) Russian writer
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"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.": Plato - (429-347 BC) - Source: The Republic
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"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.": Herbert Hoover - (1874-1964), 31st US President
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"What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.": Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - (1770-1831) German philosopher
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"We are the ruling race of the world. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . He has marked us as his chosen people. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples." : Sen. Alfred Beveridge
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"I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it." : Sen. Orville Platt of Connecticut 1894.
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"Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times," Washington has intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times."
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"If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job - yours and mine -- to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might." -- Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950
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The quotes above are from the book, "Addicted To War" "http://www.addictedtowar.com/"
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And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace: George Bernard Shaw - Irish playwright "Caesar and Cleopatra"
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"But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922- ) Author
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The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder. ~Henry C. Wright, The Liberator, 7 April 1837
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"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.": John Morley - (1838-1923) - Source: Critical Miscellanies
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As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand: -Josh Billings
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Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.: Groucho Marx: American comedian, actor and singer, 1890-1977
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In war, there are no unwounded soldiers: Jose Narosky
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If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks: Frederick The Great
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">The victor will never be asked if he told the truth: Adolf Hitler
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To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business: Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy : Russian author, 1828-1910
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Half a truth is often a great lie: Benjamin Franklin
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"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.": Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister
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"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary.": George Orwell in the book 1984
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Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter: Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social philosopher, 1900-1980
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Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong: James Bryce
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Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may: Mark Twain
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A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle: George William Curtis
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It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars: Arthur C. Clarke
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"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem.": Howard Zinn, from 'Failure to Quit'
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"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling instruments." Noam Chomsky
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"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority" Stanley Milgram, 1965
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Stanley Milgram was a psychologist who performed a series of experiments that proved conclusively that obedience to authority was so ingrained in the average US citizen they were prepared to cause lethal harm to others when instructed by authority figures to do so. All those who took part were first asked if they would be capable of killing or inflicting severe pain on their fellow human beings. 100% replied categorically 'no'.
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"I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance ... and one night late it came to me this way. We could not leave (the Philippines) to themselves--they were unfit for self-government--and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was. .. There was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them.": President William McKinley
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Our men . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.": Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines
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American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians: Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
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What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose: Thomas Jefferson
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I thank God that at this hour I am dangerous to the war profiteers of this country who rob the people on the one hand, and rob and debase the government on the other; and then with their pockets and wallets stuffed with the filthy, bloodstained profits of war, wrap the sacred folds of the Stars and Stripes about them and [about] their blatant hypocrisy to the world.
(Kate Richards O'Hare's Address To the Court Proceedings on the Sentencing of Mrs. Kate Richards O'Hare by Hon Martin J. Wade, 1 P. M., Friday, Dec 14, 1917.
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When people who are honestly mistaken learn the truth, they will either cease being mistaken, or cease being honest! : Anonymous
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"I would rather have free a press and no government, than a government and no free press." --Thomas Jefferson
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"The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." From "Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72" by Hunter S. Thompson
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"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness." Justice William O. Douglas
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"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." : Michael Parenti political scientist, author
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"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." : U.S. historian Howard Zinn, 1993
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"A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.": Euripides
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"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty." : Anne Louise Germaine de Stael - (1766-1817) French author
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"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. " : Thomas Paine Common Sense,
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"Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck." -- Susan Jacoby: -(1945-) American author
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"The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised. [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern."- -- John C. Calhoun - (1782-1850) American statesman
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"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." -- Rev. Edmund A. Opitz (1914-2006) American minister, author
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"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles." : Eugene Victor Debs
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The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own: Aldous Huxley - English novelist and critic, 1894-1963
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"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." : Arthur Miller playwright
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"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)Source: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1909
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"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?": -- Herbert Spencer - (1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher 1884
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It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity." : Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, May 22, 1886
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"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." -Edward Abbey
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"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty" : Howard Zinn
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The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience." : Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government
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"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
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"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." -- James Madison - (1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President Source: Speech, Virginia State Convention, 2 December 1829
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"Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given." -- Lysander Spooner - (1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
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"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it." -- Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
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"Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?" -- Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) Source: at the US Constitutional Convention
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"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom." -- Fredrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
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"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice 1928 Source: Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)
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"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.": Aesop - (c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
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"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive." -- Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) Historian and author Source: Freedom and Order, 1966
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"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind." -- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
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"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation." -- Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: We, The Judges, 1956
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"We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet." : - Hermann Hesse, German poet and novelist.
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To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men: Abraham Lincoln: 16th U.S. president, 1809-1865
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"He who would do good" wrote William Blake, "must do so in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite and the liar." It is also the plea of most political ideologues who do not hesitate, and often in the name of "the People", to persecute in minute particulars for the sake of the general good. The idea that heaven on earth is possible through the implementation of a political ideal is one of the most destructive ideas we have ever played with: Extract from Jeremy Taylor's Book - Ag Pleez Deddy - a South African musician
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"Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace." : Lester B. Pearson
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What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists -- whatever else they might be -- might also be rational human beings ; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States . . .: William Blum
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He is not strong and powerful who throweth people down; but he is strong who witholdeth himself from anger: Muhammad
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"When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice." - Mumia Abu-Jamal
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"But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.": Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Author
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">Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens : Plato : Ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
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I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged: Anne Frank: Jewish girl author of a diary of her family's two years in hiding during World War Two, 1929-1945
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An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me...It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too." They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied..."The one I feed."
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"The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim". Gustave Le Bon;"The Crowd"
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"An evil exists that threatens every man,woman, and child of this great country. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our Homeland" - Adolf Hitler (1933)
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Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny: Barry Goldwater
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He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people: Samuel Adams
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The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity: George Bernard Shaw
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The Second Treatise of Civil Government 1690
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"That the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with another, and unjustly invades another man's right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over the conquered, will be easily agreed by all men, who will not think that robbers and pirates have a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them.
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Should a robber break into my house, and, with a dagger at my throat, make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his sword has an unjust conqueror who forces me into submission. The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain.
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The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference in the offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders." John Locke - 1632-1704
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Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Frederick Douglass...
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No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found... Surely the(y), and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere: Ouch Borith: Permanent Representative Of The Kingdom Of Cambodia To The UN: 10/03/2001
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American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or Christians under Communism.
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We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth.
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You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.
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--Peter Storey, former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa
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The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'
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When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. - Bertolt Brecht
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How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?: Adin Ballou, The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845
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There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed: - Gil Bailie
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"What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" Mahatma Gandhi
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"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it." Arabic Proverb
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Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression: Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081
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The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding: Louis D. Brandeis
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Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
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The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting: Justice William J. Brennan, 1982
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We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us. We must get away from the idea that America is to be the leader of the world in everything. She can lead in some things. The old "manifest destiny" idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations: Francis John McConnell
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"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool" -- Plato.
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I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right: Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
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As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever: Clarence Darrow
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If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality: Bishop Desmond Tutu
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He does not believe who does not live according to his belief: Thomas Fuller
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"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security: Dwight David Eisenhower : 34th president of the United States, 1890-1969
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I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction : John Steinbeck: American novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962, 1902-1968
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The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force : Norman Cousins: American essayist and editor, long associated with the Saturday Review, 1912-1990
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Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous : William Proxmire
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"The vested interests - if we explain the situation by their influence - can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing either upon the public's indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public the danger of its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to danger where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent." Sir Norman Angell 1872 - 1967
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"Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not fruit immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, and advancing by little and little, it eradicates the man who committed it. ...justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, will preserve; it must never therefore be violated." Manu 1200 bc
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I will be harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject i do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.: William Lloyd Garrison Abolitionist (1805 - 1879)
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">The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other. (Bertrand Russell: Freedom, Harcourt Brace, 1940)
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"Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." : Bertrand Russell
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Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred. - Bertrand Russell, Unpopular essays
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"Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery." : Stephen Crane
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Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. (FDR: message to Congress proposing the monopoly investigation, 1938)
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">Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.": Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines
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" ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret. ": Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author
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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. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous: Carl Sagan
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They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war: Eugene Debs
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Reflections from history
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On Affairs in America
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" My Lords, this ruinous and ignominious situation, where we cannot act with success, nor suffer with honour, calls upon us to remonstrate in the strongest and loudest language of truth, to rescue the ear of Majesty from the delusions which surround it. You cannot, I venture to say, you cannot conquer America.
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" What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. - You may swell every expense, and strain every effort, still more extravagantly; accumulate every assistance you can beg or borrow; traffic and barter with every pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country:
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Your efforts are forever vain and impotent-doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms-never-never-never.
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William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-78) On Affairs in America 1777.
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The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us.: -Butler Shaffer
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I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends: Abraham Lincoln
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Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace: Martin Luther (1483-1546)
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The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions: Robert Lynd (1879-1949), Anglo- Irish essayist, journalist
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"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." -- Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877
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"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you -- the social reformers -- see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." -- Isaiah Berlin - (1909-1997) Source: Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958
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"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams - (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
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"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein
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There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance. - Walt Whitman
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"War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder." : Alexander Berkman
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"It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations." : Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America
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"In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes." Thomas Paine
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Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day": Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906
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"The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing": Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
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The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience: Albert Camus: French novelist, essayist, and playwright.1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. 1913-1960
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A great wave of oppressive tyranny isn't going to strike, but rather a slow seepage of oppressive laws and regulations from within will sink the American dream of liberty: George Baumler
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The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home: James Madison: US fourth president, 1751-1836
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This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector: Plato: Ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
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">In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments : Napoleon Bonaparte : (1769-1821)
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In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful : Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy : Russian author, 1828-1910
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The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground: Thomas Jefferson: 3rd US president, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, 1743-1826.
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Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens : Plato : Ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
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As long as we hate, there will be people to hate: George Harrison: Musician, producer and composer, member of The Beatles, 1943-2001
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It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.: Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
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A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?: Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
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"How is a military drilled and trained to defend freedom, peace and ahppiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an efficiently trained generation: 'The soldier must be so trained that he becomes a mere automoton; he must be so trained that it will destroy his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.' This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian . . . but by an American major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automotons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else." : Emma Goldman, Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter
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Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth. : Eugene V. Debs, Speech, June 16, 1918
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The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us.: -Butler Shaffer
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I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride: William James
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"My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?" : Paul Robeson (1898-1976) - from testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956
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"We are the ruling race of the world... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world... He has marked us as his chosen people... He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples." : Sen. Alfred Beveridge

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"I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it." : Sen. Orville Platt of Connecticut 1894.

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"Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times," Washington has intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times."
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"If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job - yours and mine -- to keep our people convinced that theonly way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might." -- Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950
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Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23

Taoism: Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss.: T'ai Shag Kan Ying P'ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5
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"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security." : Albert Einstein - (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
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Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. - John Adams
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"...[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security." -- Larry P. Arnn (1952- ) President of Hillsdale College, MI
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"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society." -- Rocco Galati lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress October, 2001
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Fear is the foundation of most governments. - John Adams
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Sovereignty over any foreign land is insecure.: Lucius Annaeus Seneca : 4 BC-65. Roman philosopher and playwright
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"...the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."- Benjamin Franklin, 1787
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"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. ": U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945 -
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Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. --Robert Louis Stevenson--
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"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty".- Immanuel Kant
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I BELIEVE that God wants me to be president." George W. Bush
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"I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany," Hitler - Berlin March, 1936
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God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.: George W. Bush
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If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us: Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937
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"freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." George W. Bush
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"Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!" : Hitler - Nuremberg Sept. 13, 1936.
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"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.": Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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"We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.': Desmond Tutu
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"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.": Frederick Douglass - [Frederick Baily] (1818- 1895), Escaped slave, abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
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"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. 'We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.'" : Gore Vidal - The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
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"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies." : by: Salvador de Madariaga - (1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
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"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich." : Noam Chomsky
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"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort." : Marshall McLuhan - (1911-1980)
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"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe.
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"But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe." : Janice Fine - Dollars and Sense magazine
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"The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses." : Ed Crane
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Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power: Benito Mussolini
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"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group," : Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Fascism is capitalism plus murder." : Upton Sinclair
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"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.": Sir Francis Bacon
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Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason: Sir John Harrington, 1561-1612
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When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty: -George Mason
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The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men: -Plato
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Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots: -H.L. Mencken
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"Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball" : Charles V
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Let those who would die for the flag on the field of battle give a better proof of their patriotism and a higher glory to their country by promoting fraternity and justice: Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1893: - Inaugural Address, 1889
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The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders: Veterans Fast for Life
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"These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland." : John Kenneth Galbraith - (1908- ) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor. Source: The Affluent Society, 1976
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"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."Thomas Sowell - (1930- ) Writer and economist
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"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness." : John Kenneth Galbraith
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The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace: James Madison
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"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.": John Flynn, 1944
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We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy." : Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
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"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy" : John Pierpont Morgan
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Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity.
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"Patriotism" is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by "patriotism" I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare-never with its power over other nations.
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Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.: Erich Fromm (1900-1980), U.S. psychologist.
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"It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations." : Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America
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"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks." -- Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) Source: Ponkapog Papers, 1903
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"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience... therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring." : Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950
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"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.": Olavo de Cavarlho
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"And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war." Aristotle, Politics
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"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy ... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States." : Boutros Boutros-Ghali
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"I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) 16th US President

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"HYPOCRITE, n. One who, profession virtues that he does not respect secures the advantage of seeming to be what he depises.": Ambrose Bierce - Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914

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"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) 16th US President Source: Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858 (The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)
http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/primarysources/emancipation/docs/fourthdebate.html
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"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause." -- Abraham Lincoln - (1809-1865) 16th US President Source: Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862 http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
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"It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return." : Socrates 469 - 399 BC
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Crime Against Peace: A basic provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so is a crime: Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/DocJac14.htm
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The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complaceny to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage.
Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian
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"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car.": Garrison Keiler
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Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and.. the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer." --H. L. Menchen -- 1956. --
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O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!: Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understands the minds of other men and women. Learned Hand
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He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself: Thomas Paine
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Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down: Frederick Douglass
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He who dares not offend cannot be honest: Thomas Paine
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"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.": - Randolph Bourne (1886 -1918) Source: in War and the Intellectuals, 1964
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"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
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"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." - Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) French historian - Source: Democracy in America, 1835
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If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption: George Monbiot
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"To initiate a war of aggresion.. is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." - Nuremberg Tribunal
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"The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter." UN Chief Kofi Annan - -September 2004. Source BBC
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"Any excuse will serve a tyrant." : Aesop - (c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist Source: The Wolf and the Lamb
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"If we do go to war, psychological operations are going to be absolutely a critical, critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in.": General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
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"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.": Joseph Goebbels was born in 1897 and died in 1945. Goebbels was Hitler's Minister of Propaganda
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"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.": Abraham Lincoln
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"When Iraq becomes strong enough in our opinion to stand alone, we shall be in a position to state that our task has been fulfilled, and that Iraq is an independent sovereign state. But this cannot be said while we are forced year after year to spend very large sums of money on helping the Iraqi government to defend itself and maintain order." : Winston Churchill - 1922
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"The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business...a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world." Ralph Wald Emerson - 1838
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"We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, will be known only as Americans." : Martin Kelly
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"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today." : President Theodore Roosevelt -
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"A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.
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"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." : Woodrow Wilson - From his Campaign Speeches, 1912
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"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. "But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe." : Janice Fine - Dollars and Sense magazine
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Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations: Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837
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"What is the great Amercican sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of "concentrated indignation" as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed....The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin.": Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery: Jonathan Swift : Irish author, 1667-1745
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"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group," : Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom." - Anthony Quainton, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984: Anthony Quainton - Source: Off the record response of the Ambassador to a group of concerned U.S. citizens when asked to explain the difference between U.S. government actions in Nicaragua and the violence it condemns as terrorism elsewhere in the world.
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It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know--or care--about circumstances in the colonies: Bertrand Russell
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The president has adopted a policy of 'anticipatory self-defense' that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy: Arthur Schlesinger.
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The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it: Louis Simpson
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I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory but let me say war is all hell: William Tecumseh Sherman.
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"The greatest spiritual practise is to transform love into service": Sai Baba
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"Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand" : Bodie Thoene
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"By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction" : William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)
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"My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whinning about for years." : Kurt Cobain (American Musician and Singer of the grunge rock band Nirvana. 1967-1994)
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There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for: Paulo Coelho:
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...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all being.: Sogyal Rinpoche
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"Our job this day is to become part of the answer to the world's immense and protracted suffering rather than continuing our ancient task of being part of the difficulty.": Hugh Prather - Author, minister
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"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.": Thomas Jefferson
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"Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time. In World War I it was the munitions industrialists; in World War II it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty. This is passing the buck.
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The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else. To stress this guilt on the part of the masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom fighters; the latter that attitude held by power-thirsty politicians." : Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." : General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951
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"When the President starts lying he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come up with evidence that is supportive of our public position and you are distinctly unhelpful if you commit to paper statements that might leak to the wrong people.
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The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting...." : Daniel Ellsburg to the US Senate on Foreign Relations, May 13, 1970
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"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence." : Elbert Hubbard (American editor, publisher and writer, 1856-1915)
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"Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." : Dwight David Eisenhower (American 34th President (1953-61). 1890-1969)
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"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America." : Jimmy Carter (American 39th US President (1977-81). Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. b.1924)
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"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....
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"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
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"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
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"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.
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"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."
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Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm
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We cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others--even when we cause it: - James Carroll
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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason": Thomas Paine - Common Sense -[January 10, 1776]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11567.htm
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"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.": Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), US civil rights leader
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"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.": Rudyard Kipling - (1865-1936)
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"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.": - Theodore Roosevelt: (1858-1919) 26th US President
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"Do not expect justice where might is right.": - Plato (429-347 BC) - Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
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"A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent.": - William Blake : (1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
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"When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.": - Eric Schaub - Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
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"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.": - Voltaire - [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
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"Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life."
Phil Ochs
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"By doubting we all come at truth." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
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"To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease."- Lao-Tzu [Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
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"It does not require many words to speak the truth."- Chief Joseph: (1840-1904) Chief of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce Indians
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"I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so." - Michel De Montaigne (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
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"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."- Elie Wiesel - (1928- ) Writer, Nobel Peace Prize winner 1986
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"People only see what they are prepared to see.'': - Ralph Waldo Emerson - (1803-1882) American essayist, poet
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"All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals." -- John Quincy Adams- (1767-1848) 6th US President
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"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Paul Johnson
British Roman Catholic journalist, historian, speechwriter and author
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"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present." -- Henry Steelecommager (1902-1998) Source: Freedom Loyalty and Dissent, 1966
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"The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him." -- George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author Source: Inside the Whale, 1940
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"Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having." -- Juvenal [Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
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"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams- (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
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"The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government." -- Daniel Webster - (1782-1852) US Senator
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"It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It's a bureaucratic system where everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's not a surprise when a school system doesn't improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy." -- Albert Shanker- (1928-1997) former president of the American Federation of Teachers
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"Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us?" -- Eric Schaub Individualist, writer, activist, speaker Source: The Common Man
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"In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone." ~ Chuck Baldwin
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"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." -- Epictetus (ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher Source: Discourses, ca
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -- Thomas Paine - (1737-1809) Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
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"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests." -- George Washington (1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country' Source: Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)
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"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive." -- Noah Webster - (1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the 1806 edition of the dictionary that bears his name, the first dictionary of American English usage. Defined the militia similarly as "the effective part of the people at large." Source: An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Philadelphia, 1787
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"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams - (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
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"The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning
the government." -- Daniel Webster - (1782-1852) US Senator
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"No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..." -- Benjamin Constant [Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician. Source: Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1810) Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), p. 401-402.
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"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men." -- Gerald W. Johnson - (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958
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"And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other
half for the freedom to speak." -- James Russell Lowell: - (1819-1891) Poet and author Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
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"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." -- Simon Heffer Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000
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"An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment." -- Justice Hugo L. Black: (1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice Source: New York Times Company vs. Sullivan, 1964
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"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then." -- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President Source: letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787; reproduced in Thomas Jefferson, Writings (The Library of America, 1984), p. 889-890
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"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history." -- William O. Douglas: (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
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"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good." -- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi - (1869-1948)
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"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it." -- Woodrow Wilson: (1856-1924) 28th US President Speech, 1912
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"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.": - Abraham Lincoln - (1809-1865) 16th US President
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"The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along." -- Clarence S. Darrow -1857-1938 Source: Address to the Court, The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
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"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face." -- Justice Potter Stewart : (1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: Walker v. Birmingham, 1967
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"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men." -- Gerald W. Johnson - (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the
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... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy: Alex Carey: Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New
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The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. [1941]: Edward Dowling:
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If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time. Noam Chomsky:
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The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men: Plato:
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When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross: Sinclair Lewis
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"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin." - James Monroe 1758-1831), 5th US President Source: First Inaugural Address, 1817
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"Who ordained that the few should have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?" -- David Lloyd George (1863-1945) British statesman, and Prime Minister
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"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it." -- Benjamin Franklin - (1706-1790) US founding Father Source: letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783, Ref: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1082
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"There are two distinct classes of men .. those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon taxes." ~ Thomas Paine
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"The State enjoys a monopoly not only on the lawful use of violence, but on the power to define the extent of its authority." ~ Butler Shaffer, 17 March 2006
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"You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it." ~ Isabel Paterson, New York Herald Tribune
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"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." -- Major General Smedley Darling Butler - (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." -- Herbert Sebastien Agar - (1897-1980) Source: The Time for greatness, 1942
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"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth." -- Peter Abelard (1099-1142) Source: Sic et non, c. 1120
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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.": - Aldous Huxley - (1894-1963) Author
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"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag." -- Major General Smedley Darling Butler (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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Whenever a people... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens." -- A Framer Anonymous 'framer' of the US Constitution - Source: Independent Gazetteer, January 29, 1791
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"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."--William Edgar
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The soft, the complacent the self-satisfied societies will be swept away with the debris of history - John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it." -- John Locke (1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA. 1693
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"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." -- Major General Smedley Darling Butler (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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"When even one "American" -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril." -- Harry S. Truman - (1884-1972), 33rd US President August 14, 1951 Source: Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion
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"Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech..." - Cato - John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750) Source: Letters, 1720
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"When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
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'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.'

[After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits." -- Mark Twain - Source: from The War Prayer, 1904. Having directed it to be published after his death, Twain said, "I have told the truth in that... and only dead men can tell the truth in this world."
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"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom." -- John Quincy Adams - (1767-1848) 6th US President Source: Speech before the House of Representatives, July 4, 1821; quoted in William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux (Editors), The Idea of America (Les Belles Lettres, 2003)
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"War itself requires no special motive but appears to be engrafted on human nature; it passes even for something noble, to which the love of glory impels men quite apart from any selfish urges. Thus among the "American savages", just as much as among those of Europe during the age of chivalry, military valor is held to be of great worth in itself, not only during war (which is natural) but in order that there should be war. Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as a class of animals, to her own end." -- Immanuel Kant - (1724-1804) German philosopher Source: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795
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"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people!" -- Patrick Henry - (1736-1799) US Founding Father
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"There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." - George W. Bush(1946- ) 43rd US President: Source: In a speech on August 7, 2002
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"The war made possible for us the solutionof a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times." - Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister - Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
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All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships areintolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state. - Jacques Ellul
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"We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too: Maíread Maguire
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"War would end if the dead could return." Stanley Baldwin
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"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind...War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." : - John F. Kennedy
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I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all: Thomas Jefferson:
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Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence: Henri Frederic Amiel:
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Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings: Helen Keller:
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A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you: Ramsey Clark:
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The peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country -- when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.": Carl Schurz:
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'If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.' Paul Wellstone
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It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. (1790): John Philpot Curran:
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So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men: Voltaire:
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Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least: Wendy Kaminer:
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Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason: Erich Fromm:
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Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom: Marilyn Ferguson:
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Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you: Jean-Paul Sartre:
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison: Henry David Thoreau:
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You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.: Clarence Darrow:
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The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with: Eleanor Holmes Norton:
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When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered: Dorothy Thompson:
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Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will: Frederick Douglass:
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None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are
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"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."- Charles Eliot Norton - (1827-1908) American scholar
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"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom." - John Quincy Adams - (1767-1848) 6th US President - Source: Speech before the House of Representatives, July 4, 1821; quoted in William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux (Editors), The Idea of America (Les Belles Lettres, 2003), p. 237
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"To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true." - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
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"They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people." - Eugene Debs: - Socialist candidate for president, June 16, 1918 - The speech led to Debs's being stripped of his citizenship and sent to jail for 10 years.
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"One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic."- Josef Stalin - (1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
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"It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?" - Melians - Source: Melians to Athenians, Peloponnesian War, 431 BC
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"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign country. would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year's military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated." --William Blum, author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II," and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"
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"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - (1807-1882) American poet
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The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it Omar Khayyam
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"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." -- George Mason - (1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington.
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"And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak." - James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American author and diplomatist Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
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"The lust for power in dominating others inflames the heart more than any other passion." -- Cornelius Tacitus - (55-117 A.D.) Source: The Histories
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"Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand - (1905-1982) Author Source: Atlas Shrugged, 1957
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"It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them." -- Thomas Jefferson -(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President Source: Note on the Crimes Bill, 1779
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"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
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"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." -- Simon Heffer Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000
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"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory." - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
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"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." -- Clarence S. Darrow- (1857-1938)
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"You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
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"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.": Jefferson, Thomas 3rd President of the United States (1801-1809)
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"The closed door and the sealed lips are prerequisites to tyranny.": Stanton, Frank L.
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Let it be impressed upon your minds, let it be instilled into your children, that the liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights." JUNIUS - English political author, known only by the signature Junius - Wrote various letters to the London Public Advertiser from Jan., 1769, to Jan., 1772
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"Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." : Eric Arthur Blair or George Orwell - British novelist and essayist (1903-1950)
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Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire: Patrick J. Buchanan - Where the Right Went Wrong
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It's not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people. And furthermore, it's not going to help. Then you might say, "Yes, it's terrorizing people, but it's worth doing because it will end terrorism." But how much common sense does it take to know that you cannot end terrorism by indiscriminately dropping bombs?: Howard Zinn - Terrorism and War
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Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism: Noam Chomsky
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Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria: Howard Zinn - Terrorism and War
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I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one: Nelson Mandela - Larry King Live, May 16, 2000
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It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world...

These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people...

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight: -Eugene V. Debs [The Canton, Ohio, Anti-War Speech. June 16, 1918]
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It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions: -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803), "Father of the American Revolution"
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Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998), Historian and author
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The coward wretch whose hand and heart can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start from the slightest pain or equal foe: Bertrand Russell
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The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons: - - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian novelist
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Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Convention. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us -- every single one of us -- knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them: - John McCain, Republican US Senator
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... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret: - Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author
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The debate here isn't only how to protect the country. It's how to protect our values.

If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles: - Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel [Feb. 27, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, entitled "The Memo"]
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you: -Friedrich Nietzche
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The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world: James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays (1998)]
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They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages: Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
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One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms: George W. Bush [press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004]
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Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management: - Edward Kennedy
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We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country: George W. Bush [Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003]
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"the actions of those folks in Iraq do not represent the values of the United States of America." George W. Bush
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This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees: - Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz
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"Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism" - Edward Gibbon
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"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance" - Thomas Paine
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"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed" - Thomas Jefferson (American 3rd US President (1801-09). Author of the Declaration of Independence. 1762-1826)
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"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty" - Thomas Jefferson
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'Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.' ~George Orwell
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"They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom" - Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese born American philosophical Essayist, Novelist and Poet. 1883-1931)
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When people who are honestly mistaken learn the truth, they will either cease being mistaken, or cease being honest! - Anonymous
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"Understand that all battles are waged on an unconscious level before they are begun on the conscious one, and this battle is no different. The power structure wishes us to believe that the only options available are those which they present to us, we know this is simply not true, and therefore we must redefine the terrain of this conflict, and clearly, it is a conflict of worldviews and agendas." - Teresa Stover
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"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." ~ Dresden James
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"The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance." - Stanley Milgram
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"Fascism is capitalism plus murder." - Upton Sinclair (AKA: Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. American Novelist and polemicist, 1878-1968)
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"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men." -- Daniel Webster- (1782-1852), US Senator Source: Speech in the House of Representatives, January 14, 1814
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"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis - (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
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"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men." -- Mortimer Adler -(1902-2001)
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"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends." -- Benjamin Disraeli - (1804-1881), British Prime Minister
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"Only the educated are free." -- Epictetus - (ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher Source: Discourses
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"Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise." -- Alexander Meiklejohn -(1872-1964) Source: Testimony, First Session, 84th Congress, 1955
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"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 1712-1778 - Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
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"All wars are sacred ... to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars in reality are money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is 'Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!' Sometimes it's "Down with Popery!' and sometimes 'Liberty!' and sometimes 'Cotton, Slavery, and States' Rights!'" -- Rhett Butler from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind
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"Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered." -- Archibald Macleish - (1892-1982) Poet, playwright, Librarian of Congress, & Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt Source: Saturday Review, 12 May 1979
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"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." -- Edward Abbey
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"The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion." -- Justice Charles Evans Hughes - (1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Source: DeJonge v. Oregon, 1937
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"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves
into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience." -- John Locke, 1690
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"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." -- John Bradshaw (1602-1659)
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"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?" -- Herbert Spencer, The New Toryism, 1884
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"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men." -- H.L. Mencken
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"Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible." -- Robert LeFevre, in his essay, Aggression is Wrong
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"Governments and citizens blend together only in the imagination of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens." -- James Bovard, Freedom in Chains
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The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. John Hay 1838-1905 American statesman, diplomat, author, journalist, personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln.
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One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free. N.A. Scott American author, intellectual, anti-totalitarian figure.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1880-1956 American journalist, satarist, social critic, anti-establishment figure, considered by scholars as one of America's greatest writers, known as 'The Sage of Baltimore.'
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It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts ... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it. Patrick Henry 1736-1799 American attorney, orator, revolutionary.
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The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Irish novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. H.L. Mencken 1880-1956 American journalist, satarist, social critic
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. Bertrand Russel 1872-1970 British philosopher, historian
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"I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away." -- Thomas Jefferson to Uriah Forrest, 1787. Papers, 12:477.
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"The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them..." -- Mark Twain
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"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819
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"It's important to realize that whenever you give power to politicians or bureaucrats, it will be used for what they want, not for what you want."-- Harry Browne
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"As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system." -- John Fund
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"We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls." -- Wayne LaPierre
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"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave." -- H. L. Mencken, "Why Liberty?" January 30, 1927
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"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1791.
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"Tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom." -- Dr. Thomas
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"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1953
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"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." -- James Madison
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"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill
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"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all -- security, comfort, and freedom. When ... the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." -- Sir Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
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"Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother's keeper." -- Everett Dean Martin - (1880-1941) Source: Liberty, 1930
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"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1799
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"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837
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"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." -- Somerset Maugham
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"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self- preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means." --Thomas Jefferson to John Colvin, 1810
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Only the winners decide what were war crimes: - Gary Will
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You cannot do justice to the dead. When we talk about doing justice to the dead we are talking about retribution for the harm done to them. But retribution and justice are two different things: William, Lord Shawcross (b. 1902), British lawyer. Daily Telegraph - London, May 1, 1991.
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"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin." -- James Monroe (1758-1831), 5th US President Source: First Inaugural Address, 1817
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"Under every government the dernier [Fr. last, or final] resort of the people, is an appeal to the sword; whether to defend themselves against the open attacks of a foreign enemy, or to check the insidious encroachments of domestic foes. Whenever a people... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens." -- A Framer - Anonymous 'framer' of the US Constitution Source: Independent Gazetteer, January 29, 1791
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"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." -- Epictetus (ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher Source: Discourses, ca 100 A.D.
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"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest." -- John Stuart Mill - (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist Source: On Liberty, 1859
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." -John Maynard Keynes, British economist
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The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war. James Madison 1751-1836 American Statesman, Fourth President of the US
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It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured. Tacitus
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Characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner. Aristophanes 456-386 B.C. Greek Dramatist
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Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. James Madison
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A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday. Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 Irish Cleric, Essayest, Author, Satarist
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Virtue has a veil, vice a mask. Victor Hugo
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"If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied": Rudyard Kipling
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The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Leo Tolstoy
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There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die. Jean Paul Sartre 1905-1980 French philosopher, writer, educator, anti-authority figure, regarded by scholars as one of the most important intellectuals of all time.
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The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. - Henry Steele Commager
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I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Voltaire
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Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law," because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual: Thomas Jefferson
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What county can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that its people preserve the spirit of resistance: Thomas
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One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds: Mahatma Gandhi
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We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war: Albert Einstein
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Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph: Haile Selassie
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The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. - It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men: Samuel Adams
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Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us: Butler D. Shaffer
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The victor will never be asked if he told the truth: Adolf Hitler
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"What is it men cannot be made to believe!": Thomas Jefferson
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"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." Dresden James.
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"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." Dresden James.
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"Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings..." Patrick Henry
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"The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.": Jennifer Harbury: Writer, Lawyer, Human Rights Activist
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"It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis." Dahr Jamail : Independent Journalist, War Reporter,
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"We're losing ground. This planet is losing ground. So things need to happen and they need to happen quick. Our message should be-loud and clear-there comes a time when the home needs protecting and the line needs drawing and anybody that dares cross it acts at their own peril.": Diane Wilson -Shrimp Fisher, Environmentalist, Activist,
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"The role of the U.S. in the new world corporate order is going to be to export security. That means endless wars and weapons in space. The Pentagon will send our kids off to foreign lands to suppress opposition to corporate globalization. How will we ever end America's addiction to war and violence as long as our communities are dependent on military spending for jobs? We must work to convert the military industrial complex to sustainable technologies like windpower, solar, and mass transit." Bruce Gagnon
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"The physical reality is that "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron. A soft energy landing from the last two hundred years of development will require massive conservation, especially by the overdeveloped countries, and that can only happen in a nongrowth ( and therefore noncapitalist ) society. The choice is now becoming either capitalism or humanity.": Stan Goff - Author, Veteran, Anti-war Activist, Feminist
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Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction,manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president. - Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Ammendment, Yale Law School, September 22, 2002
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The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defence correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons. - E. P. Thompson, British historian
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A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains. - Karl Marx
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Oppose the oppressor and support the oppressed. - Imam Ali
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"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.
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Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384
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"To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement." Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, 1799.
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"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light." --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart. 1799.
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"Cherish... the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:58
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If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds: Bill Moyers
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Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen: William E. Borah
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"It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. We have made golden calves of ourselves --- become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols." Bill McKibben
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"when an administration embarks on a war justified by little or no intelligence, speaking the truth can be regarded as treachery. The country could use more of that kind of "treachery." Ray McGovern
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"I have served my country for almost thirty years in some of the most isolated and dangerous parts of the world. I want to continue to serve America. However, I do not believe in the policies of this Administration and cannot --- morally and professionally --- defend or implement them. It is with heavy heart that I must end my service to America and therefore resign." Ann Wright
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"The role of the U.S. in the new world corporate order is going to be to export security. That means endless wars and weapons in space. The Pentagon will send our kids off to foreign lands to suppress opposition to corporate globalization. How will we ever end America's addiction to war and violence as long as our communities are dependent on military spending for jobs? Bruce Gagnon
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"Whoever controls the media, controls the peoples' minds."

"There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to writes (sic) his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with--others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things--and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press."

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, in the 1880s, at a banquet of his fellow editors
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"You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth." Richard Grossman
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"We live in a country that is addicted to incarceration as a tool for social control. As it stands now justice systems are extremely expensive, do not rehabilitate but in fact make the people that experience them worse and have no evidence based correlatives to reducing crime. Yet with that track record they continue to thrive, prosper and are seen as an appropriate response to children in trouble with the law. Only an addict would see that as an okay result." James Bell
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"In Southern West Virginia we live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting our communities, blasting our homes, poisoning us, trying to intimidate us. I don't mind being poor. I mind being blasted and poisoned. - There ARE no jobs on a dead planet." Judy Bonds
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"Mr. Speaker, we make war with such certainty, yet we are befuddled how to create peace. This paradox requires reflection if we are to survive. Making and endorsing war requires a secret love of death, and a fearful desire to embrace annihilation. Creating peace requires compassion, putting ourselves in the other person's place, and all of their suffering and all of their hopes and to act from our heart's capacity to love, not fear." Dennis Kucinich
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"Dr. King didn't get famous giving a speech that said,"I have a complaint." It's time for us to start dreaming again and invite the country to dream with us. We don't have any "throw away" species, nations, or children. We must birth a global green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." Van Jones
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"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires" - -- Susan B Anthony.
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"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life".-- Jane Addams
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"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?" - -- John Adams
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"Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands" - -- Douglas Adams
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"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." --- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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"Hitler killed only one person in his lifetime: himself. All the other atrocities that are attributed to him were carried out by people who were only following orders" Mark A. Goldman
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The men that American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. -- H L Mencken (attributed: source unknown)
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Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant -- H L Mencken
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.- H L Mencken
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"They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages". Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
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[torture] "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness".. . - Ariel Dorfman [from his book "Torture: A Collection"]
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"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason." Octavio Paz quotes
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"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world. " James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays
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"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer" Bertrand Russell
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"The healthy man does not torture others " Carl Gustav Jung
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"We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country". George W. Bush [Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003]
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"It's exciting; I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes." George W. Bush
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"each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office." Fyrefly1985 Niccolo Machiavelli = "An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod" Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody." Franklin Pierce Adams
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"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." John Quincy Adams
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"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion": Thomas Paine
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"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear": Harry S Truman
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"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution": Justice Louis D. Brandeis
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"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security:" John Adams
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"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." -Edward Abbey
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"The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred." -Daniel Berrigan
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"War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder." : Alexander Berkman
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"It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations." : Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America
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"COWARDICE, n. A charge often levelled by all-American types against those who stand up for their beliefs by refusing to fight in wars they find unconscionable, and who willingly go to prison or into exile in order to avoid violating their own consciences. These 'cowards' are to be contrasted with red-blooded, 'patriotic' youths who literally bend over, grab their ankles, submit to the government, fight in wars they do not understand (or disapprove of), and blindly obey orders to maim and to kill simply because they are ordered to do so-all to the howling approval of the all-American mob. This type of behavior is commonly termed 'courageous.'" : Chaz Bufe
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"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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"Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched." Aldous Huxley, Island
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"The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face." George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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"If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance for you to contribute to making a better world. That's your choice." Noam Chomsky, The Chronicles of Dissent
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"Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers." - R. Buckminster Fuller
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Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they though of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed: Gil Bailie
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The problems of this world are so gigantic that some are paralysed by their own uncertainty. Courage and wisdom are needed to reach out above this sense of helplessness. Desire for vengeance against deeds of hatred offers no solution. An eye for an eye makes the world blind. If we wish to choose the other path, we will have to search for ways to break the spiral of animosity. To fight evil one must also recognize one's own responsibility. The values for which we stand must be expressed in the way we think of, and how we deal with, our fellow humans: - From the Christmas Message 2001 of HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
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We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living: General Omar Bradley
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The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis: Edmund Burke
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It is reasonable that every one who asks justice should do justice: Thomas Jefferson
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Everything, everything in war is barbaric . . . But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being: Ellen Key, 1916
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The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where one stands in times of challenge and controversy: Martin Luther King
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Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms: J. Krishnamurti
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"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts -- not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." Abraham Lincoln
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"When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous." --Thomas Jefferson
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"The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy . . . Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone." --Thomas Jefferson
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"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." --H.L. Mencken
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"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
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"The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose." - Frederick Douglass
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Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein
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"When the government fears the People, that is Liberty. When the People fear the Government, that is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson
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"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them." - Mark Hertzgaard
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"Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is [now] while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion." - Thomas Jefferson - http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch17.html
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"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage, torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, and bombing of civilians, which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell
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"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Frederic Bastiat
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"Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill
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