Quotables
“You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition.”
-Vladimir Putin“Anyone will tell you that when you’re in an abusive relationship based on lies, cheating & bullying, the right thing to do is walk out.”
-Jill Stein, Green Party Presidential Candidate“Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters.”
–The Central Intelligence Agency“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
–Senator Chuck Schumer, 2017“Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”
–Senator Jay Rockefeller, 2007“Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed.”
-I.F. Stone“The American people don’t read.”
-Allen Dulles“I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.”
-Kurt Vonnegut“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those, who in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
–Dante Alighieri“The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.””
-Gandhi“The Patriot did not know just how or when or where he got his opinions, neither did he care, so long as he was with what seemed the majority—which was the main thing, the safe thing, the comfortable thing.”
-Mark Twain“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
-George Orwell“What better way to enslave a man than to give him the vote and tell him he’s free.”
-Albert Camus“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.“What you say to the people collectively in that receptive state of fanatical abandonment remains in their mind like an order given to someone under hypnosis, which can not be wiped out and resists all logical argument.“
-Adolf Hitler“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
-Albert Einstein“Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.”
– Michael Parenti“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
-Mark Twain“Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
-Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels“Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic destroyed.”
-Abraham Lincoln“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
-Elie Weisel“Today the entire ‘mainstream media’ is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.”
-Paul Craig Roberts, former Asst. Secretary of the Treasury“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
—Malcolm X“On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.”
—Howard Zinn“Drone strikes, kill lists, murderers and torturers approved for high office. Austerity for the poor, record profits for the rich. Truthtellers shackled, liars lauded, ignorance exalted, cruelty and callousness gilded with righteous piety. Everywhere, goodness is driven to its knees, and this brutality is not decried but celebrated.”
-Chris Floyd“When atrocities are useful for US foreign policy, morality and outrage are muted.”
-Vijay Prashad“On several occasions President Obama, when pressed to investigate Bush and Cheney for war crimes, has declared: ‘I prefer to look forward rather than backwards’. Picture a defendant before a judge asking to be found innocent on such grounds. It simply makes laws, law enforcement, crime, justice, and facts irrelevant.”
-William Blum“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”
-Herbert Spencer“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.”
-Edward Said“The corporate state has convinced the masses, in essence, to clamor for their own enslavement.”
–Chris Hedges“Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ”
―Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.”
-Daniel Boorstin‘The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.’
-Graham Fuller (CIA), Dollars For Terror: The United States and Islam, By Richard Labévière (2000)“That in its essence is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.”
-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”
-Gore Vidal“Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that as Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and ‘infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.'”
-Henry Giroux“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in 3 city districts. We marines operated on 3 continents.”
–Maj. General Smedley Butler, USMC“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“People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are.”
-Kurt Vonnegut“The United States has entered a new historical era marked by a growing disinvestment in the social state, public goods, and civic morality.”
-Henry Giroux“Which do you want? The Republican panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war or the Democrat panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war?”
-Paul Craig Roberts“To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”
-Gore Vidal (1925-2012)“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”
-George Bernard Shaw“…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
-Dwight Eisenhower – Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
-Abraham Lincoln“…in [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. … I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”
-Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380“At their peril and ours, the useful idiots in this country fail to see the timeless truth inherent in all wars and certainly prevalent in this one: that they are initiated as a distraction for more pressing problems at home, as a force of national unity to be yoked by the state, and as cover to advance the vested interests of the well-connected and well-financed who actually control the government.”
-Harry Goslin“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
–Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan (and self-admitted war criminal)“Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence“If that direct action, we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”
-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, February 4, 2010, Washington Post“A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.”
-Ralph Nader, When the Banks Own the Congress“The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
-Albert Camus“Six months after its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration defended its policy on the basis of schools and hospitals opening and strides made in providing water and electricity. These are all things 12 years of US bombing and sanctions had destroyed.”
-William Blum“Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country. And we will help them rid Iraq of these killers.”
-George W. Bush (Baltimore Sun, May 6, 2004)“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.”
-Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense (Chicago Tribune, July 22, 2003“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths … I mean, it’s not relevant, so why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
-Former First Lady, Barbara Bush, Good Morning America, 18th March 2003“What occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time … The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel. … Many foreign nations and peoples hate Americans for the very reasons most Americans loathe me. Think about that.”
-Timothy McVeigh (letter to and interview with Rita Cosby, Fox News Correspondent, April 27 2001)“It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.”
-Socrates 469 – 399 BC“International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather.”
-Noam Chomsky“Huge financial institutions simply took advantage of taxpayers by getting insurance without having to pay for it.”
-Dean Baker“Throwing even more money at the banks is a way to ensure that they don’t suffer from the consequence of their own greed and stupidity. It is not a way to restore the economy to health.”
-Dean Baker“It’s great to know that there are good-paying jobs for people with no discernible skills. But do those jobs have to involve running the economy?”
-Dean Baker“If these prove to be junk mortgages for which the Fed has given good US Treasury bonds, at the proverbial taxpayer expense, then the Fed and Treasury administrators should have criminal charges brought against them, the accounting firms of the companies pledging these junk mortgages and other financial junk should be closed down and RICO charges brought, and the banks themselves should be wiped out.”
-Michael Hudson“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
-Edmumd Burke“Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
–Christopher Columbus“The tragedy of modern war is not so much that young men die but that they die fighting each other, instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”
-Edward Abbey“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”
-Billy Wilder“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them.”
-US Supreme Court Judge Robert Jackson, Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal“There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.”
-Bertrand Russell“Because, reality is something that none of us can really stand, at any time.”
-Alfred Hitchcock“The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.”
-Ralph Nader“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”
-Upton Sinclair“You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since.”
-Upton Sinclair“[Israel] refuses to allow inspections or sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has hundreds of nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems, and a long record of violence, aggression and lawlessness, thanks to unremitting American support.”
-Noam Chomsky
“When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man’s moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?”
-Mark Twain“History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.”
-Mark Twain“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
-Mark Twain“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
-Mark Twain“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates–1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.”
-Mark Twain“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our Homeland.”
-Adolf Hitler, proposing the creation of the Homeland Gestapo“Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought — by force of circumstances, not argument — to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.”
-Mark Twain”He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
-Thomas Paine“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. ”
-Thomas Paine“Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. ”
-Thomas Paine“But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. ”
-Thomas Paine“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. ”
-Thomas Paine“It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.”
-Thomas Paine“Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.”
-Thomas Paine“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.”
-Prof. Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia“I don’t care about the Constitution!”
-Bill O’Reilly, FOX “News”“If that direct action, we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”
-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, February 4, 2010, Washington Post“Blair told members of the House intelligence committee that he was speaking publicly about the issue to reassure Americans that intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed” in the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens.”
February 4, 2010, Washington Post“In order to make people bear the burden we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to a wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without.”
-John Foster Dulles“I don’t think anyone questions, Mr. Kashkari, that you’re working hard. Our question is who you’re working for.”
-Rep. Dennis Kucinich“Western media continues to lead the way in language-manipulation, all with the aim of avoiding obvious facts and when necessary it misconstrues reality altogether.”
-Ramzy Baroud“It seems never to have occurred to right-winger, so-called ‘Christians’ that Jesus wasn’t maximizing his medical profits when he healed the sick, nor was he cornering the loaves and fishes market when he fed the poor.”
-Joe Giambrone“How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been 200 years at it. It’s superb.”
-Gore Vidal“The Federal Reserve is no more Federal than Federal Express.”
-Rep. Dennis Kucinich“The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.”
-Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius“If an enemy had inflicted this much damage on the United States, the countries of the European Union, or the countries elsewhere in the world that have been caught up in this downturn, millions of people would be lining up to enlist in the military, anxious to avenge this outrage. But, there is no external enemy to blame. The villains are the economists, still mostly men, in business suits.”
-Dean Baker“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
-President Dwight D. Eisenhower April 16, 1953“The US government calls Al Qaeda terrorists in Libya and Syria ‘activists’ and ‘protesters,’ and simultaneously labels as ‘terrorists’ actual democracy protesters in the United States itself.”
-Joe Giambrone“Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.“If Michael Bay was a director on Broadway, and wanted to do a quick polish of the play where Lady MacBeth was a widow from the start of of the story and did all the killing, he wouldn’t get anywhere. In Hollywood those sorts of decisions lead you all the way to the top.”
-Terry Rossio“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
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