I have a small collection of quotes stored on my computer. Most, if not all, are to be found here (some I even get from this forum) but I'm going to post them anyway.
"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."
Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before he was sentenced to death
"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..."
General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the (U.S.) media."
Noam Chomsky
"Patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels."
Samuel Johnson
"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 greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy."
Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
Adolph Hitler
"War is the biggest business in America."
Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney, prosecutor in the 1967 JFK assassination conspiracy trial - from his jury summation in the Oliver Stone movie JFK
"When do these corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country."
Ralph Nader
"Since it was created in 1995, the WTO has ruled that every environmental, health, or safety policy it has reviewed is an illegal trade barrier."
Public Citizen report, titled 'Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy."
"In a dictatorship, censorship in used; in a democracy, manipulation."
Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Every year [in the developed nations], a trillion dollars is spent on advertising... This has never happened before in the history of humanity. Primitive humans enjoyed greater freedom of thought."
Fidel Castro
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
Julius Caesar
"Let the Jews, who claim to be the chosen race, prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth."
Mahatma Gandhi, Nov. 26, 1938
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that... I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001.
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
Woodrow Wilson
"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime."
Albert Einstein, 1947
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')
"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".
Former NBC news prez Rubin Frank
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
Richard Salent, Former President CBS News
"The first casualty of war is truth."
Rudyard Kipling
"It's not suprising that the USA has failed to keep up it's payments to the UN when we spend most of our meager funds un-doing the destructive effects of their foreign policy."
Koffi Annan, General Secretary of the UN
"The one who fights, may lose. The one who doesn't fight, has already lost."
Bertold Brecht
"While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free."
Eugene Debs
"I would not be a capitalist, I would be a man; you cannot be both at the same time."
Eugene Debs
"The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are not compatible with military efficiency."
George Orwell
"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose."
Don Marquis, journalist
"If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine."
Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
"Never do governments stand in such need of agreement with all the parties of the ruling classes, or of the 'peaceful' submission of the oppressed to that rule, as in time of war."
Vladimir Lenin
"It is sobering to reflect that in our era of instant world wide communications, the United States has, on many occasions, been able to mount a large or small scale military operation or undertake other equally blatant forms of intervention without the American public being aware of it until years later if ever."
William Blum
"Sensational appeals to patriotic pride and animosity made by victories and defeats...[helps] direct the popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of creature comforts. Warlike and patriotic preoccupations fortify the barbarian virtues of subordination and prescriptive authority...Such is the promise held out by a strenuous national policy."
Thorstein Veblen
"It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get."
John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs debacle
"Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses."
Frederick the Great
"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other."
Thomas Carlyle
"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all."
Michael Rivero
"It had all the hallmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target."
W.F. Buckley
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
Plato
"First they came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak
up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, but by that time, no one was left to speak up."
Pastor Martin Niemoeller
"Men imagine the causes of happiness lie in external goods. That is as if they were to ascribe fine and brilliant lyre playing to the quality of the instrument rather than the skill of the player."
Aristotle, The Politics
"You can not put a rope around the neck of an idea; you can not put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you can not confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
Sean O'Casey
"The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions."
Confucius
"My Government is the world's leading purveyor of violence."
Martin Luther King Jr, 1967.
"The high office of President has been used to forment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."
John F. Kennedy at Columbia University, 12th November, 1963 - 10 days before his murder
"When we achieve worldwide success, I think we shall use gold for building public lavatories."
Vladimir Lenin
"Nearly all men can stand adversity but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power."
Abraham Lincoln
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Albert Einstein
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"When I fed the poor they called me a saint. When I asked, Why are they poor? they called me a Communist."
Archbishop Helder Câmera
"Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."
Abbie Hoffman
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents not by the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.” – Che Guevara
“We still believe that the struggle of Ireland for freedom is a part of the world-wide upward movement of the toilers of the earth, and we still believe that the emancipation of the working class carries within it the end of all tyranny – national, political and social.” – James Connolly
