Quotations page 10

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

1984 - George Orwell

*****

"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same."

George Orwell, 1984

*****

"Our rulers make the news, but they do not appear in the news, not as they really are-not as a political class, a governing establishment, a body of leaders with great and pervasive powers, with deep, often dark, ambitions. In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings-Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news."

Walter Karp

*****

"Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings."

Lyndon Johnson

*****

"[The American press has] at least as much power in determining the course of the republic as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches set forth in the Constitution."

Walter Annenberg, publisher

*****

"The American press exercises perhaps the greatest power there [is] in politics: the power to define reality."

William Rusher, publisher

*****

"Bipartisan foreign policy is the ideal for the executive because you can't run this damned country any other way.... Now the way to do that is to say politics stops at the seaboard, and anyone who denies that postulate is a son-of-a-bitch and a crook and not a true patriot. Now if people will swallow that then you're off to the races."

Dean Acheson

*****

"We should love America because it is free, not because it is feared."

Critics of American involvement in WWI

*****

"[America] is most fully a nation, most intensely alive as an entity, when it wages war against other nations. Even in peacetime it is the memory of past wars and the menace of future wars that keep the idea of the nation alive in America. War and the cult of the nation are virtually one and the same."

Walter Karp

*****

"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

*****

"If we add up the current Pentagon budget, the nuclear weapons budget of the Energy Department, the military portion of the NASA budget, foreign military aid, veterans' benefits, interest payments on debt incurred by past military spending and other military-related expenses, the US spends over $670 billion a year to feed its addiction to war."

book - Addicted to War

*****

"War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion... War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning."

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times

*****

"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, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times

*****

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

Walter Lippmann

*****

"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."

American Heritage Dictionary

*****

"I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours."

Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

*****

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies."

Walter Lippmann

*****

"A good part of the U.S. public, astonishingly ignorant about everything beyond its shores, fears and disdains all that it does not understand. The country that has done more than any other to develop information technology, produces television news that barely touches on world events except to confirm that foreigners tend to be terrorists and ingrates.

Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down

*****

" 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

*****

'Whether the attackers are acting on their own or on the orders of their governments, whether they are regulars or irregulars, if the attack is against civilians, then they must be considered as terrorists."

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

"The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources."

Walter Karp

*****

"The timidity of Congress in challenging administration big lies ... rises in no small part from the fear of contradiction and criticism from the powerful establishment media, whose interests all too frequently parallel those of the administration. "

Peter Dale Scott

*****

" Rogue states that are internally free - and the U.S. is at the outer limits in this respect - must rely on the willingness of the educated classes to produce accolades and tolerate or deny terrible crimes."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"Terrorism is the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims."

Boaz Ganor

*****

"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. "

Arundhati Roy

*****

" The greatest danger we have now is militarism in America. We have this huge, overpowering, unbelievably expensive military establishment... Seasoned U.S. Ieaders have warned against the threat of a huge military establishment to the liberty of our citizens. I fear that from this we are going to get even more militarism. That is, more and more functions-including domestic police functions-will be transferred from civilian institutions to the military, and the military will have ever greater authority in our society."

Chalmers Johnson

*****

"Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom."

Noam Chomsky

*****

" The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

John Kenneth Galbraith

*****

"Each party [Democratic and Republican] has assumed the mantle of fiscal responsibility while accusing the other of reckless spending. Yet both parties have proposed irresponsibly high levels of military spending at the expense of programs that meet the needs of society's most vulnerable members."

Friends Committee on National Legislation

*****

"The corporation is not a person and it does not live. It is a lifeless bundle of legally protected financial rights and relationships brilliantly designed to serve money and its imperatives. It is money that flows in its veins, not blood. The corporation has neither soul nor conscience."

David Korten

*****

"We now live in a state of permanent war - a global arms industry, apparently the largest single international business, must have its products used up so more can be sold. There must be profits for the capitalists and jobs for the proles... Are we not still in Caligula's Rome?

New Internationalist magazine

*****

"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."

Aldous Huxley

*****

"As long as an economic system provides an acceptable degree of security, growing material wealth and opportunity for further increase for the next generation, the average American does not ask who is running things or what goals are being pursued."

Daniel R. Fusfeld

*****

"Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria."

Howard Zinn

*****

"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment ... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of Defense. Nor do they want to."

William Blum

*****

"The media are a pitiful lot. They don't give us any history, they don't give us any analysis, they don't tell us anything. They don't raise the most basic questions: Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation? The answer: the United States."

Howard Zinn

*****

"It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did."

Ernest Hemingway

*****

"Odd that Bush and Cheney are so delighted to put us at war when, during Vietnam, they were both what we used to call draft dodgers."

a World War II veteran

*****

"There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented.... The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors."

Joseph Schumpteter

*****

"The greatest threats to U.S. society are not coming from "terrorists" or "rogue nations" abroad. They are coming from the words and actions of elected officials here at home. Actions of the Department of Justice - emboldened by the USA-Patriot Act passed by Congress last fall - threaten to turn the U.S. into a permanent security state.

Likewise, the greatest threats to global peace - and to human development and security worldwide - are coming from U.S. policymakers carrying out their lawful duties."

Friends Committee on National Legislation

*****

"From World War I to Korea and Vietnam, presidents have lied to the American people because they believed that if the American people knew the truth, they would not support the move for war. The track record of the U.S. news media in the twentieth century is one of regularly going along with fraudulent efforts to get the nation into one war or another by the administration in power."

Robert McChesney and John Nichols

*****

"It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"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

*****

"If voting changed anything, it would be illegal."

On a wall in San Francisco

*****

"The benefits of Bush's dividends-and capital-gains tax cut are extremely tilted toward those who own the most stock-that is, the wealthiest people. Half of the tax breaks would go to the best-off 1 percent of the taxpayers, and four-fifths would go to the best-off 10 percent."

Robert S. McIntyre

*****

"The technological capacities the government is acquiring and the removal of basic legal checks move us in a direction that was never possible 20 years ago. Does this bring us a lot closer to 1984? Absolutely."

Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU

*****

"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

*****

"You don't need a totalitarian dictatorship like Hitler's to get by with murder ... you can do it in a democracy as long as the Congress and the people Congress is supposed to represent don't give a damn?"

William Shirer

*****

"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."

Hermann Goering

*****

"The corporations of America today effectively oversee the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and indeed the presidency itself."

E.L. Doctorow

*****

" Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. "

Arthur Miller

*****

"There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security ..."

Noam Chomsky

*****

"One percent of the population in the U.S. owns nearly one-half of the country's wealth."

Normon Slolmon

*****

"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

*****

"A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. "

James Madison

*****

 "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

*****

"Patriotism itself - love of one's country and one's people - is a natural and reasonable human feeling. But patriotism which measures one's country by military superiority over all rivals regardless of consequence is irrational... There is surely a more rational form of patriotism that searches for excellence in social, economic and moral spheres rather than in weapon systems."

Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."

Emma Goldman

*****

"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

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