Quotations page 4

"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

*****

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin

*****

"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

*****

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship."

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

*****

"The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system."

Edward S. Herman

*****

" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic."

John Dewey

*****

" It is only when a society shares caring values that its people can feel secure. "

Michael Lerner

*****

"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, Third World Network

*****

" 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.

*****

"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

*****

"If we continue these policies, to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster, we are going to continue to degrade American life."

Roger Wilkins, Assistant Attorney General, Johnson administration

*****

"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, historian and author

*****

" A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"All over the world, people need change. The change? Getting control over the power and resources they need to solve their problems."

Jeremy Brecher, historian and author

*****

"The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster - an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self. "

William Dugger, management analyst

*****

"History is written by those who win and those who dominate."

Edward Said, literary critic

*****

"Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses."

Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, carrying a dispatch from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines

*****

" Politicians have become corporate prostitutes."

Helen Caldicott, MD

*****

" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."

Robert McChesney, journalist and author

*****

"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

Ambrose Bierce, American writer, 1842-1914

*****

 "We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism."

Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran, bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL. 

*****

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"If we continue these policies, to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster, we are going to continue to degrade American life."

Roger Wilkins, Assistant Attorney General, Johnson administration

*****

"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"Societies characterized by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the national agenda."

Charles Derber, Corporation Nation

*****

" Government exists for one purpose: to make things better for all people."

Eleanor Roosevelt

*****

" The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. "

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

*****

" In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy."

U.S. Senator Richard Durbin

*****

"Peace cannot exist without equality."

Edward Said, author

*****

" ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret. "

Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author

*****

"Communism is an enormously serviceable tool for achieving morally dubious goals under a morally acceptable cover. It is not acceptable to destabilize a country, overthrow its democratically elected government, and institute a reign of terror in order to lower taxes and wages for one's own multinational firms. It is necessary to put forward a higher moral imperative."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration
of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City."

Lawrence Summers World Bank economist and Deputy Secretary of Treasury, in a 1991 internal memorandum

*****

" Society's dominant discourse shapes not only its politics but the way people think about their personal lives and choices. Just as John F. Kennedy helped legitimize a discourse of idealism that gave impetus to the social movements of the 1960s, so Ronald Reagan managed to legitimize a discourse of selfishness and insensitivity that has had profound social consequences ... Shifting society's discourse - from one of selfishness and cynicism to one of idealism and caring - is the first and most important political goal ... in the next several decades. "

Michael Lerner, philosopher, psychologist, author

*****

"[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

*****

" We are social animals and we have a hierarachical and unequal society. It is a class society, and the class system creates and perpetuates the social role of consumption. We display our class membership and solidify our class positioning in large part through money, through what we have. Consumption is a way of verifying what you have and earn. "

Juliet Schor, economist and author

*****

" Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"We love your adherence to democratic principle."

Vice President George Bush
to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos

*****

" Once you have learned how to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

*****

"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. "

Harold Pinter, playwrite

*****

"The corporate media and pundit class increasingly function as press agents for whoever is in power."

Adolph L. Reed. Jr., The Progressive magazine, November 2001, p18

*****

"Our upside down welfare state is "socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor." The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people."

William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969

*****

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration
of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City."

Lawrence Summers World Bank economist and Deputy Secretary of Treasury, in a 1991 internal memorandum

*****

"The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated."

Arundhati Roy, author

*****

" It doesn't matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computor, or satellite. Everyone's going to have to deal with Disney. "

Michael Eisner, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Disney

*****

"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

*****

"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.

A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate

*****

"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

*****

" 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

*****

" 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

*****

" It is legal to purchase a fully assembled Uzi machine gun in this country [United States] but it's not legal to purchase a fully assembled low-watt radio transmitter. "

Greg Ruggerio

*****

"[True] liberty...means allowing people freely to say things you do not want to hear."

George Orwell

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