Authors' page

 

Eqbal Ahmad page

"In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it's propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."

dissident Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek

Andrew Bacevich page

"No people can be both ignorant and free."

Thomas Jefferson

Ben Bagdikian page

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

Morris Berman page

"The news and truth are not the same thing. "

Walter Lippmann

William Blum page


"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

 

Steve Brouwer page

"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, author of the book "Johnny Got His Gun"

 

Ellen Brown page

"The national interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its upper class."

Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter

 

Helen Caldicott page

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

Edward Said, literary critic

Noam Chomsky page

"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

Michel Chossudovsky page

"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

Richard Dawkins page

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."

Bertrand Russell

William O. Douglas page

"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

Doug Dowd page

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."

Michael Parenti

Albert Einstein quotations

"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."

George Orwell

F. William Engdahl page

"The national interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its upper class."

Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter

Pepe Escobar page

"Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public."

Bill Moyers

Daniel Estulin page

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

George Orwell

Paul Farmer page

" 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

Norman Finkelstein page

" The United States is evolving into an a corporate oligarchy that merely wears the trappings of a democracy."

Robert Kaplan

Robert Fisk page

"Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all ... we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States."

Harold Pinter

Eduardo Galeano page

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Abraham Lincoln

Eva Golinger page

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

neoconservative Michael Ledeen

 

" Politicians have become corporate prostitutes."

Helen Caldicott, MD

William Greider page

" 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

Sam Harris page

" 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.

Chris Hedges page

" 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

Edward Herman page

"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, Sorrows of Empire

Seymour Hersh page

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

George Orwell

Mark Hertzgaard page

"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."

Robert McChesney

Arianna Huffington page

"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

Chalmers Johnson page

" 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, political scientist and author

Walter Karp page

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."

Bertrand Russell, British mathematician, philosopher

Martin Luther King, Jr. page

"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

Michael Klare page

"There is nothing puzzling ... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope."

Walter Karp

Naomi Klein page

"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, 1871-1945

David Korten page

 "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.

Jonathan Kozol page

" The news and truth are not the same thing. "

Walter Lippmann 

 

"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

Lewis Lapham page

"Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference."

Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Lendman page

" 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

Michael Lerner page

"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

Andrew Gavin Marshall page

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading them."

Ray Bradbury

Robert McChesney page

"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

 

"[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?"

veteran New York Times reporter John Hess

Ralph Nader page

"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

Allan Nairn page

"The left-right political spectrum [is used] to neutralize unwelcome facts and ideas or just condition citizens to think along certain lines.

The "left" leaning segment of the press [in the US] can always be relied upon to automatically assault ideas and information from the right" and vice versa. In fact, media outlets have been artificially set up just for this purpose: both Nation and New Republic on the "left" were financed by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney (The Order) funds. On the "right" National Review published by William Buckley (The Order) runs a perpetual deficit, presumably made up by Buckley.

Neither the independent right nor the independent left sees the trap. They are so busy firing at each other; they've mostly forgotten to look behind the scenes. And The Order smugly claims control of the 'moderate" center."

Antony Sutton

George Orwell page

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

George Orwell

Greg Palast page

"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

Ilan Pappe page

"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

Michael Parenti page

"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, on the need for dissent and non-violent protest

Robert Parry page

"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, author of the book "Johnny Got His Gun"

John Perkins page

"What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city."

Walter Karp

James Petras page

"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

Kevin Phillips page

" 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, Latin American writer and historian

John Pilger page

"[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

Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber page

"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

 

Paul Craig Roberts page

" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."

William Greider

Eleanor Roosevelt page

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

Adolph L. Reed. Jr.

Arundhati Roy page

" ... 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

Michael Ruppert page

"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... 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, former CBS foreign correspondent

 

"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

Edward Said page

" 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.

 

"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, author

Peter Dale Scott page

"There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy, they can never result from premeditated planned group action... Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non-existent."

Antony Sutton

George Seldes page

" 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

Vandana Shiva page

"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

Christopher Simpson page

"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... 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, former CBS foreign correspondent

Sam Smith page

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

George Orwell

Nancy Snow page

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

William Blum

Norman Solomon page

"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, author

John Stockwell page

"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

I. F. Stone page

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

Arundhati Roy, author

 

Antony Sutton page

"The intellectual world is locked into a phony verbal battle between "left" and "right," whereas the real struggle is the battle between individual freedom and the encroaching power of the absolute State."

Antony Sutton

Gore Vidal page

"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent."

Arundhati Roy, author

Cornel West page

"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

David Wise

"The American media [is] totally unreliable. You can't believe a word the American media says. If they say anything correct, it's just an accident."

Paul Craig Roberts

Mark Zepezauer page

" Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Howard Zinn page

"There is [a] largely unrecorded history and it tells a story quite different than our sanitized textbooks. It tells a story of the deliberate creation of war, the knowing finance of revolution to change governments, and the use of conflict to create a New World Order"

Antony Sutton

Quotations page

"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

Lectures/Excerpts

Democracy Enhancement - Noam Chomsky
The Secret Wars of the CIA - John Stockwell
Challenging Authority - Frances Fox Piven
Harold Pinter Nobel Lecture - 2005

"What the press do is they tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear. The press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe, and make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling them that they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are right, and they never have to change your mind about anything. And the audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money to keep hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."

Allan Uthman


Authors and Books

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