Thread: Quotes

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core: Hannah Arendt - Political philosopher, was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906


"When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe;he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."~Thomas Paine"The Age of Reason" 1793


"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.": Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- ) Russian writer, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for criticizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970

"War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for, and a lot of other things you kinda forgot you had." : Anonymous


....most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance - 1841 - From 'Essays", First series


"For in every city these two opposite parties [people vs aristocracy] are to be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people....For when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority." (Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. IX)



"Protest that endures...is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." Wendell Berry

For the saddest words of tongue or pen these are : " It might have been". John Greenleaf Whittier

Q. "Mr. President, have you approved of covert activity to destablise the present government of Nicaragua?"

A. "Well, no, we're supporting them, the - oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador, because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just - I will not comment.": Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13th 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in 'Heroes'



The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace: James Madison



"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.": John Flynn, 1944



"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent and labour power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome
minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its’ citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen.

[…] There is none that disperses its’ control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media – none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.": Howard Zinn, from ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ first published 1981

"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



The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace: James Madison



"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.": John Flynn, 1944



We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.” : Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General



"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy" : John Pierpont Morgan

"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom.." - Anthony Quainton, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984: Anthony Quainton - Source: Off the record response of the Ambassador to a group of concerned U.S. citizens when asked to explain the difference between U.S. government actions in Nicaragua and the violence it condemns as terrorism elsewhere in the world.



It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know--or care--about circumstances in the colonies: Bertrand Russell


The president has adopted a policy of 'anticipatory self-defense' that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy: Arthur Schlesinger.



The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it: Louis Simpson



I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory but let me say war is all hell: William Tecumseh Sherman.



"The greatest spiritual practise is to transform love into service": Sai Baba

"When the President starts lying he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come up with evidence that is supportive of our public position and you are distinctly unhelpful if you commit to paper statements that might leak to the wrong people.

The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting...." : Daniel Ellsburg to the US Senate on Foreign Relations, May 13, 1970



"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence." : Elbert Hubbard (American editor, publisher and writer, 1856-1915)



"Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." : Dwight David Eisenhower (American 34th President (1953-61). 1890-1969)



"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America." : Jimmy Carter (American 39th US President (1977-81). Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. b.1924)

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us......

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.: Edward Abbey



"The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds-where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough-a modest living-and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.": Walt Whitman (1819-1892):



"A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property.": Harold Laski



"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. "In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. "The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war... and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." : James Madison, April 20, 1795

I am tired

To initiate a war of aggression...is not only an inter- national crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. --Nuremberg Tribunal



We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president (1890-1969)



When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest...and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war
: Plato



"Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand" : Bodie Thoene




"By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction" : William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)





"My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whinning about for years." : Kurt Cobain (American Musician and Singer of the grunge rock band Nirvana. 1967-1994)





There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for: Paulo Coelho:




...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all being.: Sogyal Rinpoche





"Our job this day is to become part of the answer to the world's immense and protracted suffering rather than continuing our ancient task of being part of the difficulty.": Hugh Prather - Author, minister




The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors: Plutarch - Historian of the Roman Republic





During the last few years, politics has worked perversely: taxes on the wealthy have been cut, and so have programs directed at the poor. The reason isn't difficult to explain. Many Americans-- especially those who have been losing ground have given up on politics. As their incomes have shrunk, they've lost confidence that the "system" will work in their interest. That cynicism has generated a self-fulfilling prophesy. Politicians stop paying attention to people who don't vote, who don't work the phone banks or walk the precincts, who have opted out. And the political inattention seems to justify the cynicism. Meanwhile, the top tier has experienced precisely the opposite--a virtuous cycle in which campaign contributions have attracted the rapt attention of politicians, the attention has elicited even more money, which in turn has given the top tier even greater influence.: Robert Reich - Former Secretary of Labor





"If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.": Sir Francis Bacon - (1561-1626) Philosopher, essayist, British Lord Chancellor

"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.": Thomas Jefferson



"Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time. In World War I it was the munitions industrialists; in World War II it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty. This is passing the buck.

The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else. To stress this guilt on the part of the masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom fighters; the latter that attitude held by power-thirsty politicians." : Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism



"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." : General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." : Texas Governor George W. Bush, April 9, 1999, on the US intervention in Kosovo



Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince



"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.": Fredrich August von Hayek - (1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974 - Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 146.

"For in every city these two opposite parties [people vs aristocracy] are to be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people....For when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority." Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. IX


"Protest that endures...is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." Wendell Berry


For the saddest words of tongue or pen these are : " It might have been". John Greenleaf Whittier


"War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for, and a lot of other things you kinda forgot you had." : Anonymous

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you: Jean-Paul Sartre:



Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison: Henry David Thoreau:



You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.: Clarence Darrow:



The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with: Eleanor Holmes Norton:



When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered: Dorothy Thompson:



Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will: Frederick Douglass:



None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free: Goethe:

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
— Eric Hoffer

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all: Thomas Jefferson:


Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence: Henri Frederic Amiel:


Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings: Helen Keller:


A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you: Ramsey Clark:


The peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country -- when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.": Carl Schurz:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Winston Churchill

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don't have that problem. " -- President Ronald Reagan

"When even one "American" -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril." -- Harry S. Truman - (1884-1972), 33rd US President August 14, 1951 Source: Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion



"Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech..." - Cato - John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750) Source: Letters, 1720




"When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.'


[After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits." -- Mark Twain - Source: from The War Prayer, 1904. Having directed it to be published after his death, Twain said, "I have told the truth in that... and only dead men can tell the truth in this world."

"Nuke a godless Communist gay baby seal for Christ." - A Random T-shirt

We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.." --- Bill Clinton Clinton, USA TODAY 11 Mar 93