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CurEvents.com - A Global Current Events Discussion Forum - Quotations That Make Us Think

Quotations That Make Us Think http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/A...akeUSThink.html "Those who cast the votes decide nothing;

Those who count the votes decide everything." Joseph Stalin "Who needs censorship when we have self-censorship.

When news is being withheld, or neutralized, at best, how can we expect anything but cynicism from those who read our daily papers?

Maybe the reason many aren't buying newspapers isn't that they can get information for free on the Internet, but because they don't believe what they read, and how can they?" Jane Lyn Stahl "The United States has only one party - the property party.

It's the party of big corporations, the party of money.

It has two right wings;

One is Democrat and the other is Republican." Gore Vidal "We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had -- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong.

We have thrown it away;

And with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism." Howard Zinn "Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship." Senator J.

William Fulbright "And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ...

Practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ...

And the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive." George Orwell, 1984 "Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character." Senator J.

William Fulbright "The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening." Senator J.

William Fulbright " They have pillaged the world.

When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea.

If an enemy is rich, they are greedy;

If he is poor, they crave glory.

Neither East nor West can sate their appetite.

They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving.

They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of "empire." They make a desert and call it "peace"." Roman historian Tacitus "A well-functioning democracy has a culture of free speech, not simply legal protection of free speech.

It encourages independence of mind.

It imparts a willingness to challenge prevailing opinion through both words and deeds.

Equally important, it encourages a certain set of attitudes in listeners, one that gives a respectful hearing to those who do not embrace the conventional wisdom.

In a culture of free speech, the attitude of listeners is no less important than that of speakers." Cass Sunstein "It is the professed goal [of U.S.

Multinational corporations] to control as large a share of the world market as they do of the United States market." Harry Magdoff "The United States has no tradition of subordinating itself to international treaty-based law, and it has no interest in a world order in which military force becomes operational only as a last resort." Peter Gowan "Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor." U.S.

Defense Planning Guidance, 1992 "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi "The people will believe what the media tells them they believe." George Orwell "Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.

At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees." Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent "Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world ...

Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know.

That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations." Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent "The real threat to U.S.

Military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action." Immanuel Wallerstein "We weren't raised to protest.

We weren't raised to question.

We were raised to wave the flag.

To pledge allegiance.

"My country, right or wrong." It's a terrible, terrible trap." Phil Donahue "I think democracy fails under a variety of conditions and one of the conditions occurs when people don't have the ability to get the kind of information they need to make up their mind.

Ideologically, I don't care much for FOX News.

But the truth is that, as long as there are countervailing points of view available on the spectrum, it doesn't matter." Howard Dean "The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner.

So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction?

Simple: They ignore it.

It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S.

Reporter to even pursue this issue." John Nichols and Robert McChesney "What is the hardest task in the world?

To think." Ralph Waldo Emerson "For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites ..." Cornel West "Our politicians have sacrificed their principles on the altar of special interests;

Our corporate leaders have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of profits;

And our media watchdogs have sacrificed the voice of dissent on the altar of audience competition." Cornel West "The fact is ...

That when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S.

Business interests, we like them just fine.

But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy." Robert Scheer "[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers.

And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security.

So why do people think the Times is liberal?" New York Times reporter John Hess "You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life.

They're plenty loud and they talk all the time.

You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress.

That's their business.

They sound wonderful.

Death before dishonor.

This ground sanctified by blood.

These men who died so gloriously.

They shall not have died in vain.

Our noble dead." Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." Edward Abbey "Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people..." Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice "The country is governed for the richest, for the corporation, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the expoiters." Helen Keller "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf "They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying.

You will die like a dog for no good reason." Ernest Hemingway "We are mad, not only individually, but nationally.

We check manslaughter and isolated murders;

But what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?" Lucius Annaeus Seneca - the Younger, Roman statesman, philosopher "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd." Bertrand Russell "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." Norman Douglas "To criticize one's country is to do it a service ....

Criticism, in short, is more than a right;

It is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation." J.

William Fulbright "You believe you are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists." Anatoly Franace "The American press, with a very few exceptions:, is a kept press.

Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man." Theodore Dreiser "It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion." Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister "Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists.

Were it not for the nonconformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress indeed." Josiah Gitt "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." John Kenneth Galbraith "It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time;

You can even fool some of the people all of the time;

But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Abraham Lincoln "The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false.

The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being." Ashley Montagu "In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule." Friedrich Nietzsche "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them;

Inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." Thomas Jefferson "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary." George Orwell "Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S.

Labor organizations have worked with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged racist campaigns against immigrant workers." Lee Siu Hin "No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." William Blum "Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism....

Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate.

Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.

It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." Emma Goldman "Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S.

Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources.

Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder.

They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

I should know; I was an EHM." John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man "[Ronald] Reagan ...

Was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy...

He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government.

He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H.

W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara.

He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S.

Military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire." John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man "All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup.

The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler.

Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea...

That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire ...

And how does a democracy become a dictatorship? Star Wars fimmaker George Lucas "While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government." Robert Kennedy.

Jr. "How far have we gone where people don't want to air their views for fear of ending up on some kind of terrorist watch list?" David Rowell, editor of The Travel Insider magazine about air travel watchlists and dissent "To understand free speech means freedom to speak what others do not like and even cannot stand to hear?

... Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement.

Hitler tolerated what he liked.

So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too.

So did Genghis Khan, the Shah, and Henry Kissinger.

Free speech only becomes an issue when someone says what others don't want to hear." Michael Albert "We were not born critical of existing society.

There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television." Howard Zinn "There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom." Howard Zinn "Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) "Change comes from a degree of discomfort that allows for and spurs thought and action." William Blum "To initiate a war of aggression ...

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." International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany - 1946 "Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid.

Did you hear that?

- stupid." Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965 " The news and truth are not the same thing.

" Walter Lippmann "This [the U.S.

Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism...

When the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other." Benjamin Franklin "America will never be destroyed from the outside.

If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." Abraham Lincoln "If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag." Huey Long "fascism - A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." The American Heritage Dictionary, 1983 "Fascism is on the march today in America.

Millionaires are marching to the tune.

It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces...

A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy.

Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America." former Ambassador to Germany William Dodd, 1938 "We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home.

A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense.

A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers.

A nation governed by a culture of impunity ...

A culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm.

We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." Sam Smith "The twentieth 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 "The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything...

That's the whole point of good propaganda.

You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for.

Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy?

That's the one you're not allowed to talk about." Noam Chomsky "Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, "safety" through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President." Katha Pollitt on the results of the 2004 election "The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press.

It's a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people...

The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power ...

Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line." Mark Hertzgaard "Once the war against Saddam begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if they can't do that, to shut Up." Bill O'Reilly, Fox News " The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one.

Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder." Arundhati Roy "Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation...

Disinformation does not mean false information.

It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing." Neil Postman "NPR and PBS at a national level tend to provide a bland variant of mainstream and conventional journalism, comparable to what's on the commercial networks, especially on highly sensitive matters such as the economy and the U.S.

Role in the world.

Public broadcasting is so obsessed with conservative criticism, even more than commercial news media journalists are, that it bends over backwards to appease the Right and appear "balanced." Robert McChesney "24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent.

And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe.

Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off.

America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract." Will Hutton "To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents.

Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing.

Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands.

That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them." Michael Parenti "Selective Service has been registering young men for over 20 years and at any moment the president can go to Congress and ask them to reauthorize conscription for a male combat draft for ages 18-25.

All that is needed is a short, "trigger" resolution and the draft for men 18 to 25 is back." from blatanttruth.org "We're not in the business of providing news and information, We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products.

" Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays "Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed by the [U.S.] ruling elite acting under cover of state authority distinguish them from garden variety killers." Darrell Hamamoto "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 "Media criticism does exist in America.

But by and large, it is not citizen-based criticism designed to make media a better source of information in a democracy.

Instead, it is a cynical manipulation of the discourse designed to silence even the mildest dissent from the conservative, militantly pro-corporate dogma that has come to pass for news in an era when "reporters" brag about the size of their American-flag lapel pins." Robert McChesney and John Nichols "Cuba has ...

Been condemned for not allowing its people to flee the island.

That so many want to leave Cuba is treated as proof that Cuban socialism is a harshly repressive system, rather than that the U.S.

Embargo has made life difficult in Cuba.

That so many millions more want to leave capitalist countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador, Philippines, South Korea, Macedonia, and others too numerous to list is never treated as grounds for questioning the free-market system that inflicts such misery on the Third World." Michael Parenti "The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news.

Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theater directors instead of journalists." Arundhati Roy "While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures." Representative Henry Waxman "The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically and instead to accept the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good." Robert Jensen "It's time for our business and political leaders to help redefine morality beyond sex, drugs, and rock and roll to include lying, hypocrisy, and callous indifference to those in need." Arianna Huffington "If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy...

But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country." Michael Parenti "If the U.S.

Really believes that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military and political leadership over the last handful of administrations, and more." Peter McClaren "The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power.

They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences.

They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business.

To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." Noam Chomsky "An alternative [U.S.

Foreign] policy offering real security would require ending the support of oppressive rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere, pursuing a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, changing our oil-dependent energy policy, and replacing the drive for overwhelming global military dominance with policies for the peaceful prevention of atrocities and deadly conflict." Friends Committee on National Legislation " Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

" Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English author and social critic "There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists.

If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason;

If we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications;

If we lived in a country where people could be held indefinitely based ...

On mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists....

But that wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live." Senator Russ Feingold "The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag." Norman Mailer "Those who own the country ought to govern it." John Jay, first chief justice of the United States, 1787 "Iraq was the target because neoconservatives wanted to remake the governments of the Middle East, to secure long-term US.

Access to oil, to open the economies to American investment and to protect Israel through installation of governments friendly to the United States." David Moberg "The communists had Pravda.

Republicans have Fox." MoveOn.org ad "In a media universe where you're likely to find right-wing conservatives on ABC, Fox, or NPR, the facts don't matter;

Only the framing.

And in the hands of biased pundits posing as objective journalists, the framing is always going to be the same: promilitary, pro-government, and pro-war." David Potorti "The United States is the world's largest consumer of oil ....

Much of the world's oil lies beneath Iraq and its Gulf neighbors...

Experts say oil played a significant role in the decision to confront Iraq." Council on Foreign Relations "This is not about oil, and anyone who thinks that is badly misunderstanding the situation." Donald Rumsfeld "The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies.

A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks.

The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization." William Greider "A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." William Blum "For the third time in the last hundred years, the U.S.

Has invaded and occupied Haiti.

Working behind the scenes, the U.S.

Conducted a destabilization campaign aimed at toppling the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

This is a message to the rest of the region: If you don't obey, the U.S.

Will impose sanctions, overthrow your government, install a client regime, and support death squads to crush any resistance." Ashley Smith "Democracy is not about trust;

It is about distrust.

It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry.

It is about responsible government.

We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on." Michael Parenti "To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises.

But that is not what the public demands." Eric Alterman "The United States is the greatest threat to world peace, and has been for a long time, and not merely because it is the world's only superpower.

Equally important, the United States is also far more disposed to use its power than any other powerful nation currently is.

Though Americans are culturally and emotionally blind to the fact, the mere intrusion of US power is, in and of itself, destabilizing." T.D.

Allman "The corporations don't have to lobby the government any more.

They are the government." Jim Hightower "The men and women who enlist in this country's military [should] be told the truth that they are not protecting the United States, they are and always have been protecting corporate interests." Chante Wolf "The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets." Lawrence Grossman - longtime head of PBS and NBC News "[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad.

Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy." Michael Parenti "From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes.

In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair." William Blum "War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport.

The military and the press ...

Have turned war into a vast video arcade game.

Its very essence - death - is hidden from public view." Chris Hedges "A tiny portion of the population controls the lion's share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media...

These individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse." Michael Parenti "The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." Noam Chomsky "[U.S.] domestic policy ...

Has focused on creating a massive welfare state for corporations even as the minimal welfare state benefiting the majority of the people was dismantled." Lawrence Shoup "Media manipulation in the U.S.

Today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want.

That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." Mark Crispin Miller "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

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, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945 "This country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth...

The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but it is also a war on the people of the United States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living.

The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the superrich.

The lives of our young are being stolen.

And the thieves are in the White House." Howard Zinn "George Bush and corporate America are intent on eliminating taxes on all capital incomes.

Nor do they care if record budget deficits are the result.

Many of their more right-wing friends, including those in Congress, actually want larger deficits.

They see chronic, record deficits as producing the budget crisis necessary to use as an excuse to privatize Social Security and dismantle what remains of the Roosevelt New Deal programs of the 1930s." Jack Rasmus "We are the only advanced nation without a national system of subsidized health care." Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America "With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario.

They start demonizing a foreign leader ...

Charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ...

Are swept along." Michael Parenti "[The Right] lie with impunity.

Let's face it. They're liars.

They lied about the reason they took our sons and daughters to war.

They spend millions of dollars in campaign ads saying they are for a prescription drug benefit under Medicare while they work to destroy Medicare and replace it with private plans and HMOs.

They call their dirty air legislation "Clear Skies" and their plan to give the timber companies our trees, "Healthy Forests." They call their job-killing economic program a "jobs program." They say they are for peace when they are for war.

Millions of children are left behind under their miserly "No Child Left Behind" education bill.

They tout a child tax credit for working families and then silently drop it in favor of more tax cuts for millionaires." Rep.

Jan Schakowsky "When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends.

Looking at things that way, the George W.

Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms." T.D.

Allman "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever?

It comes from Moscow, from Russia.

It comes straight out of the pit of hell." Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston "Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it.

They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases.

So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it.

Those are gifts from U.S.

Taxpayer to U.S. corporations..." Noam Chomsky "The U.S.

Record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions...

Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion." Carl Boggs "America's punitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor ...

America [is] a society in which a permanent state of social disintegration is held in check only by the creation of a swollen apparatus of confinement and control that has no counterpart in our own history or in any other industrial democracy." Elliott Currie "The quest for homeland security is heading ...

Toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ...

If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed." William Greider "Cheap labor has always been at the heart of U.S.-Haitian relations, ever since the Haitian Revolution in 1804.

It was actually a slave rebellion, the first and still the only successful one in modern history.

The U.S. sided with French colonialism as the U.S.

Economy was based on slavery at the time and Haiti represented the first "dangerous example." Ricky Baldwin "Expecting FOX News to report real news is about as silly as waiting for George Bush and Dick Cheney to tell the truth...

Americans care, but it's tough to care when you don't know what's going on.

That ignorance is what the warmakers count on and what the corporate media delivers." Amy Goodman "The U.S.

Continues to rank last among developed nations in official [international] development assistance, giving only 0.12% of GNP." Friends Committee on National Legislation "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas ..." Thomas L.

Friedman "For the media owners, allegations of a liberal bias make it easier for them to impose the conservative bias they prefer.

For the pseudoliberals who work in the media system, confessing to a liberal bias is far more comfortable than admitting that they've sold out their beliefs for a nice salary.

It's only because the mainstream media is so conservative that all these right-wing pundits can make accusations of liberal bias without opposition." John K .

Wilson " The political leadership of this country, as exemplified by the campaign positions of Bush and Kerry, has become so obsessed with our own security fears and so convinced of our own virtue that it has very little to offer in the way of positive socioeconomic development initiatives.

To most of the people of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the United States has largely become irrelevant to their hopes for a better future -- except as a potential market for some of their goods or as a source of outsourced jobs." Sherle Schewenninger " Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.

" Milton Friedman "Political discussion in the United States is usually restricted to the moderate to conservative range that precludes discussion of class conflict.

If "class warfare" is mentioned, it is because a conservative wants to suggest that certain matters should be kept off-limits in American political discussion" Steve Brouwer "Americans tend to believe they have the best health care in the world, but in truth it is a second-rate system and destined to get a lot worse and much more expensive." Donald Barlett and James Steele "[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral.

It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering.

It's that they just don't care ...

The same that could be said about a sociopath.

As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ...

Then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home - the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies.

American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things." William Blum "What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret;

To believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ... To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted. Believe me this is true.

Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse.

You wait for the next and the next.

You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.

You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ...

You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.

Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

" German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist "The U.S.

Is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted.

The Bush Administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so, places global security in jeopardy, as other nations feel entitled to do the same.

The rejected treaties include: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM).

The U.S. is also not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the U.N.

Framework Convention on Climate Change." Project Censored 2005 "The moment war is declared...

The mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves.

They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation... The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized... War is the health of the State.

It automatically sets in motion throughout society those 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... But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war.

Loyalty-or mystic devotion to the State-becomes the major imagined human value... In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification.

The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war... It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States... War is the health of the State.

Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover..." Randolph Bourne, "The State", 1918 "Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public." Bill Moyers "Four sorrows ...

Are certain to be visited on the United States.

Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S.

Will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787.

First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut.

Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta.

Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.

Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens." Chalmers Johnson "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 Crimes Tribunal, 1950 "Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise.

They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike." William O.

Douglas, former U.S.

Supreme Court Justice, 1969 "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead " Many of us regard ourselves as mildly liberal or centrist politically, voice fairly pleasant sentiments about our poor children, contribute money to send poor kids to summer camp, feel benevolent.

We're not nazis; we're nice people.

We read sophisticated books.

We go to church. We go to synagogue.

Meanwhile, we put other people's children into an economic and environmental death zone.

We make it hard for them to get out.

We strip the place bare of amenities.

And we sit back and say to ourselves, "Well, I hope that they don't kill each other off.

But if they do, it's not my fault." Jonathan Kozol " The range of debate between the dominant U.S.

[political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class.

" Robert McChesney "Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government.

If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest." Charles Derber, Corporation Nation "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin, 1759 "If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power.

They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets.

We will control ourselves." Howard Zinn "The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world." Michael Parenti " To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

" C. Wright Mills - from the book The Power Elite "Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." William Blum " The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic." John Dewey, American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952 " It is only when a society shares caring values that its people can feel secure.

" Michael Lerner "The only thing worth globalizing is dissent." Arundhati Roy "In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants." Robert McChesney and John Nichols " The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought." Emma Goldman "For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...

That almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." William Shirer "No form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away.

This means that it is up to the citizenry, those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well being." Howard Zinn " I am astonished each time I come to the U.S.

By the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world.

It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.. Eduardo Galeano " When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking." John Wooden "To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization." Jeremy Seabrook " With unfailing consistancy, U.S.

Intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy.

Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S.

Leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ...

Whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests." Michael Parenti " If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America.

Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence?

Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?

" Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote: : "Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.

At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees." Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent "Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world ...

Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know.

That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations." Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent Does it occur to you that these are exactly the effects to be expected in a child who grows up watching Sesame Street?

(And that is THE BEST kid's show on tv!) Attending public schools for twelve years emphasizes the effects until they become the only world the young adult has ever known.

>"A well-functioning democracy has a culture of free speech, not simply legal protection of free speech.

It encourages independence of mind.

It imparts a willingness to challenge prevailing opinion through both words and deeds.

Equally important, it encourages a certain set of attitudes in listeners, one that gives a respectful hearing to those who do not embrace the conventional wisdom.

In a culture of free speech, the attitude of listeners is no less important than that of speakers." Cass Sunstein< This is correct.

And profoundly important.

The point of "free speech" is not free speech itself;

The point is that this "free speech" should effect change.

Otherwise, why should it exist? If we forget this lesson, we are lost. This Administration has relegated the function of "free speech" to the arena of speak only.

Empty speech. And very quietly.

Because we are watching you. There is "big" free speech (which changes things), and there is "small" free speech (which changes nothing);

What we now observe, in this country, is unquestionably "small" free speech.

"I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of Man" - Thomas Jefferson

Quote: s http://antiwar.com/Quote: s.php Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. ~Winston Churchill The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. War is a racket.

It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. ~General Smedley Butler Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people. ~John T.

Flynn The great error of nearly all studies of war...

Has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics... ~Simone Weil We may extend our dominion over the whole continent...but be assured it will be at the price of our free institutions. ~Rep.

William Waters Boyce I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses... ~Harry Emerson Fosdick Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly. ~Senator Robert M.

La Follette After every ''victory'' you have more enemies. ~Jeanette Winterson The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise. ~Garet Garrett I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats... ~Benjamin Franklin [T]he essence of so-called war prosperity;

It enriches some by what it takes from others.

It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income. ~Ludwig von Mises Our children are not born to hate, they are raised to hate. ~Thomas della Peruta Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. ~Marie Beyle I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own. ~Phillip Caputo I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them;

The pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die. ~Mary Roberts Rinehart Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ~George Washington The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. ~Major Ralph Peters, US Military For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit. ~Ernie Pyle Patriotism means to stand by the country.

It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official... ~Theodore Roosevelt The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all. ~Tacitus War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. ~William Cowper Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy... ~Abraham Lincoln Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. ~Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice War is fear cloaked in courage. ~General William Westmoreland Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist.

You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor. ~A pirate, from St.

Augustine's "City of God" What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. ~Marcus Tullius Cicero We are the ones responsible to determine whether the war that our marines, soldiers and airmen are fighting in is worth the cause... ~Scott Ritter I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit. ~Thucydides The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. ~Frederick Douglass Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism.

Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. ~Noam Chomsky It is far easier to make war than peace. ~Georges Clemenceau 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 Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. ~Ulysses S.

Grant It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village. ~Voltaire Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. ~James Madison War doesn't make boys men, it makes men dead. ~Ken Gillespie An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. ~Thomas Paine Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms... ~Simone Weil Every nation has its war party.

It is not the party of democracy.

It is the party of autocracy.

It seeks to dominate absolutely. ~Senator Robert M.

La Follette It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. ~Albert Camus We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it. ~Edward R.

Murrow Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies. ~W.

L. George The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. ~Marcus Aurelius The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious. ~Marcus Tullius Cicero Man was/is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they. ~Jean Jaques Rousseau The dangerous patriot...drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. ~Colonel James A.

Donovan, Marine Corps I've been immersed in it too long.

My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused.

The hurt has become too great. ~Ernie Pyle It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else. ~Theodore Roosevelt Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear. ~General Douglas MacArthur For what can war, but endless war, still breed? ~John Milton Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people... ~Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. ~Mahatma Gandhi Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders. ~Marquis de Sade The statesman who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. ~Winston Churchill It is always more valuable to report the truth. ~Jean-Paul Sartre In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. ~George Orwell What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. ~Leo Tolstoy Peace is constructed, not fought for. ~Brent Davis Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. ~Thucydides We say that we care about the war, but we don’t even really know what we’re fighting for. ~Scott Ritter In this war – as in others – I am less interested in honoring the dead than in preventing the dead. ~Butler Shaffer It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood...War is hell. ~General William Tecumseh Sherman It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. ~Voltaire 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 some men...in order to prevent the supposed intentions of their adversaries, have committed the most enormous cruelties... ~Clearchus, in Xenophon [War] might be avoidable were more emphasis placed on the training to social interest, less on the attainment of egotistical grandeur. ~Lydia Sicher Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war. ~Mark Twain About the Quote: : from "The Mysterious Stranger," published 1910. If, finally, violence meets with violence, we have confirmation of the age old adage that war though it kills many men, makes many more men evil. ~Fritz Medicus It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so... ~Robert A.

Heinlein Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. ~Lord Acton Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. ~Groucho Marx Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ~Margaret Mead No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. ~James Madison Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. ~Issac Asimov About the Quote: : The character Salvor Hardin speaks these words in Asimov's "Foundation." The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature. ~James Madison ...Violence as a way of gaining power...is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security... ~Alfred Adler A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man. ~Alfred Adler As long as we can talk with people, as long as one can keep the guns quiet, one has a chance. ~Lydia Sicher It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. ~Alfred Adler We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. ~Jimmy Carter 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. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be. ~Thomas Jefferson The dangerous patriot...is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. ~Colonel James A.

Donovan, Marine Corps The next war ...

May well bury Western civilization forever. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn War is the continuation of politics by other means. ~Karl Von Clausewitz Man has no right to kill his brother.

It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers? ~Marquis de Sade To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war. ~Otto von Bismarck About the Quote: : Bismarck (1815-1898) was the first Chancellor of the Germany Empire from 1871-1890.

This Quote: is often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill. The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed.

A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. ~William Ellery Channing ...Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population... ~Jean-Paul Sartre War is at best barbarism.

Its glory is all moonshine...War is hell. ~General William Tecumseh Sherman The voice of protest...is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum...is bidding all men...obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. ~Charles Eliot Norton The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. ~George Orwell About the Quote: : This Quote: is spoken by the character of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel, "1984." The war...was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides. ~Robert E.

Lee Where is the justice of political power if it...marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills? ~Kahlil Gibran We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower Respect for the rights of others means peace. ~Benito Juárez War is not a word, it's an acronym for "Wasting Another's Resources." ~Ramman Kenoun Let us become inspired by inherent beauty, and not impassioned by manufactured hate. ~Nima Shirali, Middle Eastern Reconciliation Forum War remains the decisive human failure. ~John Kenneth Galbraith That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. ~Theodore Roosevelt All nations want peace, but they want a peace that suits them. ~Admiral Sir John Fisher The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. ~Thomas Jefferson The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. ~Albert Camus Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. ~Albert Einstein All mankind...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. ~John Locke Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it. ~Anne O'Hare McCormick Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. ~H.L.

Mencken One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing;

That to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one. ~Agatha Christie I hate war...for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations;

Entangling alliances with none. ~Thomas Jefferson To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman. ~Alfred Adler War is a racket.

It is the only one international in scope.

It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. ~General Smedley Butler War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. ~Lois McMaster Bujold We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. ~Stephen Vincent Benét The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. ~Lyndon B.

Johnson History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. ~Ronald Reagan What is more immoral than war? ~Marquis de Sade There are only two things we should fight for.

One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. ~General Smedley Butler War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. ~Senator John McCain Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another.

It is total...because it may well involve the whole world. ~Jean-Paul Sartre Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced). ~Erasmus, the 16th-century scholar Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it. ~William Penn Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer? ~Kahlil Gibran Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower We first fought...in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism.

Our excuses for global domination always change. ~Serj Tankian People do not make wars;

Governments do. ~Ronald Reagan Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will certainly face defeat. ~General Vo Nguyen Giap (Vietnam) Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing. ~Ronald Reagan To announce that there must be no criticism of the president...is morally treasonable to the American public. ~Theodore Roosevelt To declare that the end justifies the means, to declare that the government may commit crimes, would bring terrible retribution. ~Justice Louis D.

Brandeis Political language ...

Is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ~George Orwell 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 The Department of Defense is the behemoth...With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire. ~The 9/11 Commission Report About the Quote: : Norton First Edition Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. ~Theodore Roosevelt This world of ours...must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower War is the business of barbarians. ~Napoleon Bonaparte The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. ~George Orwell About the Quote: : This Quote: is spoken by the character of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel, "1984." War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder. ~Alexander Berkman One day the end of the world will come as a result of a 'justified' war. ~Mikhail Gofman, Antiwar.com reader Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. ~George W.

Bush There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat. ~Jimmy Carter Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy. ~Alfred Adler War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over...is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen. ~G.

K. Chesterton War is organized murder and torture against our brothers. ~Alfred Adler Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter... ~Winston Churchill Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism...which equates the national honor with military victory. ~Colonel James A.

Donovan, Marine Corps Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. ~Marquis de Sade War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. ~Ludwig von Mises Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. ~George Orwell Criticism in a time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government. ~Sen.

Robert Taft, (R) Ohio In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war.

As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war. ~Senator Robert M.

La Follette In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments. ~Napoleon Bonaparte There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave. ~John James Ingalls There is no way to peace.

Peace is the way. ~Mahatma Gandhi About the Quote: : This Quote: is also often credited to a peace activist A.J.

Muste. There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance. ~George Bernard Shaw ...no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. ~Ronald Reagan Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. ~Dwight D.

Eisenhower Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well...than to kill ten thousand. ~Olive Schreiner The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ~George Orwell The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people. ~Frank Kent The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. ~Albert Camus In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. ~Jose Narosky What a cruel thing is war...to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E.

Lee ...to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. ~Theodore Roosevelt If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest. ~Thomas Jefferson War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. ~Alexander Berkman There is but one evil, war.

All the other proclaimed evils such as hate, greed, descrimination, and jealousy are only sub-categories of it. ~Jose Barreiro Emphasis on military prowess is an indication of philosophical poverty. ~Henk Middelraad War brings out the most negative emotional human responses on both sides. ~Henk Middelraad I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. ~James Baldwin Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with... ~Gerard K.

O'Neill Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance.

It is also owed to justice and to humanity. ~James Bryce Don't talk to me about atrocities;

All war is an atrocity. ~Lord Kitchener (Horatio Herbert) War is a way of shattering to pieces...materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and...too intelligent. ~George Orwell About the Quote: : This Quote: is spoken by the character of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel, "1984." Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. ~Ludwig von Mises The State thrives on war – unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed – expands on it, glories in it. ~Murray Rothbard Old men declare war.

But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~Herbert C.

Hoover 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 How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men? ~Lao Tzu Society has arisen out of the works of peace;

The essence of society is peacemaking. ~Ludwig von Mises There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in.

It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive. ~Robin Cook About the Quote: : Cook is Britain's former foreign secretary.

He resigned from the British Cabinet over the Iraq War. Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. ~Russell Baker A people free to choose will always choose peace. ~Ronald Reagan Any excuse will serve a tyrant. ~Aesop War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing... ~Lewis Mumford Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. ~Mark Twain Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise. ~Sir Francis Bacon The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. ~James Madison Let us form a new religion, that which would be called 'humanity', with 'peace' as its prophet. ~Nima Shirali, Middle Eastern Reconciliation Forum All men having power ought to be mistrusted. ~James Madison Think of war as a game of Russian roulette.

It is a game of chance with your life as the grand prize. ~Ramman Kenoun What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise. ~Barbara Jordan Dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. ~Gerard K.

O'Neill Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. ~James Bryce Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained.

It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism. ~Dorothy Thompson Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner. ~James Wolcott About the Quote: : in his article “From Fear to Eternity” in Vanity Fair, March 2005 National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people. ~Senator John Taylor About the Quote: : US Senator(SC), lived from 1753-1824 There are no politics in war.

Politics is the luxury of the safe-at-home.

War is a lottery of survival. ~John Cory War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures. ~Congressman Ron Paul In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer... ~Lewis Mumford About the Quote: : from "Technics and Civilization" The reality right now is that the most dangerous opinion in the world is the opinion of a U.S.

Serviceman. ~Lance Cpl.

Devin Kelly (USMC) We carefully nurture a spirit of detachment toward the wars we pay for. ~James Carroll About the Quote: : The Boston Globe, 9/21/04 The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies. ~Basil O'Connor All government wars are unjust. ~Murray Rothbard The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. ~Herman Goering We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening... ~Leo Tolstoy Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself. ~Lao Tzu Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce. ~Richard Cobden Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it. ~Thomas Jefferson As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. ~Josh Billings Tyrants seldom want pretexts. ~Edmund Burke The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.

It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. ~Albert Einstein To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public. ~Noam Chomsky This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs;

When he first appears he is a protector. ~Plato Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it. ~Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist 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. ~Butler Shaffer Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich. ~Sir Peter Ustinov The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. ~Louis D.

Brandeis Peace...is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. ~Dorothy Thompson We believed ourselves indestructable...

Watching only the madmen outside our frontiers, and we remained defenseless against our own madmen. ~Jacobo Timerman There is no morality in war.

Morality is the privilege of those judging from the distance.

War is only death and destruction... ~John Cory That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true... ~Thomas Paine

Shocking (or not so shocking) Quote: s http://www.oaknorton.com/shockingQuote: s.cfm "The Constitution Is What The Judges Say It Is." – Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles E.

Hughes "Candidates With Deeply Held Christian Beliefs Are Unfit and Disqualified From Serving As A Federal Judge." - New York Senator Charles Schumer This year will go down in history.

For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration.

Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future! - Adolph Hitler [1935] The Weapons Act of Nazi Germany. Capital must protect itself in every way...Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible.

When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers.

People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders.

This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world.

By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. -J.P.

Morgan "I'm not sure it's accurate, legally or historically to call the Declaration of Independence a 'founding document'." -Senator Steve Kelley, 12/22/2003 "We cannot expect the Americans to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of Socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism." - Nikita Kruschev, Premiere of the former Soviet Union, 3-1/2 months before his first visit to the United States. "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism.

But, under the name of "liberalism," they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas, for many years the U.S.

Socialist Party presidential candidate "...100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt...all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government." - Grace Commission report submitted to President Ronald Reagan on January 15, 1984. "I don't like the income tax.

Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'.

That's socialism.

It's written into the Communist Manifesto.

Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him.." - T.

Coleman Andrews, Commissioner of Internal Revenue, May 25, 1956 in U.S.

News & World Report "Democracy is indispensable to socialism." - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin "Democracy is the road to Socialism." - Karl Marx "Democracy is the most vile form of government...

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." - James Madison "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H.L.

Mencken The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War).

… The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

… Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless.

Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. - Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp.

1247-1248.] "If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." — Prince Phillip - Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund - Quote: d in 'Are You Ready For Our New Age Future?', Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December '95 "The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man." — Merton Lambert - former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation - Harpeth Journal, December 18, '62 "A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." — Ted Turner - CNN founder and UN supporter - Quote: d in the The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June '96 "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ...

All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." — David Brower - first Executive Director of the Sierra Club;

Founder of Friends of the Earth;

And founder of the Earth Island Insitute - Quote: d by Dixie Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, p.166 "The United Nation's goal is to reduce population selectively by encouraging abortion, forced sterilization, and control of human reproduction, and regards two-thirds of the human population as excess baggage, with 350,000 people to be eliminated per day." - Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier, Nov.

1991 "The first task is population control at home.

How do we go about it?

Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control.

One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food.

Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size." — Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, p.135

Martin Luther King Quote: s http://www.quotationspage.com/Quote: ...uther_King_Jr./ All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.

Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity.

It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.

The foundation of such a method is love. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars...

Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality. Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality. We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. When you are right you cannot be too radical;

When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative. The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. Martin Luther King Jr., "Strength to Love" All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. Martin Luther King Jr., 'Strength to Love,' 1963 The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers. Martin Luther King Jr., 'Strength to Love,' 1963 I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. Martin Luther King Jr., Accepting Nobel Peace Prize, Dec.

10, 1964 Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time;

The need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

The foundation of such a method is love. Martin Luther King Jr., December 11, 1964 Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion;

It was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963 Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963 I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live. Martin Luther King Jr., Speech in Detroit, June 23, 1963 ...And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land.

I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

So I'm happy tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man. Martin Luther King Jr., Speech in Memphis, April 3, 1968, the day before King was assassinated Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963 Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.

We have guided missiles and misguided men. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963 The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

George Orwell Quote: s http://www.george-orwell.org/l_Quote: s.html " Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

" " If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

" " To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

" " Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

" " Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.

This is elementary common sense.

If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other.

Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.

In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.

" " Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.

It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.

In other words: it is war minus the shooting.

" " Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.

" " The great enemy of clear language is insincerity " " To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

" " For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

" " Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

" " All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

" " The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

" " An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

" " Political language.

. . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

" " Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

" " At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.

" " On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

" " Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

" " Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

" " Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

" " Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past.

" " If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

" " We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

" " Power is not a means, it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;

One makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture.

The object of power is power.

" " War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

"

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs;

When he first appears he is a protector." - Plato "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - U.S.

President James Madison "Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".

- Adolph Hitler "Why of course the people don't want war ...

But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering, Nazi leader. "The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror.

[The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".

- Josef Stalin http://georgewashington.blogspot.co...own-people.html

"... but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..." -- Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) Source: Federalist, No.

29 http://Quote: s.liberty-tree.ca/Quote: ...lton.Quote: .B32F "The highest number to which a standing army can be carried in any country does not exceed one hundredth part of the souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms.

This portion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men.

To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.

It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.

Besides the advantage of being armed, it forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

The governments of Europe are afraid to trust the people with arms.

If they did, the people would surely shake off the yoke of tyranny, as America did.

Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors." -- James Madison (1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President http://Quote: s.liberty-tree.ca/Quote: ...ison.Quote: .C88A "What, Sir, is the use of a militia?

It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.

... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." -- Rep.

Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) of Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention Source: spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789 http://Quote: s.liberty-tree.ca/Quote: ...erry.Quote: .71B0

"I hate newspapermen.

They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts.

I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast." William Tecumseh Sherman Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans." Robert E.

Lee

"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." -- Aldous Huxley, 1959 http://100777.com/node/417 "The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything...

That's the whole point of good propaganda.

You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for.

Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy?

That's the one you're not allowed to talk about." -- Noam Chomsky http://www.chomsky.info/

Quote: : "The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything...

-- Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky thinks evidence and facts don't mean anything.

In 1979, he signed the following petition: "Dr.

Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France.

Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the "Holocaust" question.

Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him.

Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives. We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him. We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.

" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves. Carl Jung Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble. Carl Jung Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. Carl Jung The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.

The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Carl Jung The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. Carl Jung The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Carl Jung The shoe that fits one person pinches another;

There is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Carl Jung We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. Carl Jung As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962 The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. Carl Jung, "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.

The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconciousness", 1917 An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling.

The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. Carl Jung Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism. Carl Jung If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy.

What right have we then to depreciate imagination. Carl Jung Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better. Carl Jung There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. Carl Jung I could not say I believe.

I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. Carl Jung As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. Carl Jung I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. Carl Jung To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can. Carl Jung As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being. Carl Jung Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you. Carl Jung http://www.quotationspage.com/Quote: s/Carl_Jung/ The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. CARL JUNG, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.

The one is the shadow of the other. CARL JUNG, On the Psychology of the Unconsciousness Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality;

It is just as unsavory as gross sensuality. CARL JUNG, Marriage as a Psychological Relationship The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium. CARL JUNG, Man and His Symbols In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. CARL JUNG, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. CARL JUNG, Modern Man in Search of a Soul Man needs difficulties;

They are necessary for health. CARL JUNG, The Transcendent Function The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body. CARL JUNG, Factors Determining Human Behavior Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.

He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. CARL JUNG, "New Paths in Psychology"

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. -Eugene McCarthy

..is it true that Time Warner Cable was recently purchased by the Chinese and that's why they are changing the name to Comcast?

A Quote: from David Rockefeller's book "Memoirs" . "For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions.

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.

If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it" - David Rockefeller

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, In Freedom "A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed.

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 "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent busybodies.

The robber barons' cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;

But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S.

Lewis "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." -James Thurber "The human tendency is to believe anything that comforts, and deny what discomforts, so that unpleasant untruths are simply ignored." "Most People Are Wrong About Most Things Most Of The Time" -Dr.

Dan Duffy Sr. "Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense.

The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible "noble purpose," but to plain, naked human evil. -Ayn Rand Those who appear great, are great because we are on our knees, let us rise "Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past."--George Orwell (O'Brien in 1984) "With most people unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another."--Lichtenberg "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France (1844-1924) "All propaganda is a lie even when its telling the truth." -G Orwell

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. – James Madison (1751-1836), 4th U.S.

President and author of the U.S.

Constitution When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. – Sinclair Lewis, (It Can’t Happen Here, 1935) 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. – Franklin D.

Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US President …An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will;

It is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy.

For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments.

Even this formality is not necessary in an empire. – John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President I’m the commander in chief, see, I don’t need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things.

That’s the interesting part about being president.

Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation. – George W.

Bush, Quote: d in Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/...ise-in-the-usa/

"I hate quotations.

Tell me what you know." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson just playing devils advocate

Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism." -Thomas Jefferson "To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men." - Abraham Lincoln "What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that its people preserve the spirit of resistance." - Thomas Jefferson "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to prevail in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke, British statesman "Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it." - Will Durant "Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." - Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr. http://georgewashington.blogspot.co.../06/Quote: s.html

"You can lead a man to ponder, but you can't make him think." - SmartAZ

The Religious Right is Neither. - AN

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer;

Then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. - Etienne de la Boetie, "The Politics of Obedience" (1553) Freedom is like drink.

If you take any at all, you might as well take enough to make you happy for a while. - Finley Peter Dunne Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase...the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. - Frank Herbert To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave - Fredrick Douglass If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear - George Orwell Whoever controls the media, controls the mind. - Jim Morrison Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F.

Kennedy The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose. - John Milton And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world.

And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. - John Steinbeck, "East of Eden" If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all. - Noam Chomsky http://Quote: s.prolix.nu/Freedom/

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires of freedom in people's minds.” - Samuel Adams

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.

... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.

It stands as a protector of property rights.

If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." Quote: by: Alan Greenspan Chairman, US Federal Reserve Bank Source: from page 101 of the book "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand " with additional articles by Alan Greenspan - 1966 http://Quote: s.liberty-tree.ca/Quote: ...span_Quote: _1cb8

"Two wrongs don't make a right.

However, three lefts do." Robin Williams

Quote: s from Ayn Rand http://www.aynrand.org/ # There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob. # Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. # Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force? # Individual rights are not subject to a public vote;

A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority;

The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). # It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision.

Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable;

Men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable;

It is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable.

A dictatorship has to be capricious;

It has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational;

It has to deal not in death, but in sudden death;

A state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. # The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another. # Force and mind are opposites;

Morality ends where the gun begins. # Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind. # The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society;

It is the right to disagree that is crucial.

It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree... # To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true. # To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking;

To maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality. # The smallest minority on earth is the individual.

Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. # There's no way to rule innocent men.

The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.

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. # There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic.

Force or persuasion.

Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns. # America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization.

They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. # Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life # There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. # Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. # Man's character is the product of his premises. # No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge. # The mind leads, the emotions follow. # The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. # To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion. # Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense.

The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible "noble purpose," but to plain, naked human evil. # When personal judgement is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. # Thinking men cannot be ruled. # If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before;

Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor.

Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. # Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. # Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history.

Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras;

Whenever it fell, so did mankind. # Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world.

All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction.

But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship.

Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars.

Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America. # The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. # There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men.

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. # Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics- on a theory of man's nature and of man's relationship to existence.

It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice.

When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as "conservatism." # To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer. # Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government. # The basic need of the creator is independence.

The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion.

It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever.

It demands total independence in function and in motive.

To a creator, all relations with men are secondary. # Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give.

Yet one cannot give that which has not been created.

Creation comes before distribution- or there will be nothing to distribute.

The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.

Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.

We praise an act of charity.

We shrug at an act of achievement. # Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others.

But the creator is the man who disagrees.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current.

But the creator is the man who goes against the current.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together.

But the creator is the man who stands alone. # A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud).

It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i.e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong).

Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime. # There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law.

Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right;

It may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas;

It may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology. By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas. # Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. # There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule- executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses- the nationalization or expropriation of private property- and censorship.

A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw. # The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others).

There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right. # Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.

In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie;

In Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people;

In America, it is the businessmen. # It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same.

The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence.

All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship;

Nobody wins-except the ruling clique. # Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically;

They cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. # To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality. # Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death. # Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value;

Political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.

The businessman's tool is values;

The bureaucrat's tool is fear. # The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality.

The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual.

He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove.

He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort. # Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent. # It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings.

Where there's service, there's someone being served.

The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters.

And intends to be the master. # To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it. # The purpose of all art is the objectification of values. # That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you.

The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices.

That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.

That is just WAY too much to absorb in one sitting.

How about redoing it as a "Quote: of the day" That said, my meager contribution (all in fun - don't flame me): " A true Lady takes off her pride with her clothes and does her whorish best" - Lazarus Long.

Quote: s from Thomas Jefferson "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." ~ Thomas Jefferson "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." ~ Thomas Jefferson "It is incumbent upon every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.

A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world." ~ Thomas Jefferson "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." ~ Thomas Jefferson "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." ~ Thomas Jefferson "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." ~ Thomas Jefferson "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." ~ Thomas Jefferson "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~ Thomas Jefferson "To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

~ Thomas Jefferson Final Interesting Quote: ...

In light of the present financial crisis, it's now very interesting to read what Thomas Jefferson said in 1802: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." ~ Thomas Jefferson That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. Thomas Jefferson http://www.brainyQuote: .com/Quote: s/a..._jefferson.html .

Napoleon Bonaparte “When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes.

Money has no motherland;

Financiers are without patriotism and without decency;

Their sole object is gain.” Niccolo Machiavelli “For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.” President James Madison “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control of governments by controlling money and its issuance.” President Abraham Lincoln “The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity.

It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy.” President James A Garfield “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” The Rt.

Hon. Reginald McKenna – Chancellor of the Exchequer “I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money.

The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases.

Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit.

And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.” Sir Josiah Stamp – Bank of England “Banking was conceived in inequity and was born in sin.

The bankers own the earth.

Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again.

However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in.

But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the costs of your own salary, let them continue to create deposits.” President Woodrow Wilson “A great Industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.

Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men.

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 majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men. “I am a most unhappy man.

I have unwittingly ruined my country.” (President regretted signing into law the Federal Reserve Act) Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter “The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.” Louis T.

McFadden, Chairman of Banking & Currency Committee In 1932: “The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States.

It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations.

It makes and breaks government at will …” In 1933: “Roosevelt has brought with him from Wall Street James P.

Warburg, son of Paul M.

Warburg, Organizer and first Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve System…” In 1950: “This same Warburg had the audacity and arrogance to proclaim before the U.S.

Senate: ‘We shall have World Government whether or not we like it.

The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by Conquest or Consent’.” Senator Barry Goldwater “Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money-lenders.

The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited.

It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.” Henry Ford “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index....articleId=11491 "When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." --Robert Heinlein

Mao Tse Tung : "All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." (Problems of War and Strategy, Nov 6 1938, published in "Selected Works of Mao Zedong," 1965) http://triadblogs.com/ccw/9397/Favorite+Quote: s.html 1973 - August 10: The New York Times publishes "From a China Traveller" by David Rockefeller , who writes about Communist China: "One is impressed immediately by the sense of national harmony....There is a very real and pervasive dedication to chairman Mao and Maoist principles.

Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community purpose.

General social and economic progress is no less impressive....The enormous social advances of China have benefited greatly from the singleness of ideology and purpose....The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history." http://www.greaterthings.com/Conspi.../NWO_Quote: s.htm

---'The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.

Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.

Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.

These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.' ---'Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites ...

[Whose] ties cut across national boundaries ...

It is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook ...

The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty ...

Further progress will require greater American sacrifices.

More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken, with some consequent risk to the present relatively favorable American position.' Zbigniew Brzezinski - Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era 1970 http://www.scribd.com/doc/7868533/B...echnetronic-Era

Watch YouTube video - NWO From The Mouths of The Elite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkKbE9qCzQo&feature=fvw .

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.

And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are." H.

L. Mencken (1880-1956) http://www.theadvocates.org/celebri...-l-mencken.html

Discussion Title: Quotations That Make Us Think
Title Keywords: CurEvents.com  Global  Current  Events  Discussion  Forum  Quotations  That  Make  Think 



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