Quotations page 6
"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
*****
"The greatest menace
to freedom is an inert people."
Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis
*****
"Along with Sri Lanka,
the United States is one of only two countries in the world that
do not give politicians free broadcast time."
Peter Levine, The New Progressive
Era
*****
"Travel is fatal to
bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, and
charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny
corner of the globe."
Mark Twain
*****
"When Time magazine conducted
a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North
Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to
world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States."
Immanuel Wallerstein, Covert Action
Quarterly
*****
"President Bush cruelly
manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy
of the rest of the world - to introduce a "world order"
dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of
Defence, Donald Rumsfeld."
Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper
of Britain
*****
"To justify a preventive
war that the United Nations and global public opinion did not
want, a machine for propaganda and mystification, organized by
the doctrinaire sect around George Bush, produced state-sponsored
lies with a determination characteristic of the worst regimes
of the 20th century."
Ignacio Ramonet, Director of Le Monde Diplomatique
*****
"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, author
*****
"This nation is already
spending 10 percent more than it did on average during the Cold
War and more than it spent on average during the Vietnam and Korean
Wars."
Lawrence Korb
*****
"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, The American Prosperity
Myth
*****
"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
*****
"The Bush team has neared
some elements of fascism in its day-to-day operations ..."
Normon Solomon
*****
"To say 'I'm an embedded
journalist' is to say 'I'm a government propagandist'."
Noam Chomsky
*****
"Without communism ...
our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the
time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns
out to be - who else? the people of the United States."
Gore Vidal
*****
"Call it "nationalism"
when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word "patriotism"
for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian
place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world."
Barbara Ehrenreich, author
*****
"To plunder, to slaughter,
to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make
a wilderness, they call it peace."
Tacitus
*****
"War is not about flag-waving
and patriotism. War is about killing and death."
Christopher Hedges, NY Times corrspondent
*****
"The U. S. stands on the
threshold of a permanent state of war and a permanent war economy."
Friends Committee on National
Legislation
*****
"Multi-billion-dollar
multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's
sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders."
John le Carre' - author
*****
" We Americans claim to
be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to
violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of
projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens."
Emma Goldman
*****
"By the end of the millennium
five men controlled the world's media. And the people rejoiced,
because their TVs told them to."
Michael Moore
*****
'The United States ranks 139th
in the world in average voter turnout in national elections since
1945."
from a study by the Institute
for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
*****
"In many respects, we
now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the
great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues
of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any
meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations
and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed
to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times."
Robert W. McChesney, media critic
and author
*****
"Governments lie."
I.F. Stone
*****
"Tis the time's plague
when madmen lead the blind."
William Shakespeare's King Lear,
Act 4
*****
"If democracy is ever
to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning
government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper
offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism
and despair caused by the realization that the New World Order
means we are all to be managed and not represented."
Tony Benn, British Labour Party
Member of Parliament
*****
"The media do not set
their own investigative agendas independently, but operate as
part ... of the political establishment."
Peter Dale Scott, Cocaine Politics
*****
"One of the Iraq war's
major casualties is the credibility of the American media. Nobody
takes it seriously."
BBC World News commentator
*****
"Freedom of the Press
is meaningless if nobody asks a question."
Ani DiFranco, songwriter/singer,
from her song Serpentine
*****
"The United States is
not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness
of its propaganda system."
Edward S. Herman, political economist
and author
*****
" The problem in defense
is how far you can go [in military spending] without destroying
from within what you are trying to defend from without. "
President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
*****
"America, like Britain
before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has
committed herself against revolution and radical change in the
underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy
the world economic and political system, which assures the United
States its disproportionate share of economic and political power
... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in
the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and
modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening
way."
Richard Barnet, Intervention and
Revolution
*****
"Night after night audiences
are terrified and titillated, aroused and manipulated, but not
informed. Like an unbalanced diet, which gradually can lead to
serious illness, the local TV news threatens the health of our
community.'
Paul Klite, former executive director,
Rocky Mountain Media Watch
*****
"Only corporate America
enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it
pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable
because those who have bought the government also own the media."
Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace
*****
"The interests of the
corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into
dollars."
William O. Douglas, former U.S.
Supreme Court Justice, 1969
*****
"They that can give up
essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
*****
"The awful scenes of death
and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have
been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and
only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often
as a result of our policies."
Howard Zinn, after the 9-11 WTC
destruction in New York
*****
"The American people ought
to know that it is not them, but their government's policies,
that are so hated."
Arundhati Roy, author
*****
"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
*****
"Today, as in the Gilded
Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility
rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social
irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective
responsibility for employees - just as government has for its
citizens."
Charles Derber, Corporation Nation
*****
"Political freedom has
given way to guilt by association. Due process has given way to
detention on the Attorney General's say-so. Public scrutiny has
given way to secret detentions and secret trials. Equal protection
under law has given way to ethnic profiling."
The Nation magazine - about how
Sept.11 attack has allowed the government to take away Americans'
civil liberties
*****
"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
*****
"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
*****
" The corporate grip on
opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western
world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so
entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
Gore Vidal, novelist and critic
*****
"We pretend not to understand
the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the
dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military
presence."
Jerry Fresia, author of Toward
an American Revolution
*****
"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
*****
" U.S. Ieaders commit
war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial
role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place
and assuring a "favorable climate of investment" everywhere.
They do this by using their economic power, but also ... by supporting
Diem, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, Savimbi, Marcos, Fujimori, Salinas,
and scores of similar leaders. War crimes also come easily because
U.S. Ieaders consider themselves to be the vehicles of a higher
morality and truth and can operate in violation of law without
cost. It is also immensely helpful that their mainstream media
agree that their country is above the law and will support and
rationalize each and every venture and the commission of war crimes.
"
Edward Herman, political economist
and author
*****
"The United States supports
right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and
the Middle East ... because these are the rulers who have tied
their personal political destiny to the fortunes of the American
corporations in their countries... Revolutionary or nationalist
leaders have radically different political constituencies and
interests. For them creating "a good investment climate"
for the United States and developing their own country are fundamentally
conflicting goals. Therefore, the United States has a strong economic
interest in keeping such men from coming to power or arranging
for their removal if they do."
Richard Barnet, Intervention and
Revolution
*****
"There can be no liberty
for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies."
Walter Lippmann, 1920
*****
" 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
"How else to describe
the new (2001) administration's legislative agenda - elimination
of the inheritance tax, revision of the bankruptcy laws, the repeal
of safety regulations in the workplace, easing of restriction
on monopoly, etc. except as an act of class warfare? "
Lewis Lapham
*****
"What made the Gilded
Age was not the individual scandals of the Reagan, Bush, or Clinton
years... The new crux was the vast, relentless takeover of U.S.
politics and policymaking by large donors to federal campaigns
and propaganda organs. The S&L scandals showed the corruption
in both parties ... Indeed, the eighties saw the financial sector
take the lead in Washington lobbying outlays and in dollars provided
to federal election campaigns. Both cemented a fast-returning
relationship: politics was finance, and finance was politics,
just as the men with diamond stickpins had said a century earlier."
Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy
*****
"The principal power in
Washington is no longer the government or the people it represents.
It is the Money Power. Under the deceptive cloak of campaign contributions,
access and influence, votes and amendments are bought and sold.
Money establishes priorities of action, holds down federal revenues,
revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class
to the very rich. Money restrains the enforcement of laws written
to protect the country from abuses of wealth-laws that mandate
environmental protection, antitrust laws, laws to protect the
consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the securities markets,
and many more."
Richard N. Goodwin, former speechwriter
for John F. Kennedy
*****
"I don't know why we think,
just because we're mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute
might for right."
Senator Wayne Morse, 1964, as
he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
*****
'I had been instructed to implement
a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate
policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals,
children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein,
is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary,
he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who
are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated
water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of
control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the
Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History
will slaughter those responsible."
Denis Halliday, Assistant Secretary-General
of UN
*****
"This is total war.
We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out
there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan,
then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things
stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it... If we
just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely,
and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just
wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about
us years from now."
Richard Perle, about the war on
terrorism
*****
"[As a result of U.S.
sanctions] Iraq's children were hardest hit, dying of malnutrition
and easily preventable diseases at the rate of 5000 a month -
the equivalent of a 9/11 disaster every 30 days."
Mark Zapezauer, Boomerang
*****
"There isn't a trick
in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It
has its 'finger-men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle-men' to
destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations and
a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a
military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels
me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military
service as a member of this country's most agile military force,
the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second
Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most
of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for
Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer,
a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part
of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.
I helped make Honduras 'right'
for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially
Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys
to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen
Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The
record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for
the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests
in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went
its way unmolested.
During those years, I had,
as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking
back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.
I operated on three continents."
Major General Smedley Butler,
1933 speech
*****
"We are on the verge of
global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and
the nations will accept the New World Order."
David Rockefeller - Statement
to the United Nations Business Council, 1994
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