Quotations from

Toward an American Revolution

Henry David Thoreau

" What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men [and women] in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses?..."Robert Justin Goldstein

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Robert Justin Goldstein

" One of the most startling aspects of American political life is the virtual exclusion of socialism from any serious consideration as a possible solution to American economic or other problems."

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Noam Chomsky

" If segments of the usually irrelevant and apathetic public begin to organize and try to participate in some meaningful fashion in shaping affairs of state, that is not democracy, that is called a crisis of democracy as liberal ellites in fact call it and it's a crisis that must be overcome by various means."

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Edward Bernays, on government propaganda commission during WWII and "father" of modern public relations (PR)

" The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. "

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Senator Leverett Saltonstall, 1966

" It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have."

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Charles Higham, researcher, about U.S.-Nazi collaboration during WWII

" What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearbom, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"

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Lyndon B. Johnson

" There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want."

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Richard Rubenstein

"... the Nazis...were this century's original efficiency experts."

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Sir Henry Deterding, Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell in 1932

"Nazis are a great stabilizing force which would come in handy against Soviet Russia."

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society...We must see that the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together, and you really can't get rid of one without getting rid of the others...The whole structure of American life must be changed."

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The Director, from the book Brave New World

"And that, that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

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John Judge, a researcher in California

"There are camps. There's slave labor here in the United States. It's hidden under the corporate fronts, on the privately owned farms, in certain industries. But it's here if people took the time to look at it. It's in the institutions. It's in the prisons, the pyschiatric prisons, the legal prisons that are our Third World, that everyone turns their face and attention away from. It's in the VA [Veterans Administration] where people are used 80,000 a month as human guinea pigs to test the drugs and the new techniques for the medical and psychiatric facilities. It's out in the streets where the homeless are not caged, but left to die, left to be surplus population, left to be useless eaters. People are not picked up and put into ovens, ovens are dropped out of the sky, white phosporous and napalm in Vietnam and El Salvador and in the countries that are attacked. It's still genocide. It's still aimed at the same target and it still comes in the end to the same thing. And should power ever shift on this globe, should this ever not be six percent of the population consuming sixty percent of the energy and thirty percent of the resources of the world. And should we ever be held accountable, ask yourself honestly how different will the testimony be from that of those fascists in Nuremberg at the end of World war II, how different from the testimony of Contragate, that I was only following orders? I did what I was told. I was supporting murder, sabotage, death, in the name of freedom, anything in the name of freedom, someone's freedom, somewhere-certainly not the people under the gun, but for their version of freedom and their version of democracy which means class privilege as opposed to their version of communism which means democracy and democratic control."

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Brian Wilson, progressive activist

"The lives of people in the Third World are worth no less than our own."

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Brian Price, an American historian

"Is it possible for a class which exterminates the native peoples of the Americas, replaces them by raping Africa for humans it then denigrates and dehumanizes as slaves, while cheapening and degrading its own working class - is it possible for such a class to create democracy, equality, and to advance the cause of human freedom?" "No. Of course not."

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Daniel Singer

" The monopoly of truth, including historical truth is implied in the monopoly of power."

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John C. Miller

[The Framers]...had no wish to usher in democracy in the United states. They were not making war upon the principle of aristocracy and they had no ... intention ... of destroying the tradition of upper class leadership in the colonies ... They did believe, however, that the common people, if properly bridled and reined, might be made allies in the work of freeing the colonies from British rule and chat they - the gentry - night reap the benefits without interference...

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Samuel Adams

"In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death."

Toward an American Revolution