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
*****
"A people that wants to be free must
arm itself with a free press."
George Seldes, journalist
*****
"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
*****
" 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
*****
" ... 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
*****
"... 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