Thread: Quotes

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable." : U.S. historian Howard Zinn, 1993


"If a country develops an economic system that is based on how to pay for the war, and if the amounts of fixed capital investment that are apparent are tied up in armaments, and if that country is a major exporter of arms, and its industrial fabric is dependent on them, then it would be in that country's interests to ensure that it always had a market. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is clearly in the interests of the world's leading arms exporters to make sure that there is always a war going on somewhere.": Marilyn Waring - Source: Documentary 'Who's Counting', based on her book 'Counting for Nothing'.

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot,

therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual." : Frank Herbert


"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." : William Blake

"I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth he sought no further; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." (from What is Man?) -- Mark Twain

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them." The Quotable Bertrand Russell p. 138

"At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox."

--George Bernard Shaw (August 9, 1944, the Irish Times)

What a dick head.

ray is always the other person. - Jean-Paul Sartre

" ... No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found... Surely the(y), and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere: Ouch Borith: Permanent Representative Of The Kingdom Of Cambodia To The UN: 10/03/2001

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.( especially in Thailand )

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." .

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

-- Albert Einstein

"When a politician says to you, 'Jack, if there's anything I can do for you, just let me know,' that means you're dead." As JFK once told Gore Vidal:

So that confident strut of the Bush gang, their incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, their complacent smirks, their callous indifference to the unspeakable horror they have unleashed upon the world – these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or wilful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. They know full well what the reality is – and they like it. Chris Floyd 2006

We Would Rather Do Business With 1000 Terrorists Than With One Jew.

Goldberg's Funeral Home (USA)

American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or Christians under Communism.

We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth.

You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all.

--Peter Storey, former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa

George Bernard Shaw:

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Hell is other people. - Jean-Paul Sartre

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America." : Jimmy Carter - [James Earl Carter] (1924- ) 39th US President


"From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.": Carl Schurz - (1829-1906) German-born, US General, US Senator (MO), Founded the Liberal Republican movement


"Law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." : Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President


"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.": Abraham Lincoln - (1809-1865) 16th US President

"The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God.

Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy.

This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion."


Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

"Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does."

"Man [has] always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason."

"It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear."


-- Douglas Noel Adams

One of my favourite Douglas Adams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

The Second Treatise of Civil Government 1690

"That the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with another, and unjustly invades another man's right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over the conquered, will be easily agreed by all men, who will not think that robbers and pirates hhave a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them.

Should a robber break into my house, and, with a dagger at my throat, make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his sword has an unjust conqueror who forces me into submission. The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain.

The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference in the offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders." John Locke - 1632-1704 - John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government

"COWARDICE, n. A charge often levelled by all-American types against those who stand up for their beliefs by refusing to fight in wars they find unconscionable, and who willingly go to prison or into exile in order to avoid violating their own consciences. These 'cowards' are to be contrasted with red-blooded, 'patriotic' youths who literally bend over, grab their ankles, submit to the government, fight in wars they do not understand (or disapprove of), and blindly obey orders to maim and to kill simply because they are ordered to do so—all to the howling approval of the all-American mob. This type of behavior is commonly termed 'courageous.'"
—Chaz Bufe, The Devil's Dictionaries ("American Heretic's Dictionary" section)

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
William S. Burroughs

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
William S. Burroughs

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo - and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
William S. Burroughs

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

~Robert Lynd

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses...

~Harry Emerson Fosdick