QUOTATIONS

 

" 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, political scientist and author

*****

"Power lies in the growth of awareness."

Herbert de Souza, Brazilian human rights activist

*****

"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl."

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

*****

" The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day."

Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, 1855-1926

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"A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press."

George Seldes, journalist

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"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, English dramatist

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" Many Americans want to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear victories in the Third World however achieved. "

Richard Falk, professor

*****

" 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.

*****

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint.
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."

Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist

*****

"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

*****

"Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make."

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

"Today the United States has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world. "

Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders

*****

"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular."

David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian, "Of the First Principles of Government" 1758

*****

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

John Dewey, American philosopher and educator, 1859-1952

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" ... the NSS [National Security State] is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" [The Third World War] is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

George Kennan head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948

*****

" Where is the outrage? ... If we are moved merely by greed, and there's no longer any respect for decent or honest government, then we will suffer the results. "

Barbara Tuchman, historian and author

*****

" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."

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

*****

"It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it."

Secretary of State Madelaine Albright talking about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the US embargo of food and medicine

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"... the only way to fully comprehend U.S. policies toward the third world is to posit ... "the threat of a good example." Insurgencies in the third world do not challenge U.S. military security or even, ultimately, investments by U.S. corporations.... What they represent is the possibility that emerging nations may demonstrate by example that the United States may not be the last word in democracy, freedom, and opportunity. That threat is much greater if weighed from the perspective of those who see it in their interest to preserve unchanged the present U.S. economic and political order."

Frances Moore Lappe', Rachel Shuman, and Kevin Danaher, authors

*****

" It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture. "

Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

*****

" I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts. "

Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865

*****

" We must use our vast resources of wealth to aid the undeveloped countries of the world. We have spent far too much of our national budget in establishing military bases around the world and far too little in establishing bases of genuine concern and understanding. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights."

Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and political scientist

*****

"Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere [during war]?"

Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch humanist, 1466-1536

*****

" ... experience requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same 'common sense.' Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and pentrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human."

Erich Fromm, 1900-1980, American psychoanalyst and author

*****

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

C.P. Snow, English author, physicist, and statesman, 1905-1980

*****

" In the Middle Ages, the sewage wasn't properly disposed of, but people didn't pay attention to it until the waters of the rivers and the filth rose over the doorsteps. Then they had to. That's what is beginning to happen [in American politics]. It is beginning to rise over the doorsteps. "

Barbara Tuchman, historian and author

*****

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.... There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice from 1939-1975

*****

" Scare the hell out of the American people."

Senator Arthur Vandenburg, telling President Truman what the he needed to do in order to to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State

*****

" Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. "

Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940

*****

" We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people."

" The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvadore Allende in 1973

*****

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."

Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo and one of the founders of Christianity, 354-430

*****

" We have come to accomodate ourselves to a model of society that has to be unjust, with inherent inequalities, where a great percentage of the population has to be in misery, has to die of hunger, has to live with their basic needs unsatisfied. This is the neo-liberal mentality and every day it seems more normal."

Father Javier Giraldo, Colombia

*****

"Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

*****

" In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, 1961

*****

" Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question. "

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

" Don't Treat Us Like Americans! "

Posters carried by German auto workers protesting reductions in sick pay and the failure of German auto manufacturers to consult with the unions, Summer 1996

*****

" It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. We [the CIA] are responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world."

John Stockwell, former CIA official

*****

"[U.S.] political considerations take precedence over any regard for the plight of the people [in Third World countries]."

Michael Parenti, political scientist and author

*****

" The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high [military] budget. "

Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak

*****

"Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers."

Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and philosopher, 1828-1910

*****

"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, writer

*****

" 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

*****

" Some of the problems of governance in the United States stem from an excess of democracy ... "

Samuel Huntington, Harvard professor and political scientist

*****

"Democracy was being saved from Communism by getting rid of democracy."

Newsweek magazine about the Dominican Republic prior to the overthrow of elected President Juan Bosch in 1963 in a US-supported coup

*****

" Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered ..."

Henry Kissinger

*****

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

James Madison, American president from 1809-1817, helped draft the Constitution

*****

" ... buy the top academic reputations of the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campus. "

Lewis Powell, prior to becoming a Supreme Court Justice, on how corporations can gain influence in academic circles

*****

"I suspect that a great power needs an elite, a class of self-confident and more or less disinterested people who are accustomed to running things.''

Stewart Alsop, syndicated newspaper columnist

*****

" Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country."

author unknown

*****

"... 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."

Peter Dale Scott, author

*****

" By the later years of the Reagan regime, a preferred nomenclature suited to U.S. interests became standardized for the Third World. In the case of nations to be rolled back (e.g., Nicaragua), governments were called terrorist and the insurgents were labeled democratic. In the case of countries to be supported against "communist" insurgencies (e.g., El Salvador and the Philippines), the governments were called democratic and the insurgents were labeled terrorists. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"... the United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights."

Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war."

Albert Einstein, American theoretical physicist, 1879-1955

*****

" One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" I ask you, what is the difference between 30 million people dead and 130 million people dead? ... With 30 million dead, the United States can survive ..."

Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and 'father' of the H-Bomb, describing how the "Star Wars" space-based weapons system might allow the United States to fight and "survive" a nuclear war

*****

"In strict confidence ...I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."

Theodore Roosevelt, American president from1901-1909

*****

"Sometimes to be Silent is to Lie."

Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno

*****

" Democracy, as Americans understand it, is not necessarily the future of all mankind, nor is it the duty of the U.S. government to assure that it becomes that. "

George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948

***

" I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world."

US General Colin Powell talking about US military power prior to the Gulf War in 1991

*****

" It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-anti-revolutionaries. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"The 1964 military takeover [in Brazil] was "totally democratic" and "the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century."

Lincoln Gordon, Ambassador to Brazil under John Kennedy describing the overthrow of Brazil's parliamentary democracy by generals backed by the United States

*****

"If justice requires the consent of the governed, then our [U.S.] whole past record of expansion is a crime."

Henry Cabot Lodge,1850-1924, US senator

*****

"Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the opportunities."

El Salvadoran President Jose Nepolean Duarte about the injustice in El Salvador that led to a guerrilla insurgency against the government in the 1970s and 1980s

*****

" No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war."

Theodore Roosevelt, American president from 1901-1909

*****

"To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War Il, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's 'Establishment'."

Samuel Huntington, Harvard profeesor and political scientist

*****

" Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority."

Thomas Huxley, English biologist and educator, 1825-1895

*****

" The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."

Henry Adams, American historian, 1838-1918

*****

" ...sectors of the business community attempted to solve the economic crisis [of the 1970s and 1980s] through increased military power abroad to allow multinational businesses to penetrate more vigorously into the Third World and increased military spending at home to stimulate the economy. ... In the 1970s and 1980s, when business was less booming, global rollback became a more attractive foreign policy goal. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."

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

*****

" America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has created our biggest international problems in the postwar era. But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world. You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans - the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence - to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two centuries ago.... "

Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine

*****

" [The] American thirst for victory, his scorn for defeat, gives the militarist line great leverage over political debate, although its degree of dominance ebbs and flows with the nature of the issue and the public mood, the latter itself significantly shaped by a media that defers to the state on national security policy in most matters. "

Richard Falk, professor

*****

"If we love this country, we'd better change it."

Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist

*****

" [Nearly 70% of the military budget] is to provide men and weapons to fight in foreign countries in support of our allies and friends and for offensive operations in Third World countries .. Another big chunk of the defense budget is the 20% allocated for our offensive nuclear force of bombers, missles, and submarines whose job it is to carry nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union... Actual defense of the United States costs about 10% of the military budget and is the least expensive function performed by the Pentagon... "

Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, U.S. Navy retired

*****

" It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"Why of course the people don't want war.Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. 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, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

*****

"The agony and moral anguish that ought to accompany an act of mass killing -- yes, even in a war [the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991] -- seemed wholly absent from American culture."

Ruth Rosen, history professor

*****

" Since the modern world recognizes only wage earners as "productive" members of society -- housewives, traditional farmers and the elderly suddenly become identified as "unproductive.""

Helena Norberg-Hodge, anthropologist, speaking about the changes in traditional societies as they modernize

*****

"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, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940

*****

" I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves ... The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

Head of the US Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Uruguay in 1981, teaching classes in the art of torture

*****

"I was nineteen years old, and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do.... But now I tell my sons, if the government calls, ... to use their own judgment, ... to forget about authority ... to use their own conscience. I wish somebody had told me that before I went to Vietnam."

a U.S. soldier who had participated in the My Lai massacre, in which a company of American soldiers shot to death women and children by the hundreds in a tiny Vietnamese village

*****

"Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies ...There's no question we can't wait until Reagan gets in ... We all feel that he is our savior.'

CIA pilot in Guatemala, 1980

*****

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke, British political writer, 1729-1797

*****

" From 1928 to 1932, the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party's share of the vote skyrocketed from 2.6 percent to 37.3 percent. While many commentators have attributed the Nazis' success to its appeal to the lower middle class ... the facts unequivocally reveal that it was the upper middle class that most strongly voted for Hitler... The Nazis were seen as patriotic, anti-communist, and religious. The people who voted Nazi were not so much people who had fallen economically, but people who feared falling and wanted to stay on top. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" He who recognizes no humanity in others, loses it in himself."

author unknown

*****

" Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths."

John Stockwell, former CIA official

*****

" 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. "

a Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

*****

" Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."

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

*****

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwight and critic, 1856-1950

*****

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, Chief of Staff New York Times at New York Press Club, 1953

*****

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 121-180 A.D. and Stoic philosopher

*****

" ... the media in the United States effectively represents the interests of corporate America, and ... the media elite are the watchdogs of what constitutes acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content, and the general use of media resources.

Peter Phillips, Project Censored, 1998

*****

" The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in the country."

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI 1924-1972

*****

"Basic civil liberties including the right to life, liberty and the freedom of personal and political expression, suffered a drastic setback in 1981. In more than a dozen regional nations, even the most fundamental rights -- life and the inviolability of the person -- were transgressed by the government-condoned practice of harassing, torturing and murdering political opponents of those in power ... These reverses can be linked to policies adopted by the Reagan administration ... [which] has allied the U.S. with the most violent regimes in the hemispere. He [Reagan] has sanctioned atrocities and human rights abuses by providing those governments with essentially unconditioned U.S. support."

Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 1982

*****

"We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, never have had any thought of that kind."

Ronald Reagan, 1982

*****

" Governments lie."

I.F. Stone, journalist and author

*****

" The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd."

Robert McChesney, journalist and author

*****

" [The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans.
It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there ... is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State in 1971 about American carpet-bombing of Laos which killed hundreds-of-thousands of civilians

*****

"We [the U.S.] have over 200 incidents in which we have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will."

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" 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

*****

"The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy."

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

*****

" Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. "

Daniel Schorr, journalist

*****

" There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state."

Alexander Cockburn, journalist

*****

" The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA.""

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

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

Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974

*****

"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

*****

"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

*****

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

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"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

*****

"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

*****

"We love your adherence to democratic principle."

Vice President George Bush
to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos

*****

"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

*****

" 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

*****

" ... 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

*****

"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

*****

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

William Dugger, management analyst

*****

"[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

*****

" 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

*****

"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

*****

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."

US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

*****

" 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 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

*****

" Rollback as a foreign policy ... causes untold devastation and misery for millions overseas, and hinders any potential positive U.S. influence in world affairs... To the extent the U.S. public backs rollback, this support is rooted in a misguided sense of patriotism. 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. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

" If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. "

Secretary of State Madelaine Albright describing her vision of America's role in the world

*****

" ... the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" America must prevent other states "from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order....We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. "

Pentagon's Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999

*****

" The U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate " the threat of a good example".

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

*****

" Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"

Henry Kissinger - who (with Richard Nixon) was responsible for the massive bombing of Cambodia in 1973, which killed three-quarters of a million peasants and disrupted Cambodian society, setting the stage for Pol Pot to come to power and ultimately kill another one-and-a-half million people

*****

"Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"

John Stuart Mill, British philosopher and economist, 1806-1873

*****

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

George Orwell, English writer, 1903-1950

*****

"Those who own the country ought to govern it."

John Jay, American statesman and first Chief Justice of US Supreme Court, 1745-1829

*****

" ... there is a system of terroristic states -- the real terror network -- that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"That men should not be equal, is the primitive belief of primitive people."

author unknown

*****

" Coming to grips with ... U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" We routinely had Latin American students at the School of the Americas (SOA) who were known human rights abusers, and it didn't make any difference to us."

Instructor at the School of the Americas in Georgia

*****

" The foreign policies of nation-states, particularly economic and monetary policies, have always been a highly elitist matter. Policy options are proposed, reviewed, and executed within the context of a broad bipartisan consensus that is painstakingly managed by very small circles of public and private elites.... Where necessary, a consensus is engineered on issues which must get congressional / parliamentary approval, but wherever possible executive agreements between governments are used to avoid the democratic process altogether. "

Peter Thomson

*****

"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good...and it would spread a lively terror.... "

Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, British prime minister during World War II, commenting on the British use of poison gas against Iraqis after World War I

*****

" The first casualty when war comes is the truth."

U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

*****

" ... the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"What the United States has done to the country [Cambodia] is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world..."

California Congressman Pete McClosky following a visit to Cambodia in the 1970s

*****

" ... neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick ... argued in 1979 that Third World revolutions are illegitimate, the products of Soviet expansion rather than of local historical forces opposed to repressive dictatorships. ... Kirkpatrick had solved the moral problem of the rollbackers: why it is fine to overthrow left-wing governments and make friends with rightist dictators. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine held that right-wing dictatorships can evolve into democratic governments while left-wing nations cannot. Under this Doctrine, Marcos, Pinochet, and P.W. Botha were leading their countries down the path of democracy. "

from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

*****

"How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]."

Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist

*****

"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, economist and author

*****

" Democracy is based on the principle of one person, one vote. The market functions on the principle of one dollar, one vote. Consequently, under conditions of unequal economic power, a society ruled by the market is a society ruled by those who have the most money -- the antithesis of democracy. "

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

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

William Greider, journalist and author

*****

" People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. "

C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite

*****

" You can say anything you want in a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what ? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2000 or 20,000. "

George Bush's press secretary to reporters following the 1980 vice-presidential debate

*****

" [The] social forces that have been near the center of power ever since 1945 are so well entrenched in the national security bureaucracy as to be constants in the political setting within which foreign policy takes shape... [as a result] the formal procedures of political democracy (political parties, elections) give virtually no voice to principled criticism of interventionary deplomacy in the Third World. "

Richard Falk, professor

*****

" History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"The modern liberal state ... often uses deception to gain its ends -- not so much deception of the foreign enemy, but of its own citizens,who have been taught to trust their leaders."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

*****

" The women of the United States are nothing but brood sows, having sons to be put into the army and made into fertilizer. "

Kate Richards O"Hare, 1915, feminist

*****

" The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. ... 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security."

Michael Lerner, journalist

*****

" We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country. "

FBI Director Louis Freeh, to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, 1997

*****

" We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" The United States is supposed to be in favor of human rights and democracy, so that a show of concern by our leaders is required to demonstrate our high moral character. This display of concern is not necessary if there is little public interest in or knowledge about the abusing country and its victims. Whether the public is informed on these matters is, of course, affected by what government, business, and the media choose to publicize, and these conjointly tend to play down abuses by regimes that serve U. S. business and strategic interests."

Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate."

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

" Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

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

Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940

*****

" The economy is doing fine, but the people aren't."

General Emelio Medici, head-of-state of Brazil's U.S.-supported military dictatorship, 1971

*****

" We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This [economic] plan can be fulfilled dispite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support ... that provided buy the Armed Forces."

Martinez de Hoz, top financial minister of the U.S.-supported Argentine military government, 1976, on the government's proposed economic plan

*****

"History is fables agreed upon."

Francois Voltaire, French philosopher and author, 1694-1778

*****

" We are a nation that worships the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice. It is not simple to adopt a credo that moral force has as much strength and virtue as the capacity to return a physical blow; or that to refrain from hitting back requires more will and bravery than the automatic reflexes of defense. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Today in America [is]... the development of a permanent war establishment by a privately incorporated economy inside a political vacuum. "

C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite

*****

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."

General David Sharp, former US Marine Commandant,1966

*****

" If they do it it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom. "

a U.S. Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s, asked to explain how such U.S. actions as the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism that the U.S. condemned around the world

*****

" The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war."

Henry Wallace, Vice-President under Franklin Roosevelt 1941-1945

*****

" It should never be forgotten that the people must have priority. "

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalist leader, president of North Vietnam-1954-1969

*****

" The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them. "

Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. president 1953-1961

*****

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."

Eugene V. Debs, American socialist leader, 1855-1926

*****

"The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan."

Lewis Lapham, journalist

*****

" The United States has to realize it does not own Central America or any other part of the world, and that people have a right to shape their own destiny, to choose the type of government they want. We don't lose Cuba, we don't lose Nicaragua, because they were never ours to lose."

Sister Ita Ford, one of four U.S. churchwomen slain by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980

*****

" ...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries."

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

" ... the operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World
have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant -- they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] 'threats'. "

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"The torturers from the start had said that the United States supported them and that was what counted."

Amnesty International report on Greece in the 1960s under US-supported dictator George Papadoupolus

*****

"We, the people of the world, will mobilize the forces of transnational civil society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing we are forging our own instruments and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs."

"The People's Earth Declaration, UNCED NGO Forum

*****

"History is the history of war -- of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationals to send the young people off to fight."

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global system is harmonizing standards across country after country - down toward the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people."

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

"Just who are these goddamn reds, anyway? A goddamn red is anyone
who wants 30 cents when I am paying 25."

John Steinbeck, American writer, 1902-1968, and author of "The Grapes of Wrath"

*****

" The NSS [National Security State] represents and serves the interests of a tiny elite. Its economic policies of "trickling-up", enforced by the machine gun, are rationalized on the ground that growth in the long run will trickle down to the lower orders. This is a self-serving ideology designed mainly to allow the western public
to think well of themselves and their own country."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"... the establishment can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ... countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged, including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to the transnational corporation..."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. "

John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

*****

"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."

Howard Scott

*****

"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?"

Chief Luther Standing Bear, 1933

*****

"The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mind-set that puts this country first."

Cyrill Stewert, Chief Financial Officer of Colgate-Palmolive Corporation

*****

"I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."

General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps Commandant,1935

*****

" There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency. "

David Korten, economist and internationalist

*****

"This use of the government of all for the enrichment and aggrandizement of few is a revolution.... These sovereign powers ... have been given by you and me, all of us, to our government to be used only for the common and equal benefit. Given by all to be used by all, it is a revolution to have made them the perquisite of a few."

Henry Demarest Lloyd,1847 - 1903, US journalist

*****

"We are entering a new phase in human history -- one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population."

Jeremy Rifkin, economist

*****

"The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased.... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than' physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment."

Michel Chossudovsky, economist

*****

"Corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places will follow
and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed."

Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865

*****

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories."

Cecil Rhodes, "founder" of Rhodesia

*****

"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate."

Jeremy Brecher, historian and author

*****

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will."

Frederick Douglass, 1817-1895, escaped slave, abolitionist, author, orator, statesman

*****

" It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place. "

Hazel Henderson, economist

*****

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice from 1916-1939

*****

" Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"President Rios Montt [is] a man of great personal integrity and commitment who wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans, and [is] getting a "bum rap" on human rights."

President Ronald Reagan praising Guatemala's military dictator in 1982; during the 17 months of Rios Montt's "Christian" campaign (1982-83), 400 villages were destroyed, 10,000-20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 were forced to flee to Mexico

*****

" Justice too long delayed is justice denied. "

author unknown

*****

" Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher wage or a priest helping organize a peasant cooperative is a communist. And someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more equitable tax system is a communist fanatic. There is no word or act suggesting the desirability of elite generosity toward the poor, or the need for education, organization or material advance for the majority, that has not been branded communistic in Latin America in recent decades. ... Since communism is the enemy and peasants trying to improve themselves, priests with the slightest humanistic proclivity, and naturally anyone seriously challenging the status quo, are communists, they are also, by definition, enemies."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

" The human race has improved everything except the human race."

Adlai Stevenson, 1900-1965, governor of Illinois and candidate for president

*****

" In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

*****

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men."

Henry Taylor

*****

"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, English author, 1894-1963

*****

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all."

Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and president of US from 1801-1809

*****

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

Feodor Dostoevski, Russian novelist, 1821-1881

*****

"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

*****

"The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home....
We shall lose the war after we have won it."

Marilyn Young, historian, talking about US government values and priorities

*****

"A small group of people acting in concert for justice and peace throw into motion invisible questions held by a lot of people. They challenge that notion that "we can't make a difference."

Bernadine Dorn, Irish democracy activist

*****

" ... so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible ... "

Robert McChesney, journalist and author

*****

" I have come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence, composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness, and hunger of the vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against the powerful and well-armed landowner ."

Father Thomas Melville, Guatemala 1968

*****

"We who have a voice should speak for the voiceless"

Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador

*****

" You do things again and again, and nothing happens. You have to do things, do things, do things,. You have to light that match, light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it's going to sputter and go out and at what point it's going to take hold. Things take a long time. It requires patience, but not a passive patience -- the patience of activism."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

*****

" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. "

Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

"... U. S. business wants a "favorable climate of investment" abroad, and ... military regimes that will crush labor unions and otherwise serve foreign business meet that demand."

Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

*****

"They are going to arrest us all and execute us for Shell."

spoken by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian democracy activist, after reading a secret Nigerian military memo in May 1994. He was executed by the Nigerian military dictatorship in 1995.

*****

" It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."

Albert Camus, French writer and thinker, 1913-1960

*****

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me."

Martin Niemoller, German anti-Nazi pastor during World War II

*****

"Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass."

Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940

*****

" 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.

*****

" When small steps are taken by large numbers of people momentous things can happen."

Vandana Shiva, environmental activist

*****

" Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and "stuff". That acting out of passion and conviction "doesn't make a difference". But all history shows that it does."

Bernadine Dorn, Irish democracy activist

*****

" If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World. "

John Pilger, author

*****

"The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense."

Catholic priest and human rights activist Daniel Berrigan

*****

" We may not be strong enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation we must build from."

Leslie Cagan, anti-war activist

*****

"Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Margaret Mead. anthropologist

*****

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives."

Albert Schweitzer

*****

"Our loyalties must transend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective."

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

" Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain

*****

"It is not power that corrupts but fear. The fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

Aung San Suu Kyi

*****

"Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell

*****

"Indifference will not wreck a man's life at any one turn,
but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run."

Bliss Carman

*****

"History is fables agreed upon."

Voltaire

*****

"The human race has improved everything except the human race."

Adlai Stevenson

*****

"The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked,
tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer."

Jawaharlal Nehru

*****

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Henry David Thoreau

*****

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men."

Henry Taylor

*****

'Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them."

Edward R. Murrow

*****

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Arthur Schopenhauer

*****

"An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate."

David Korten

*****

"Freedom of the Press belongs to the man who owns one"

A.J. Liebling

*****

'In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works."

Barrington Moore, 20th century philosopher

*****

"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?

I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.... "

Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography

*****

"When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled."

Michael Ventura

*****

"The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries."

Michael Parenti, writer

*****

"Nowhere is it easier to become rich and privileged, but the price of failure is steeper than elsewhere. Nowhere is there more equality of opportunity or less equality of outcome. Nowhere is the medicine or the higher education better, but the nation that preened itself on evading the sickening rigidities of the European class system has pioneered the new social stratification of the underclass."

Martin Walker, Washington correspondent for The Guardian of London, writing about the United States

*****

"I find it incomprehensible why a country as rich as the U.S. can allow a whole generation of young people in the inner city to slide into despair in such a degree that they go out in the streets and burn down and loot their own neighborhoods."

Helmut Voss, German correspondent, commenting on the Los Angeles race riots in 1965 and 1992

*****

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security."

Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine

*****

"The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them."

Richard Reeves

*****

" We have a single system, and in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

" The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."

Henry Adams

*****

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

James Madison

*****

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

*****

"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical constitution with a radical bill of rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... What's happened in America today is too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no community structure and no work structure. And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it...."

President Bill Clinton

*****

"This use of the government of all for the enrichment and aggrandizement of few is a revolution.... These sovereign powers ... have been given by you and me, all of us, to our government to be used only for the common and equal benefit. Given by all to be used by all, it is a revolution to have made them
the perquisite of a few."

Henry Demarest Lloyd. 1890s

*****

'Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."

"It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think."

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

" The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display."

" The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth."

" How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."

" Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass."

" Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. "

Emma Goldman

*****

"Those who own the country ought to govern it."

John Jay

*****

"The unexamined - life is not worth living."

Socrates

*****

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustices is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law."

(The "law" that King respected ... was not man-made law. He meant respect for the higher law, the law of morality, of justice.)

Martin Luther King, Jr.In his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail,"
written in the spring of 1963:

*****

"Liberties are not given; they are taken."

Aldous Huxley

*****

" Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer.
Many people need desperately to receive this message:
" I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."

Kurt Vonnegut

*****

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

Walter Lippmann

*****

"The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it,
at the expense of whomever does not."

William Dugger

*****


Third World Travel