Collected Quotes on Politics

2006-01-20T23:09:00.000-08:00

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy—all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. […] Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

-- George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia

2006-01-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

Randy brings the quotes on Social Change.

2005-05-02T03:26:00.000-07:00

The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.
-- George Washington

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-- Thomas Jefferson

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
-- Thomas Paine

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
-- Thomas Jefferson

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
-- Abraham Lincoln

More Quotes on Religion from Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Lincoln, Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, Einstein, and others.

On September 6, 1988, the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chief Administrative Law Judge, Francis L. Young, ruled: "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known....[T]he provisions of the [Controlled Substances] Act permit and require the transfer of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance." - Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition," [Docket #86-22] (September 6, 1988), p. 57.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
- - P. J. O'Rourke

Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader.
-- Plato

Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis

In Germany they first 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--and by that time no one was left to speak up.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern.
-- William Blake (1757-1828)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle"

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.
-- U.S. Supreme Court, in American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382,442

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
-- Seneca, A.D. 65

Silence gives consent.
-- Canon Law

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
-- Thomas Paine

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
-- James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook.
-- U.S. Army Ranger Handbook

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel
-- H.L. Mencken

Jurors should acquit, even against the judge's instruction . . . if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
-- Alexander Hamilton, 1804

If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Justice Theophilus Parsons, 1788

It is not only the juror's right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
-- John Adams, 1771

There has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the power and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what is the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their power, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and find all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.
-- Lysander Spooner, 1852

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-- U.S. Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. [Who will police the police?]
-- Latin proverb

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-- Thomas Carlyle

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood.
-- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, passed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948

We can never solve our significant problems from the same level of thinking we were at when we created the problems.
-- Albert Einstein

Don't hate the media, become the media.
-- Jello Biafra

2005-03-25T00:26:00.000-08:00

"You couldn't lead a monkey to a banana raffle."

-- Max Stone, Rebel Extreme Trillionaire, Sealab 2021

2004-06-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

2004-05-17T04:34:00.000-07:00

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." William Butler Yeats

"Better to be the architect of something you can endorse than the placard waving protagonist standing in the rain." Tim Woods, Communciations Consultant

"The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That's the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead." Gen. George S. Patton

"A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." Harry S. Truman

"Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve." Tom Landry

"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." Lyndon B. Johnson

"Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan I know he is going to vote against me." Harry Truman

"It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can." Jean- Jacque Rousseau

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." Winston Churchill

"I will make him an offer he can’t refuse." Mario Puzo

"The civilities of the great are never thrown away." Dr. Johnson

"Modest proposals are better than grand designs: they serve the political function of registering concerns, but are too small to provoke opposition." Economist

"Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in." Lyndon Johnson

"Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes." George Bernard Shaw

"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals – they always come in handy." Stanislaw Lec

"Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth." Benjamin Disraeli

"Even the best intentioned of great men need a few scoundrels around them; there are some things you cannot ask an honest ma to do." La Bruyere

"The golden rule has no place in a political campaign." John James Ingalls

"Human kind cannot bear too much reality." T. S. Elliot

"Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against. "W.C. Fields

"Once again we saw the phenomena of the three kinds of citizens in this country: The activists who campaign hard, the regular citizen who votes but does not otherwise participate and the truly tuned out who never even knows know when an election has been called.” Rod Love, Canadian Alliance campaign strategist

"I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smell like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket." Lyndon Baines Johnson

"Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." George Bernard Shaw

"In politics, nothing is contemptible." Benjamin Disraeli

"Washington, D.C. is a city lying in the gutter, wallowing in hypocrisy. It has become a bizarre sinkhole of character assassination and smirking self-righteousness. It will eagerly cast not only the first stone but any other rocks that it can lay it hands on." Wall street Journal Editorial

"Men are joined by conviction, sundered by opinion." Goethe

"Even a little dog can piss on a big building." Jim Hightower

"It is much easier to be critical than to be correct." Benjamin Disraeli

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" Abraham Lincoln

"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Chinese Proverb

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." Sir Winston Churchill

"The much hyped leaders debates are just a political black hole that consume time, money, energy, resources, staff and adrenalin, and rarely produce anything other than a mush tie, allowing all the spin doctors to claim a phony victory.” Rod Love, Canadian Alliance campaign strategist

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch

"In politics, madame, you need two things: friends, but above all an enemy." Brian Mulroney

"Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in." H.R. Haldeman

"If you can’t lick ‘em in the alley, you can’t beat ‘em on the ice." Conn Smythe

"There are no small steps in great affairs." Cardinal De Retz

2004-05-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

"Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics." Thomas Jefferson

"Politics are a labyrinth without a clue." John Adams

"All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effects. " John Adams

"They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts." John Adams

"Commitments the voters don't know about can't hurt you." Ogden Nash

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." Napoleon Bonaparte

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." Charles de Gaulle

"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war." Maria Montessori

"Diplomacy --- the art of saying "Nice doggie" 'til you can find a stick." Wynn Catlin

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." Henry Adams

"Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous." William Proxmire

"Lighthouse: A tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician." Anonymous

"No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country." George Smith Patton

"Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source." Ron Nesen

"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory." John Kenneth Galbraith

"Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second rate president." Richard M. Nixon

"Our elections are free--it's in the results where eventually we pay." Bill Stern

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers." Nikita Khruschev

"I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head." George Wallace

"If Communism goes, I've still got the U.S. House of Representatives." Robert Novak

"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM." Lyndon B. Johnson

"In political discussion heat is in inverse proportion to knowledge." J. G. C. Minchin

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress." Mark Twain

"I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough." Clarie Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate

"Politics is a game requiring great coolness." Sir John A Macdonald,
Canadian Prime Minister

"The decline of official discourse into cream of bleat has behind it reasons that go beyond the politician's genetic instinct for the median. There is, above all, the odd influence of television. The politicos prefer it to print because they don't get edited. But it's become comical to watch the TV people shooting one "tough" question after another at guests who bat them away like fruit flies on a steaming peach pie. The morning Sunday shows used to make news but rarely do in a big way anymore. " Daniel Hennigar, Wall Street Journal

"Today's headlines are tomorrow's birdcage drop-sheets." Anonymous

"Noise proves nothing--often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid." Mark Twain

"I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half-hour looking at my face on their television screens." Dwight Eisenhower

"Experts are just trained dogs." Albert Einstein

"The way my luck is running, if I were a politician I would be an honest man." Rodney Dangerfield

"Politics is like football. If you see daylight, go through the hole." John F. Kennedy

"Great obstacles make great leaders." Cree leader, Billy Diamond

"We have two types of politicians-the incapable and those capable of anything." Slogan written on a wall in Paraguay, according to the Economist

"There will be no silence from Canada. Our friendship has no limit. Generation after generation we have traveled many difficult miles together side by side." Prime Minister Jean Chrétien

"We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right." Nelson Mandela

"Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often." Mark Twain

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." Alexander Hamilton

"We have seen a growing mismatch between the command of media communication shown by the most talented politicians, and the halting, uneven progress which they can deliver through the machinery of government." Tom Bentley, Director of Demos, a British Think Tank

"The more successful a political party, the more winning its ways, the less of its time is spent casting about for policy or determining it principles. But, political parties with principles or even without them, have a common need for money; someone has to pay for the television commercials." Dalton Camp, Canadian political commentator

"In joining a political party, people shouldn't have to swear everlasting agreement with every jot and tittle of their party's policy manifesto. Debate, disagreement, argument, are good for democracy not bad." William Watson, Columnist & McGill University Professor

"Your job is to work as hard as you can in government, and to work as hard as you can in your ridings for the people you represent, because the time will come when you will not want me to come into your ridings. The time will come when I am so personally unpopular that you won't want help from me....and then at that moment, when I am not able to help, your chances of being re-elected are going to depend entirely on your own efforts." David Peterson, Former Ontario Premier

"There are two kinds of fool. One says, 'This is old, and therefore good.' And one says, 'This is new, and therefore better.'" Dean Inge

"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience." George Bernard Shaw

"If politicians lived on praise and thanks they'd be forced into some other line of business." Edward Heath, British Prime Minister

"A week is a long time in politics." Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister

"There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible." Sir Alec Douglas-Home, British Prime Minister

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." Sir Winston Churchill

"The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion." Stanley Baldwin, British Prime Minister

"If I am a great man, then all great men are frauds." Andrew Bonar Law, British Prime Minister

"I am more or less happy when being praised, not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained." Arthur James Balfour, British Prime Minister

"There seem to me to be very few facts, at least ascertainable facts, in politics." Sir Robert Peel, British Prime Minister

"The decline of official discourse into cream of bleat has behind it reasons that go beyond the politician's genetic instinct for the median. There is, above all, the odd influence of television. The politicos prefer it to print because they don't get edited. But it's become comical to watch the TV people shooting one "tough" question after another at guests who bat them away like fruit flies on a steaming peach pie. The morning Sunday shows used to make news but rarely do in a big way anymore. " Daniel Hennigar, Wall Street Journal

"Today's headlines are tomorrow's birdcage drop-sheets." Anonymous

"Noise proves nothing--often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid." Mark Twain

"I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half-hour looking at my face on their television screens." Dwight Eisenhower

"Experts are just trained dogs." Albert Einstein

"The way my luck is running, if I were a politician I would be an honest man." Rodney Dangerfield

"Politics is like football. If you see daylight, go through the hole." John F. Kennedy

"Great obstacles make great leaders." Cree leader, Billy Diamond

"We have two types of politicians-the incapable and those capable of anything." Slogan written on a wall in Paraguay, according to the Economist

"There will be no silence from Canada. Our friendship has no limit. Generation after generation we have traveled many difficult miles together side by side." Prime Minister Jean Chrétien

"We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right." Nelson Mandela

"Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often." Mark Twain

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." Alexander Hamilton

"We have seen a growing mismatch between the command of media communication shown by the most talented politicians, and the halting, uneven progress which they can deliver through the machinery of government." Tom Bentley, Director of Demos, a British Think Tank

"The more successful a political party, the more winning its ways, the less of its time is spent casting about for policy or determining it principles. But, political parties with principles or even without them, have a common need for money; someone has to pay for the television commercials." Dalton Camp, Canadian political commentator

"In joining a political party, people shouldn't have to swear everlasting agreement with every jot and tittle of their party's policy manifesto. Debate, disagreement, argument, are good for democracy not bad." William Watson, Columnist & McGill University Professor

"Your job is to work as hard as you can in government, and to work as hard as you can in your ridings for the people you represent, because the time will come when you will not want me to come into your ridings. The time will come when I am so personally unpopular that you won't want help from me....and then at that moment, when I am not able to help, your chances of being re-elected are going to depend entirely on your own efforts." David Peterson, Former Ontario Premier

"There are two kinds of fool. One says, 'This is old, and therefore good.' And one says, 'This is new, and therefore better.'" Dean Inge

"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience." George Bernard Shaw

"If politicians lived on praise and thanks they'd be forced into some other line of business." Edward Heath, British Prime Minister

"A week is a long time in politics." Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister

"There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible." Sir Alec Douglas-Home, British Prime Minister

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." Sir Winston Churchill

"The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion." Stanley Baldwin, British Prime Minister

"If I am a great man, then all great men are frauds." Andrew Bonar Law, British Prime Minister

"I am more or less happy when being praised, not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained." Arthur James Balfour, British Prime Minister

"There seem to me to be very few facts, at least ascertainable facts, in politics." Sir Robert Peel, British Prime Minister

"All those men have their price." (His opinion of his fellow parliamentarians) Sir Robert Walpole , British Prime Minister

"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it." Earl of Chatham, William Pitt, 'The Elder', British Prime Minister

"I hate liberality - nine times out of ten it is cowardice, and the tenth time lack of principle." Henry Addington, British Prime Minister

"Great men are very apt to have great faults; and the faults appear the greater by their contrast with their excellencies." Gerald J. Simmons

"Those of you who come in with me now will receive a big piece of the pie. Those of you who delay, and commit yourselves later, will receive a smaller piece of pie. Those of you who don't come in at all will receive – Good Government!” Huey Long

"If nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline, and even if unanimously elected, I should decline to serve." General Tecumseh Sherman

"We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate." Kim Hubbard

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill

"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." John Galbraith

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Aesop

"Compare the emotional vocabulary available to a leader (confidence, satisfaction, indignation) with the emotions not permitted (regret, embarrassment, dread, angst, mortification, anger, surprise, wonder, doubt), and it becomes apparent why perfectly normal people, upon entering public life, transform into cartoons - because they are not free to express what a normal person would feel in their situation." John MacLachlan Gray, Canadian Playwright

"Until relatively recently, mass political movements were still about basic rights of food, shelter, education and self sufficiency. The reasons fewer people vote these days, or turn up for political meetings, is that for the vast majority of us those rights have been fulfilled. These days it’s in the adverts for mobile phones or foreign holidays where phrases like "Join the Revolution!" and "Cry Freedom!" are bandied about for a generation which knows nothing of their provenance. Just as now we have luxury illnesses to replace real ones, so now we have luxury politics." John Diamond, British Journalist

"The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie." Theodore H. White

"The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought." John Jay Chapman

"Political work is the life-blood of all economic work. " Mao Tse-Tung

"We often repent of what we have said, but never, never, of that which we have not." Thomas Jefferson

"Becoming a politician is the only step down I could take from being a journalist." Jim Hightower

"A fanatic is one who won't change his mind and won't change the subject." Winston Churchill

"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." Cato the Elder

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." Thomas Jefferson

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." Indira Gandhi

"Politics are, as it were, the market place and the price mechanism of all social demands - though there is no guarantee that a just price will be struck; and there is nothing spontaneous about politics- it depends on deliberate and continuous activity." Bernard Crick

"Finality is not the language of politics." Benjamin Disraeli

"There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail." Will Rogers

"When we win on an issue we call it leadership. When we lose, we call it politics. Practicing politics simply means increasing your options for effective results." John Eldred

"Never vote for the best candidate, vote for the one who will do the least harm." Frank Dane

"Office tends to confer a dreadful plausibility on even the most negligible of those who hold it." Mark Lawson

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." Mark Twain

"Too bad ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." Henry Kissinger

"When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property." Thomas Jefferson

"In politics as on a sickbed men toss from side to side in hope of lying more comfortably. "Goethe

"Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few." Jonathan Swift

"The political process is not tied to any particular doctrine. Genuine political doctrines, rather, are the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to this perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation." Bernard Crick

"Politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have their ‘politics’. But the communities in which this manner of activities is pre-eminent are the hereditary co-operative groups, many of them of ancient lineage, all of them aware of a past, a present and a future, which we call states. For most people, political activity is a secondary activity – that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. But the activity is one which every member of the group who is not a child nor a lunatic has some part and some responsibility." Michael Oakshott

"There is no more great men; there is only great committees." Marshal McLuhan

"Politics, a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." Ambrose Pierce

"If somebody’s gonna stab me in the back, I wanna be there." Allan Lamport

"In politics the choice is constantly between two evils." John Morley

"Gratitude is not a normal feature of political life." Lord Kilmuir

"No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity." Franklin Roosevelt

"Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupations of free men, and its existences is a test of freedom." Bernard Crick

"Politics makes strange post-masters." Kin Hubbard

"Great and glorious events which dazzle the beholder are represented by politicians as the outcome of grand designs whereas they are usually products of temperaments and passions." La Rochefoucauld

"Politics is not like an ocean voyage or a military campaign… something which leaves off as soon as reached. It is not a public chore to be gotten over with. It is a way of life." Plutarch

"Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters." Bob Dylan

"Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence…politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good." Bernard Crick

"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop." P. J. O’Rourke

"Some of you have money, while some are poor you know.
If you send me to Washington, I’ll just divide the dough." Betty Boop

"Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature." Kim Hubbard

"After long experience of politics, I have never found that there is any inhibition caused by ignorance as regards criticism." Harold Macmillan

"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts." Henry Brooke Adam

"All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway." Harry Truman

"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans." Goethe

"The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself." Bernard Crick

"I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow." Woodrow Wilson

"There is every reason to believe that our system will soon attain the highest degree of perfection of which human institutions are capable." President James Monroe

2004-05-17T04:31:00.000-07:00

"The ruling quality of leaders adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again." Warren G. Bennis

"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom." Bob Dylan

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and Third by experience, which is the bitterest." Confucius

"Patience is the companion of wisdom." St. Augustine

"A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail." John Foster Dulles

"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world." George Washington Carver

"To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice." Confucius

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest."Confucius

"The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved." William Jennings Bryan

"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm." Sir Winston Churchill

"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence." George Washington

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." Francis Bacon

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit." Aristotle

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." Anatole France

"Opportunity doesn’t knock. You knock, opportunity answers." Proverb

"The harder you work, the luckier you get." Gary Player

"In simplest terms, a leader is one knows where he want to go and gets up and goes." John Erskine

"Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line." Warren G. Bennis

"Nothing succeeds like success." Alexandre Dumas

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other." Abraham Lincoln

"We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it." Joseph Addison

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune:
Omitted, all the voyage of their lives
Is bound in the shallows and in miseries…
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures." Shakespeare

"Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you and they who lose today may win tomorrow." Cervantes

''I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.'' George Burns

"Victory belongs to the most persevering." Napoleon Bonaparte

"We must become the change we want to see in the world." Mohandas Gandhi

''We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.'' Herman Melville

''We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.'' - Aristotle

''I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.'' Bill Cosby

''Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.'' Plato

"Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use." IBM founder Thomas J. Watson

"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter." Edmund Burke

"Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient; often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship." James Russell Lowell

"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." Thomas Jefferson

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." Albert Einstein

"I don't let my mouth say nothin' my head can't stand." Louis Armstrong.

"Well done is better than well said." Benjamin Franklin

"Recognition is the greatest motivator." - Gerard C. Eakedale

"When I want your opinion I'll give it to you." Laurence J. Peter

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi

"We cannot solve today's problems using the mindset that created them." Albert Einstein

"Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass." Confucius

"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." Linus Pauling

"A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit." D. Elton Trueblood

"Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far." Euripides

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Calvin Coolidge

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." Louis Pasteur

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it." John Ruskin

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson

"To see things in the seed, that is genius." Lao-tzu

"We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects." Alexis de Tocqueville

"A few observations and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth." Alexis Carrel

"Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life." Goethe

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being." Goethe

"Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman." Lord Chesterfield

"You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them." Malcolm Forbes

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in." Alan Alda

"A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope." Epictetus

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." Bertrand Russell

"The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else." Martina Navratilova

"They also serve who only stand and wait." John Milton

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder." Aldous Huxley

"The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for." Dostoyevsky

"The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one." J. Russell Lynes

"It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." John Andrew Holmes

"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel." Carl W. Buechner

"We should measure affection, not like youngsters by the ardour of its passion, but by its strength and constancy." Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." Carl Sandburg, poet (1878-1967)

"There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts." George Matthew Adams

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears." Marcus Aurelius

"The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse." Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." W. Edwards Deming

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself." Eleanor Roosevelt

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." Oscar Wilde

"Education: That which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge." Mark Twain

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro". Hunter Thompson

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." Vaclav Havel

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater." William Hazlitt

"One of the criteria by which we measure the worth of public figures is whether or not their brand of bull is in step with the current Zeitgeist." John MacLachlan Gray, Canadian Playwright

"The common man, no matter how sharp and tough, actually enjoys having the wool pulled over his eyes, and makes it easier for the puller." P.T.Barnum

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating." Oscar Wilde.

"I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards." W. Somerset Maugham

"The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests." Gail Sheehy

"The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he." Karl Kraus

"Let sleeping dogs lie." Sir Robert Walpole, British Prime Minister

"To speak, and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks." Ben Johnson.

"Obviously we don't have 300 million people. We haven't got a big army. We don't have Hollywood. We're a medium small-sized country. We have to do what medium small-sized countries do, which—even though we're not smarter than other people—is to make ourselves seem to be smarter. We have to work harder and know more than other people. John Ralston Saul

"I have not the particular shining bauble or feather in my cap for crowds to gaze at or kneel to, but I have the power and resolution for foes to tremble at." Oliver Cromwell

"The longer the title, the less important the job." George McGovern

"You are remembered for the rules you break." Douglas MacArthur

"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." Sam Levenson

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." Winston Churchill

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." W B Yeats

"When I have to choose between voting for the people or the special interests, I always stick with the special interests. They remember. The people forget." Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Martin Luther King Jr.

"One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." John Locke

"When I look at myself, I’m devastated; when I compare myself with others, I’m consoled." Old Québecois saying

"If you're not very clever you should be conciliatory." Benjamin Disraeli

"It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it." Thomas Jefferson

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." Goethe

"All rising to great place is by a winding stair." Francis Bacon

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river." Nikita Khrushchev

"I suppose flattery hurts no one, that is, if he doesn’t inhale." Adlai Stevenson

"It is not necessary to understand things to argue about them." Pierre de Beaumarchais

"A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars." Talleyrand

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap." Napoleon

"To plunder, to lie, to show your arse, are three essentials for climbing high." Aristophanes

"Fortune rarely accompanies anyone to the door." Gracian Proverb

"We all have enough strength to endure the troubles of others." La Rochefoucauld

"In order to succeed in the world people do their upmost to appear successful." La Rochefoucauld

"The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices." La Rochefoucauld

"To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is to insult them without fear of consequences." La Rochefoucauld

"For God’s sake, don’t say yes until I’ve finished talking." Darryl Zanuck

"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book." Ronald Reagan

2004-05-17T04:30:00.000-07:00

"I will not regret leaving what has become a totally dysfunctional institution. I will not miss the thrill of making well-researched speeches in a virtually empty room. I will not miss working long hours on irrelevant ministerial guided committees. I will not miss the posturing." Retiring speech of Canadian Alliance M.P., Lee Morrison

"If nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline, and even if unanimously elected, I should decline to serve." General Tecumseh Sherman

"We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate." Kim Hubbard

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill

"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." John Galbraith

"The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first?" Rex Murphy, Canadian Broadcaster

"One moment it's a cathedral, at another time there is no words to describe it when it ceases, for short periods of time, to have any regard for the proprieties that constitute not only Parliament, but its tradition. I've seen it in all its greatness. I have inwardly wept over it when it is degraded." Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker

"Parliament is a deliberate assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purpose, not local prejudices ought to guide but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole." Edmund Burke

"Often the experts make the worst possible Ministers in their own fields. In this country we prefer rule by amateurs." Clement Richard Attlee, British Prime Minister

"There is no more striking illustration of the immobility of British institutions than the House of Commons." Herbert Henry Asquith, British Prime Minister

"There are two supreme pleasures in life. One is ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back." The Earl of Rosebery, British Prime Minister

"[The British constitution] presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it." William Ewart Gladstone, British Prime Minister

"The duty of an Opposition is very simple... to oppose everything, and propose nothing." The Earl of Derby, British Prime Minister

"What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong." William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, British Prime Minister

"An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them." (After his first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister:) Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, British Prime Minister

"The House of Commons is a great unwieldy body, which requires great Art and some Cordials to keep it loyal." Henry Pelham, British Prime Minister

"I shall not... think the demands of the people a rule of conduct, nor shall I ever fear to incur their resentment in the prosecution of their interest. I shall never flatter their passions to obtain their favour, or gratify their revenge for fear of their contempt." Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, British Prime Minister

"I can hardly keep wondering at my own folly in thinking it worthwhile to leave my books and garden, even for one day's attendance in the House of Commons." William Wyndam Grenville, Lord Grenville, British Prime Minister

"I have nothing to say to the nothing that has been said." Spencer Perceval, British Prime Minister

"Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help." Ken Livingstone

"Being in the backbench, we are typecast as if we are all stupid. We are just supposed to be voting machines." Clifford Lincoln

"A majority is always the best repartee." Benjamin Disraelli

"In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather than to something else than their rulers. They defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society…The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of the a splendid procession: it is by them that the mob are influenced; it is they who the inspectors cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second hand carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them." Walter Bagehot

"It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them." Cardinal De Retz

"I always voted for my party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all." W.S. Gilbert

"The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern." Walter Bagehot

"We’re not a separate branch of government. It is probably smart for committees to get a sense of how their recommendations will be received by the Minister. You can’t operate in a total vacuum or a committee risks being ignored.’’ Barry Campbell

"A cabinet is a combining committee – a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state. In its origin in belongs to one, in its functions it belongs to the other." Walter Bagehot

"Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm." Oscar Wilde

"There are two ways of getting into the Cabinet – you can crawl in or kick your way in." Aneurin Bevan

"There is a myth that the rules are fair…The rules are set up to guarantee that the minority will be heard but are weighted to allow the government to govern. That is the principle and that is the rub." Camille Montpetit

"It’s amazing the number of smart witnesses who feel like deer caught in the headlights when reporters microphones are thrust under noses outside the committee room. Be ready to drive your message again. This is part of the performance. It’s like being called back for an encore." Laura Peck

"Ottawa is a flurry of committee activity, departmental consultations, caucus work and private one-on-one meetings between Canadians and Parliamentarians….Parliamentary committees link Canadians to their parliamentarians. There is simply no other forum for Canadians to hook into the legislative and policy making process on a regular, formal and public basis." David McInnes

"Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men – by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have not vote at all." Walter Bagehot

"The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the Government or the Opposition, had been very easy to describe and had required no imagination to conceive. The character reproduces itself from generation to generation; and as it does so, become shorn in a wonderful way of those little touches of humanity which would be destructive of its purpose. Now and again there comes burst of human nature, …but as a rule, the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools, which are used either for building up or tearing down, and can generally bear to be changed from this box into the other, without the appearance of much personal suffering. Four and twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole, and work for one purpose, having each of them set aside his own idiosyncrasy, and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve either their own country or their own ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply. I have never ceased to wonder that stones of such strong caliber should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles." Anthony Trollope

"When in the House MPs divide
If they have a brain and cerebellum too,
They have to leave their brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell ‘em to." W.S. Gilbert

"Every Cabinet Minister is in a sense the Prime Minister’ agent – his assistant. There’s no question about that. It is the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, and he is the one person directly responsible to the Queen for what the Cabinet does. If the Cabinet discusses anything it is the Prime Minister who decides what the collective view of Cabinet is. A Minister’s job is to save the Prime Minister all the work he can. But no Minister could make a really important move without consulting the Prime Minister, and if the Prime Minister wanted to take a certain step the Cabinet Minister concerned would either have to agree, argue it out in Cabinet, or resign." Lord Home

"I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say." Margaret Thatcher

"There is a lot to be said for a prime minister concentrating on just keeping his head above water, without actually doing things. Politics, remember, is the art of the possible, and in Canadian politics not very much is ever possible." George Bain

"Since the top of the inter-agency hierarchy of the Prime Minister, and since he is obviously beyond reach as the arbiter of departmental disagreements on powers and processes, the result is a perpetual squabbling without any accessible referee … as veteran of dozens of interdepartmental committee meetings, I can attest to how good ideas can be ground down to pedestrian programs, and to how everyone is given a little pieces of the action as a tribute for letting proposals go forward." H. L. Laframboise

"Cabinet members are soon overwhelmed by the insistent demands of running their departments. On the whole, a period in high office consumers intellectual capital; it does not create it….The less ministers know at the outset, the more dependent they are on the only sources of available knowledge; the permanent officials." Anthony Wedgewood-Benn

"I say to myself that I must not let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand. I’m pushed in, shepherded, nurse and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me." Richard Crossman

"An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too – at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own…A man who enters Parliament must be content to utter common thoughts…And to some minds there is no necessity more vexing or more intolerable. Walter Bagehot

"We already have a sabbatical system. Its called opposition, and I’ve had enough of it." Nigel Lawson

"An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next." Valery

"The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it." Walter Bagehot

"One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament." Walter Bagehot

2004-05-17T04:29:00.000-07:00

"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent." Napoleon Bonaparte

"One of the biggest challenges for people when they’re faced with a public policy issue is defining what the issue is from the perspective of people in government. I think the main thing a client should be looking for in a lobbyist or a government relations consultant is for help to think the way people in government have to think when they’re looking at an issue. It’s the only way you’re going to win the day on an issue." Sean Moore

"Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out there and bring pressure on me." President Franklin D. Roosevelt, (In response to a business delegation)

"Those who do not know the plans of competitors cannot prepare alliances. Those who do not know the lay of the land cannot maneuver their forces. Those who do not use local guides cannot take advantage of the ground." Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"The best government consultant is one that has a good track record, actual experience in the way the government works, a willingness to get into the trenches on a client's behalf, good contacts and credibility and a willingness to work toward not only resolving a current problem but devising a strategy to Avoid future ones." Senator William Kelley

"Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise itself as the relationship to government. The manager has responsibility for this relationship as part of his responsibility to the enterprise itself. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do." Peter Drucker

"The main advantage of the on-the-scene consulting firm is that it can give you expert representation relatively quickly. The company or association is, in effect, buying the accumulated experience and key contacts of that firm, and thus avoiding the time-consuming and expensive process of building those contacts for themselves." Dr. S. Sarpkaya

"Professional lobbyists know their territory. They make very efficient use of their client's time. They can find out where your problem lies, who to talk to, and what questions to ask. They can tell you what information you need to have, and what questions you will have to answer. You will find out who you have to convince and why. Essentially, they guide you through the jungle of government and public opinion." Honourable John Reid, The Question of Lobbying

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." Hubert Humphrey

"As a supplicant to government, you cannot afford to bulls—t! Government reserves that right for itself." Anonymous

"Government relations is a test of how you manage frustration" . Anonymous

"Nine times out of ten Ministers side with their officials. Do you want a 10% or 90% chance of success." Anonymous

"There isn’t enough understanding by business of the constraints facing government. What government needs is a kind of real political advice that is based not just on what business wants, but what government can deliver, and what everyone can settle for. Business lobbies generally govern badly. Business still comes to scream if something gores its ox. But there still isn’t enough analysis of why government takes a particular stand on policy, and depending on the source of that stand, whether it can be adjusted or not." Stanley Hart

2004-05-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

"This victory is in large part due to the Internet... For the first time, a coalition of NGOs has had an influence on the security of the entire world without being a superpower." Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Winner

"Politicians used to put out leaflets with pictures of their family and pet dog and copies of their lousy speeches and it would be enough. Unfortunately many politicians now just create a web site with pictures of their family and pet dog and their lousy speeches but it is not good enough," Stephen Coleman, Oxford Internet Institute

"A lot of the Internet traffic may represent an echo chamber of virtual activism rather than meaningful protest. The web allows people who agree with each other to talk to each other and gives them the impression of being part of a much larger network than is necessarily the case." Barbara Epstein, University of California Professor

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it." Bill Gates

"There is a connection waiting to be made between the decline in democratic participation and the explosion in new ways of communicating. We need not accept the paradox that gives us more ways than ever to speak, and leaves the public with a wider feeling than ever before that their voices are not being heard. The new technologies can strengthen our democracy, by giving us greater opportunities than ever before for better transparency and a more responsive relationship between government and electors" The Honourable Robin Cook

"The Internet makes it far easier for us to restrict ourselves, much of the same, to groups of like-minded people -- to live in echo chambers of our own devising. In this way, the Internet is creating an increase, in many places, of social fragmentation, and hence an increase in both tolerance and incivility, as people end up seeing their fellow citizens as stupid, or malicious, or despicable. This problem is increased by the fact that much of the Internet is intolerant and far from civil. The culture of (some) television -- with liberals simply attacking conservatives, and vice-versa -- isn't healthy for democracy or tolerance, because it encourages people to choose teams, rather than to think issues through. For many people the Internet is aggravating this problem." Cass Sunstein, Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of Republic.com

"With email, a person can get his questions answered. You can bring people up to different levels of engagement with the campaign. You can't do that with any other medium." Joe Rothstein, Washington, DC consultant

"At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool. Because the Internet has an aura of "technology" surrounding it, the uneducated believe information from it even more. They don't realize that the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer: an electronic conduit for untreated, unfiltered information. Just when you might have thought you were all alone with your extreme views, the Internet puts you together with a community of people from around the world who hate all the things and people you do. You can scrap the BBC and just get your news from those Websites that reinforce your own stereotypes." Thomas Friedman, New York Times

"Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning. Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens." Andrew Leigh and Robert Atkinson in "Breaking down bureaucratic barriers: the next phase of digital government"

"Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who can not, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live." Peter Cochrane

"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand." author unknown

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Nobel laureate economist Herbert A. Simon

"The positive claims for the value of the Internet offered by our contemporaries are mostly hype. Whatever the long-range value of the Net turns out to be, it won't be the quality of information it offers, the democratic distance learning it makes possible, the presence of the Net user to all of reality, and the possibility of a new life full of meaning." Hubert Dreyfus, Philosopher University of California

"Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning....Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens." Andrew Leigh and Robert Atkinson in "Breaking down bureaucratic barriers: the next phase of digital government"

"A candidate who can master the Internet will not only level the playing field; he will level the opposition." RightClick Strategies' Larry Purpuro

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

"The Internet has become the main strategic communications tool behind the scenes in politics. It is not a medium to sway undecided voters. It is a medium to organize your supporters, feed them your message and get out your core vote. It may have an impact on new and less frequent voters some day, but that seems a long way off. No candidate that I am aware of has ever won because of the Internet." Steve Clift, Democracy Online

"The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it." Ted Nelson, Computer Visionary & Founder of Hyper Text

"Encouraging e-democracy is less desirable to elected officials. On the contrary, most of what they do while in office is try to increase their chances for re-election. Consider a politician who has the opportunity to create easily accessible public records of public meetings, including his own roll call votes. The person most motivated to use such records would likely be an opponent who wants to embarrass the incumbent." New America Foundation fellow James Snider

"The net is more than an organizing tool - it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision-making. It facilitates the process of information sharing to such an extent that many groups can work in concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus." Naomi Klein, No Logo

"Many key decisions are complex, and there is considerable uncertainty about the consequences of alternative measures. The policy-making bureaux in most governments are limited in size, and are typically overloaded. The new technologies hold out the promise of drawing upon far wider expertise. The challenge is how to do this in the most effective way. I suspect that the more structured the questions that are posed in the Internet dialogue the more meaningful will be the responses. Participants in the dialogue could be required to provide evidence backing up their arguments. One advantage of this approach is that it would widen the circle of expertise which the government could draw upon, which all too often is limited by circles of personal acquaintance." Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank

"The net, by its very nature, is inclusive. It reduces the barriers to human interaction. That said, for the Internet to . . .transform and not to perpetuate our political circumstances, three further conditions must be met. The first, most obviously, is universal Internet access. The second is a citizen body . . . willing and able to use the net to become connected and re-engaged. And the third, perhaps most importantly, is a formal political class with some predisposition to take Internet politics seriously. Of these, there is evidence to suggest that the big problem lies with the formal political class." Ian Kearns and Nick Hardy, Institute for Public Policy Research, UK

"Each new generation of nerds thinks it has the answer, only to run into the same brick wall of human behaviour. We must understand people and organizations before we can determine how to meld them with technology." Frank Bannister, a senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and e-democracy expert

"While the major political parties have struggled to use the Internet to their advantage, grassroots groups with enthusiasm beyond their budgets are finding that electronic politics can be a powerful force. The old and inefficient telephone tree is giving way to e-mail lists and computers that can send a letter or news alert to thousands of people in seconds. It is a trend that might reshape politics, bringing more people into a newly decentralized - - and democratized - - process just when many experts have concluded that the nation suffers from a near-terminal case of apathy." Daniel Weintraub, Sacramento Bee

"Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work." Laurie Anderson, Artist and technology pioneer

"One must be wary of the view that these loose and diverse coalitions represent a new form of globalized participatory democracy. The dissent industry is largely a product of the Internet revolution. Inexpensive, borderless, real-time networking provides advocacy non-governmental organizations [NGOs] with economies of scale and also of scope by linking widely disparate groups with one common theme." Sylvia Ostry

"I can't think of anything except kissing babies that you can't do online." Michael Cornfield, political scientist at George Washington University.

The modern campaign headquarters...has an annex open any hour of the day or night, at an address starting with www. New York Times, 10/19/99.

The Internet is rapidly taking its place as a full-fledged component of the political campaign media mix. As it does, it will open more opportunities of leveraging the most valuable currency in the modern world of political campaigns: information. Ron Faucheaux, editor-in-chief, Campaigns & Elections.

"The technology that's out there is going to change the country; therefore, it's going to change our politics." Doug Bailey, publisher, Hotline.

"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.” Max Frisch

"I was not only the first woman to become secretary of state, I was the first [U.S.] secretary of state of the 21st century. I was the first secretary of state to own a Web site, to visit Internet cafes, and to make Internet access a part of policy." Madeleine Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State

"By and large, people are sort of technologically averse in the political space." Mike McCurry, Press secretary to President Clinton.

"Today there are 400 million people around the world who have access to the Internet. By 2005, there will be more than 1 billion. We can all imagine the expectations and demands this will impose on government, but also the possibilities it will bring for improving services and revitalizing democracy." Graham Stringer, UK Minister

"Creating the foundation for dramatic change, the Internet has had a profound impact-in part by enabling organizers to quickly and easily arrange demonstrations and protests, worldwide if necessary. Individuals and groups now are able to establish dates, share experiences, accept responsibilities, arrange logistics, and initiate a myriad of other taskings that would have been impossible to manage readily and rapidly in the past. International protests and demonstrations can be organized for the same date and time, so that a series of protests take place in concert. The Internet has breathed new life into the anarchist philosophy, permitting communication and coordination without the need for a central source of command, and facilitating coordinated actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy. It has allowed groups and individuals to cement bonds, file e-mail reports of perceived successes, and recruit members." Canadian Security Intelligence Report, Anti-globalization: Spreading Phenomenon

"The Internet is becoming the ‘pre-digestion’ chamber for public policy discussion. Public policy ideas are being introduced, accessed, advocated, promoted, and debated on-line and then flow into the formal channels of official policymaking. As issues move through these channels, a parallel debate occurs on-line. When decisions are taken, the issues are re-fought on-line. Cyber debate and discussion is becoming the background soundtrack of government policy-making, both reflecting and influencing the process." Scott Proudfoot, Hillwatch

"Men have become the tools of their tools." Henry David Thoreau

"There is more to life than increasing its speed." Mahatma Gandhi

"Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other.” C.P. Snow

"I'm addicted to the Internet. I admit it. It has transformed the way I work as a senator, communicate with my children, and keep tabs on news and cultural developments.... The Internet is a more direct communications link between legislators and their constituents....I constantly work at fusing my Senate work into my office home page to make it as useful, timely, and user-friendly as possible for Vermonters and others who may visit.....I look at my Web site, as my 24-hour virtual office, where visitors can send me an e-mail or search for the information they need anytime, day or night.” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont

"New information technologies—including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls—have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They’ve done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems.” Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." Mitch Radcliffe

"The electronic town hall allows for speedy communications and bad decision-making." David Shenk

"Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people....The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster." Al Gore

"From far left to far right - and almost every point in between - advocacy groups are leading the charge into cyberpolitics. It’s essentially impossible to find an activist group of any significance that does not have an internet presence today. Advocacy groups, having gained experience from constant campaigning, tend to engage in more sophisticated online activism than candidates and corporations do. And they're constantly getting better at it..... It is not a medium for mass persuasion; if you want to run for president, you'd better buy lots of television advertising. But, if you want to move individuals to meet, march, and mail public officials, you'd best be online..... It levels the playing field and lowers barriers to participation by placing powerful information and communications tools in the hands of even small nd cash-strapped organizations. With an ever-increasing number of government documents available online, key information is no longer restricted to organizations with sophisticated Washington-based lobbyists who know on which Capital Hill doors to knock. One e-mail alert can do the world of countless phone trees and in infinitely faster than mailings. Organizations can afford to communicate with non-members and to build rosters of activists who are not dues-paying members.” Tom Price, ZDNet

"Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre." Goethe

"Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session." Marshall McLuhan

"It has provided more access to more information and political activity than anyone has in the history of the world to a sliver of the population – for instance junkies like me. But most others have been largely oblivious to the information cyber-revolution." Norman Ornstein

"The Internet is many things simultaneously …a new broadcast medium…interactive bulletin board …enormous collaboration tool…a huge post office.. The Internet is a venue for one-to-many communications, one-to-one communications, and many-to-many communications." Kevin Hill & John Hughes

"A survey by Holm Group in 1998 found that 88% of staff members in congressional offices check the Internet for information every day." Rebecca Fairley Raney

"Our marvelous new information technologies boost our power and opportunities for political engagement, but they can also disempower us by contributing to extreme political mobilization that sometimes overwhelms our institutions. These institutions were designed for rural societies operation at a tiny fraction of today’s speed and with a citizenry vastly less capable that today’s. It’s unclear how they will change to adapt to the new reality, but change they must." Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto

"The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete." Alvin Toffler

"Keep your web pages up to date. 'The first thing I do with a witness is go to their web site.'" notes a parliamentary researcher. David McInnes

"High-powered politicians had reams of statistics and analysis why a set of international investing rules would make the world a better place. They were no match, however, for a global ban of grass roots organizations, which, with little more than computers and access to the Internet, helped derail a deal.”
Madelaine Drohan

"Who killed the MAI – the Multilateral agreement on Investment? According to many accounts, civil society deserves the credit – or blame – and its weapon of choice was the Internet. The Internet with its revolutionary ability to connect millions and share information and strategies across time and space, allowed for an unprecedented global mobilization of opposition to the Agreement." Horizons

"From gas prices to cultural jamming and on-line concerts, the Internet is a hotbed of activity. On-line activism is everywhere and while this kind of Internet usage might not get the attention that dot.com startups and broadband battles do, the innovative uses of the Internet are reminders that real people are using technology to incite actions and maker their voices heard." Emma Smith

"The Internet, unlike television, is not universally available, and online information reaches only highly interested voters." Rebecca Fairley Raney

"In the ever accelerating world of the Internet, e-campaigning has gone from a novelty to a necessity in less than a year. With increasing sophistication and urgency, campaigns are using the Web as a bulletin board, advertising medium and organizing tool." Howard Fineman

"The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors…Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects." Marshall McLuahn

"Unless the digital divide is narrowed soon, the United States may be headed to the class warfare of a century ago, the last time the economy changed so fundamentally. It won’t be pleasant." Jonathan Alter

"The net is emerging as mainstream, multipurpose political tool." Amy Borrus

"The Information Revolution is likely to democratize politics by weakening the elites’ grip on information." Richard Dunham

"Without question, the mass gathering of peaceful protestors and a small number of violent critics of the WTO would not have been possible without a wired world. With thousands of web sites featuring sophisticated analysis of the complex 134 country organization and urging the world to come to Seattle, it was the Internet that made this protest the loudest and largest in decades." Bill Tieleman

"As a two way mass communications medium that allows users to receive news and information, as well as participate in information transmission and public discussion, the Internet potentially diffuses power over information and public debate. That ability even extends to overt lobbying by individuals in behalf of their own political interests." Richard Davis

"The new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village." Marshall McLuhan

"Advancements in electoral politics have almost always come from marketing, advertising, and communications techniques which were developed and refined for the consumer marketplace….As new marketing and communications techniques are developed to respond to the e-commerce boom, it will likely be from these areas that crossover applications to the electoral arena will originate." Grant Kippen

"The communications revolution is changing how people interact with one another, how organizations engage their constituencies, how we access information. It also makes possible a collective I.Q. where thousands of people can be connected to focus on an issue." Morino Institute

"In 1994, if a political party or interest group had even a rudimentary web site, it was a pioneer in the Information Age. In 1995, if a party or organization had a flashy series of web pages that included graphics, audio, video or text, it was hip. In 1996, if a Candidate for president has a web site, he would likely give out the address for during televised appearances…By 1997, if a party or interest group still did not have a web site, it was run by a bunch of idiots….Any political party or interest group …that does not take advantage of the Internet for lobbying, member recruitment and retention, and information dissemination, is cheating itself of one of the biggest boons to organized political activity in the twentieth century…The web is potentially the greatest thing since the postal system and the telephone for political interest groups." Kevin Hill & John Hughes

2004-05-17T04:26:00.000-07:00

"We have not eternal allies and we have not perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and peretual and those interests it is out duty to follow." Lord Palmerston, British Prime Minister

"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war." John Adams

''It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.'' Eleanor Roosevelt

"Whoever has an army has power, and war decides everything." Mao Tse Tung

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao Tse Tung

"War gives the right to the conquerors to impose any condition they please upon the vanquished." Julius Caesar

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." George S. Patton, General

"To be prepared for War is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." George Washington

"I say one evil empire down…one to go." Michael Moore, The Big One

"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit." Napoleon Bonaparte

''Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.'' Charles de Gaulle

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." George Santayana

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

"Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it." Anne O'Hare McCormick

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." Viktor Frankl

"The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." Gen. Omar Bradley

"He who does not attempt to make peace / When small discords arise, / Is like the bee's hive which leaks drops of honey / Soon, the whole hive collapses." Nagarjuna (c. 100-200 A.D.)

"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day." Sir Winston Churchill

"The world is now too small for anything but brotherhood." Arthur Powell Davies

"The triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track." Naomi Klein, No Logo

"I consider war to be the greatest folly, if not the greatest crime, of which a country could be guilty, if lightly entered into. If a proof were wanted of the deep and thorough corruption of human nature, we should find it in the fact that war itself was sometimes justifiable." Earl of Aberdeen, British Prime Minister

"We hear war called murder. It is not; it is suicide." James Ramsay MacDonald, British Prime Minister

"The world must learn to work together, or finally it will not work at all." Dwight Eisenhower

"There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so." Stephen Hawking, Physicist

"If you look at democratic societies, what you find is that they are constructed on the basis of the nation state, and the foundation of that is 'responsible individualism,' which takes the formal form of 'citizenship,' which turns into a 'social contract,' which in practical terms is 'democracy.' That is the real definition of a real nation, a real country. Therefore every economic power that is removed from a nation state and put into the international sector without the creation of compensating international powers for the citizens to assert the public good, is an anti-democratic move; it is a regress, not a progress. International agreements based on theories that exclude the idea of aggressive citizenship are anti-democratic." John Ralston Saul

"There is no longer a clear, bright line dividing America's domestic concerns and America's foreign policy concerns...If we want America to stay on the right track, if we want other people to be on that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no choice but to try to lead the train." President Bill Clinton

"When dealing with Canadians, it is advantageous to seem to be negotiating from a position of weakness, for when faced with an abject opponent, they become concession-happy and will accede to almost anything." British Diplomat, Alleyne Fitzherbert

"What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" Lin Yutang

"A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste." Adlai Stevenson

"Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions because it loves moderation, delights in compromise an is most careful to avoid anger." de Tocqueville

"The meat of the buffalo tastes the same on both sides of the border." Sitting Bull

"People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity." John Adams

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H.G. Wells

"I love my country far too much to be a nationalist." Unknown

"Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values." Jose Ortega y Gasset

"The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots." P. Ginsparg "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell

"The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies." Lester Pearson

"Patriotism corrupts history." Goethe

"The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull." Dean Acheson

"Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last." Charles de Gaulle

"Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over." Goethe

"At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity." Schopenhauer

"The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order." Bernard Crick

"There’ll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics." Walter Wriston

2004-05-17T04:23:00.001-07:00

"Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people." John Adams

"Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable." John Adams

"Public business must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise man decline, others will not; if honest man refuse it, others will not." John Adams

"If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless mean are at the tail and middle." John Adams

"Governments should fear weariness above all. Once it sets in, it is hard to dispel and almost invariably presages decline and eventual defeat." The Economist

''There are always great dangers in letting the best be the enemy of the good.'' Roy Jenkins

"A leader is a dealer in hope." Napoleon Bonaparte

"Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects." Tolstoy

"I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." Thomas Jefferson

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." Winston Churchill

"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." President William Jefferson Clinton 5/29/93

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Dwight D. Eisenhower

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. Thomas Jefferson

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State wants to live at the expense of everyone." Fredrick Bastiat

"I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." Thomas Jefferson

"There is but one element of government, and that is THE PEOPLE. From this element spring all governments. For a nation to be free, it is only necessary that she wills it. For a nation to be slave, it is only necessary that she wills it." John Adams

"Power is not alluring to pure minds." Thomas Jefferson

"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsiblitiy for themselves. George Pataki

"Most bad government has grown out of too much government." Thomas Jefferson

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." Charles Austin Beard

"If a government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, within five years, they'd have a shortage of sand." Milton Friedman

"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" Thomas Jefferson

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." Barry Goldwater

"A silent majority and government by the people is incompatible." Tom Hayden

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread." Thomas Jefferson

"Fiftyone percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn

"The government's view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. Thomas Jefferson.

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." Milton Friedman

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." Bertrand de Jouvenal

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Thomas Jefferson

"Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship." Harry S. Truman

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." Kierkegaard

"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary." Kathleen Norris

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Thomas Jefferson

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." Plato

"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." Ronald Reagan

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Adam Smith

"A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader." Harry S. Truman

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Thomas Paine

"Today the nations of the world may be divided into two classes - the nations in which the government fears the people, and the nations in which the people fear the government." Amos R. E. Pinochet

"Fire, water and government know nothing of mercy." Albanian Proverb

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." Voltaire

"Pro is to con as progress is to Congress." Anonymous

"Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too." Richard M. Nixon

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments." William H. Borah

"As a rule, the Government appoints its friends." Sir Hector Langevin, Canadian Cabinet Minister

"Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken." Bertrand Russell

"Would it not be simpler
If the Government
Dissolved the people
And elected another?" Bertolt Brecht

“The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.” John Stuart Mill

"Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful." John Stuart Mill

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there." Clare Booth Luce

"It can produce cynicism if people believe that the process is merely something that has to happen; they almost become bit players in the process, arriving at decisions that are already made. I emphasise the importance of people knowing that their participation is for real, and that it can affect the outcome. We should not allow public sector managers simply to tick a box to say that they have done the participation bit; participation should contribute to the decision-making process. If it does not, we will genuinely undercut all the good things that are happening." Tony Wright, British MP

"I wouldn't say voters are stupid. But the same voter who wants unlimited services also does not want to pay for it. There's a disconnect." Phil Talmadge, former Washington Supreme Court judge and legislator.

"Public opinion in this country is everything." Abraham Lincoln

"Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing." Benjamin Disraeli

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." John F. Kennedy

"Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing." Benjamin Disraeli

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." John F. Kennedy

"I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management." E.B. White

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." James Madison

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" Abraham Lincoln

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences." Robert Green Ingersoll

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Louis Dembitz Brandeis

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided." Konrad Adenauer

"Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced to do so by political level authority." Richard Holbrooke, US Diplomat

"Regulations are government embedding and marbling its way into and out of successive layers of societal activity. It is government deconstructing, rebuilding, renovating and expanding a little each day. The regulatory machinery may move a little faster or a little slower, but like rust, it never sleeps." Scott Proudfoot, Hillwatch

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us." Thich Nhat Hanh

"It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack." Voltaire

"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done." Oscar Wilde

"We cannot work or eat or drink; we cannot buy or sell or own anything; we cannot go to a ball game or a hockey game or watch TV without feeling the effects of government. We cannot marry or educate our children, cannot be sick, born or buried without the hand of government somewhere intervening. Government gives us railways, roads and airlines; sets the conditions that affect farms and industries; manages or mismanages the life and growth of the cities. Government is held responsible for social problems, and for pollution and sick environments. Government is our creature. We make it, we are ultimately responsible for it, and, taking the broad view, in Canada weave considerable reason to be proud of it. Pride, however, like patriotism, can never be a static thing; there are always new problems posing new challenges. The closer we are to government, and the more we know about it, the more we can do to help meet these challenges." Canadian Senator Eugene Forsey

"The idea of imposing restrictions on a free economy to assure freedom of competition is like breaking a man's leg to make him run faster." Morris R. Sayre

"You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." Abraham Lincoln

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." President John F. Kennedy

"It is the responsibility of the citizens to support their government. It is not the responsibility of the government to support its citizens." President Grover Cleveland

"His administration apparently means to define itself as a television program instead of a government…I don’t know if it can please both its sponsors and its intended audience." Lewis Lapham, Harpers’ Editor talking of the Clinton Administration

"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul." Margaret Thatcher

"You never reach the promised land. You can march towards it." James Callaghan, British Prime Minister

"I repeat, that all power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise, and that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist." Benjamin Disraeli

"The function of government is to calm, rather than to excite agitation." Viscount Palmerston, British Prime Minister

"Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair." George Burns

"A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity." George Grenville, British Prime Minister

"Civilization and profits go hand in hand." Calvin Coolidge

"I believe there's something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.” Woody Allen

"As Clerk of the Privy Council, a particular concern of mine revolves around the governance challenge embodied in the dichotomy between fast and slow. Our era of accelerated change has been compared to a 100-meter dash that is run over and over and over again. There are times when the speed of the public interest must be more deliberative — slower in real time — than private sector deliberations. There are usually more interests at stake in public sector issues, more people to be brought along and a more subtle, or at least different, calculation than the private sector’s bottom line. Decisions are typically hard to reverse and there is intense pressure to get it right the first time. Governance in a democracy takes time — even if you don’t stop to recount the chads. But there are instances when it cannot be otherwise and still remain a democracy." Mel Cappe, Clerk of the Privy Council

"If there is anything that puzzles me in this game, it is that the longer that you are in the job of prime minister, the harder you have to work to do your job. With anything else ....you get to know the ropes pretty well and it becomes easy. I feel the more you know, the more you have to know and the more problems come at you. It is certainly not because I do not delegate." Pierre Trudeau

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." Thomas Jefferson

"Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is." Woodrow Wilson

"All societies of men must be governed is some way or other. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet." Robert Winthrop

"Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." Thomas Paine

"Power corrupts, but absolute power is a blast." Junior White House staff

"Nearly all men can withstand adversity; If you want to test a man's character, give him power. " Abraham Lincoln

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." C. S. Lewis

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone." Frederic Bastiat

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” Barry Goldwater

"All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships." George Bernard Shaw

"Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer." Warren Bennis

"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." David Hume

"In public affairs, stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because it is harder to fight." Woodrow Wilson

"Which government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves." Goethe

"Business has three main constituencies; government has dozens. What constitutes a signal achievement in one constituency’s eyes… may be a disaster to others." Timothy Plumtre

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." Tacitus

"A good government implies two things; first fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained." James Madison

"What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors." Henry Becque

"In government, all of the incentive is in the direction of not making mistakes. You can have 99 successes and nobody notices, and one mistake and you’re dead." Lou Winnick

"One law for lion and ox is oppression." William Blake

"It’s a billion here and a billion there; the first thing you know it adds up to real money." Senator Everett Dirksen

"Much has been said about the analogy between running a business and running a government. This is a sloppy analogy from a start. If one simply substitutes ‘running a business’ on the one hand and ‘governing a parliamentary democracy’ on the other hand the falsity of the conceit is obvious." Lord Bancroft

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul." George Bernard Shaw

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." Unknown

"Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P. J. O’Rourke

"Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule." De Tocqueville

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them." P. J. O’Rourke

"Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish." Lao-Tzu

"Business and government administration are alike in all unimportant respects." Wallace Sayre

"The word government is from the Greek word, which means ‘to steer’. The job of government is to steer, not to row the boat. Delivering services is rowing and government is not very good at rowing." E. S. Savas

"An atomic energy plant can slip through parliament easily. A rug in a mayor’s office – an issue everyone can understand – can tie up a municipal council for ages. The risk is asymmetric. In government, what gets you in a hassle is seldom the huge decisions that were clearly wrong, it’s the little things that that were clearly trivial by comparison." Anonymous official

"Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem invincible." George Orwell

"There is not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people." Hubert Humphrey

"Much of the language of business is competitive, even military, in nature: strategy, tactics, aggressive stances, exploitation of advantage, overcoming the competition, positioning, consolidation of position. In government, the motivation is not financial advantage and the context is not the competitive world of the marketplace. Cabinet’s mandate is the attainment of that elusive goal good government. The ends of good government have to do with such abstract matters as social and economic well-being, personal freedom, equality under the law or cultural enhancement. The possibility of so many different interpretations of these objectives makes the task of government a good deal more contentious than that of business." Timothy Plumtre

"The art of government is the organization of idolatry." George Bernard Shaw

"The budget should be balanced; the treasury refilled; public debt should be reduced; the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled; and assistance to foreign lands should be limited, lest the State become bankrupt. The people should be forced to work and not depend on Government for assistance." Marcus Tullius Cicero

"We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen." Will Durant

"It would be desirable if every Government, when it comes to power, should have its old speeches burnt." Viscount Snowden

"Here is the values we shall find recurring wherever government is opposed: a belief that government, as a necessary evil, should be kept at a minimum; and that legitimate social activity should be provincial, amateur, authentic, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, organic, right-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational. Values contrasting with those are not polar opposites, but distant points on the continuum of approaches to government – namely, a belief that government is sometimes a positive good, and that it should be cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, articulated in its parts, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, and delegative, with a division of labor. Ideally, government should combine all these values in a tempered way, since one set does not necessarily preclude the other. But…group after group in our history does treat the first cluster of values as endangered by the second, under siege from them." Gary Wills

"The science of constructing a commonwealth or renovating it, or reforming it, is…not to be taught a priori…That which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may rise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions." Edmund Burke

2004-05-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." H. L. Mencken

"The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice." H.G. Wells

"The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open." Gunther Grass

"Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires." Friedrich Nietzsche

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." Eugene V. Debs

"Only the educated are free." Epictetus

"He who allows oppression, shares the crime." Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin

"As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences." Eugene McCarthy

"Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods." H.L. Mencken

"It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember." Eugene McCarthy

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness." Edvard Teller

"A government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Abraham Lincoln

"These are the people we elected and if we are not satisfied we should get new candidates. It is in our hands. It is our country. It is a very simplistic view that politicians are to blame for everything." Robert Stanfield, former Conservative Leader and Premier of Nova Scotia

"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." Thomas Jefferson

"A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights." Napoleon Bonaparte

"Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues." Napoleon Bonaparte

"Men take only their needs into consideration - never their abilities." Napoleon Bonaparte

"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance." William O. Douglas

"A man younger than 30 who's not a liberal has no heart and a man older than 30 who's not a conservative has no brain." Winston Churchill

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty." Thomas Jefferson

"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." Rudolf Giuliani

“Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes.” Thomas Sowell

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” Thomas Jefferson

"For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom, the right to freely express opinion and the right to be allowed to criticise and form opinions. Human dignity is the right to health, work, education and social welfare. Human dignity is the right and the practical possibility to shape the future with others. These rights, the rights of democracy, are not reserved for a select group within society, they are the rights of all the people." Olof Palme, the late Swedish Prime Minister

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." Thomas Jefferson

''You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.'' James Thurber

“Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: No man should have so much. The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: All men should have as much.” Phelps Adams

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote." George Jean Nathan

"Don't vote, it only encourages them." Anonymous

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." Thomas Jefferson

"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side." Orson Scott Card, Novelist

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." Thomas Jefferson

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society" Theodore Roosevelt
''Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.'' Thomas Jefferson

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." Edmund Burke

"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been." Winston Churchill

"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant." John Simon

"Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management." Senator Soaper

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." George Bernard Shaw

"Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think." Anonymous

"Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame." Laurence J. Peter

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." H. L. Mencken

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." E. B. White

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken

"That government is best which governs least." Henry David Thoreau

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Judge Gideon J. Tucker

"In America, anybody may become president, and I suppose it's just one of the risks you take.” Adlai Stevenson

"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage." H. L. Meneken

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet." Abraham Lincoln

"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing." Thomas Jefferson

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." E.M. Forster

“What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?” John Dewey

“What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.” Walter Lippman

"In democracy everyone has the right to be represented, even the jerks." Chris Patten

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." H.L. Mencken

“Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.” John Stuart Mill

“No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interest of the few. And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. The essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.” John Dewey

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education." Thomas Jefferson

"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

"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place." Mahatma Gandhi

"History is fables agreed upon." Voltaire

"When the government fears the people, that is LIBERTY. When people fear the government, that is TYRANNY." Author Unknown

"The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced." Frank Zappa

"Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers." William Penn

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space." Gloria Steinem

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." Josh Billings

"If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." Henry David Thoreau

"If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind." John Stuart Mill

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." Galbraith's Law

"The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He is in front of it." Axel Munthe

"If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others." Blaise Pascal

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good." Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it." Charles Caleb Cotton

"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep." Albert Einstein

"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" Thomas Henry Huxley

"The truly just is he who feels half guilty of your misdeeds." Kahlil Gibran

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political." Ignazio Silone, author (1900-1978)

"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people." Giordano Bruno

"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." African proverb

"On each race is laid the duty to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people into deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival." Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Poet (1861-1941)

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." Mahatma Gandhi

"Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption." John Stuart Mill

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." Tolstoy

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." Laurens van der Post

"If there is not struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blow, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." Frederick Douglass

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." Alice Walker

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln

"They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a communist; They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader; They came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." Elie Wiesel

"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." Michel de Montaigne

"Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know." Andre Maurois

"He who allows oppression, shares the crime." Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin

"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." Mark Twain

"It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do." Moliere

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." Saul Bellow

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order." Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947)

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." Paulo Freire

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress." Thomas A. Edison

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." Mignon McLaughlin, author

"Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake." Joan Gilbert

"To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets." Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE)

"Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before." Richard A. Clarke, former White House counter- terrorism chief.

"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty." Samuel Adams

"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties . . . They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty . . . that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be the fundamental principle of the American government." Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice

"Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any deprivation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery." Alexis de Tocqueville

"Good government could never be a substitute for government by the people themselves." Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, British Prime Minister

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." William Pitt, "The Younger”, British Prime Minister

"We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate." Thomas Jefferson
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

"A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election." Bill Vaughan

"Democracy is too good to share with just anybody." Nigel Rees

"The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves." John Ralston Saul

"Strong people don't need strong leaders." Ella Baker

"The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone." James Madison

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.” Edmund Burke

"Only the educated are free.” Epictetus

"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty." James Madison

"Who's more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?" Obi Wan Kenobi

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." E.B. White

"I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy." Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Complete equality isn’t compatible with democracy, but it is a agreeable to tolitarianism. After all the only way to ensure the equality of the slothful, the inept and the immoral is to suppress everyone else." Iain Benson

"It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens." John Mayard Keynes

"Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." Clement Atlee

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken

2004-05-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

"I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family."

- Gloria Steinem

"...the world's 358 billionaires ... have more assets than the combined incomes of countries representing nearly half -- 45 per cent -- of the planet's population."

David Usborne in New York reporting on the UN's 1996 Human Development Report

"Hear me people: We now have to deal with another race---small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule."

---Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference, 1877

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-classc muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...."

Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940)
Major General (U.S. Marine Corps)

"It is no longer a single historical world--as it has been from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities, are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living theirs. Our crisis is that we no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us. The most we want is to hang on to what we've got. They want the means to live. That is why our principal preoccupations have become private and our public discourse is compounded of spite. The historical and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes and action, has been dismantled. We live and have our being today in private coverts."

John Berger

"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved through understanding".

A. Einstein

"Mother, the sky* collapsed
in the tears of the innocent"

Yannis Ritsos

"When the world has the Way,
Running horses are retired to till the fields.
When the world lacks the Way,
War-horses are bred in the countryside.
No crime is greater than approving of greed,
No calamity is greater than discontent,
No fault is greater than possessiveness."

Tao Te Ching

"The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments."

Henry Clay, From: Speech in the Senate, March 14, 1834

"There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down."

David Ricardo

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."

Bertrand Russell

"If you rub it in, both at home and abroad, that you are ready for instant war, with every unit of your strength in the first line and waiting to be first in, and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down, and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any), and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you."

--John Arbuthnot Fisher, British Admiral 1841-1920

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction."

Blaise Pascal

"When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long."

--Lya Sorano

"We are all conduits for something. Whatever we are in contact with, whatever we surround ourselves with, passes through us whether we like it or not. A driver zooming through traffic because he's listening to speed metal is a conduit for the music. Likewise, we are conduits for the enterprises in which we participate. Ideas pass through us, spirituality and certainly the desire for money passes through us as surely as the cord through the wooden hands of a marionette. When large corporations are the ultimate purveyors of what we make, it has to affect our work. We become conduits for corporate ideology. We take the check and wonder why we're miserable.

--Eric Bogosian

"To know and not to do is not to know"

-Chinese saying

"The trouble with the rat race is even if you win, you find out you're still a rat."

--Lily Tomlin

"...those who try to resist the technologically advanced but morally primitive Western societies will pay a bitter price."

-- Noam Chomsky

"Why haven't you raised your voice against these evils, against this machine that is sapping the life blood of the revolution?" I asked. He gave two reasons. As long as Russia was being attacked by the combined Imperalist, and Russian women and children were dying from the effects of the blockade, he could not join the shrieking chorus of the ex-revolutionists in the cry of "crucify!" He preferred silence... then he added "We have always pointed out the effects of Marxism in action. Why be surprised now?"

--A conversation between Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."

A. Einstein

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

Eric Hoffer

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

- Abraham Lincoln, speech (1861)

"Hierarchies make some people dependent on others, blame the dependent for their dependency, and then use that dependency as a justification for further exercise of authority."

--Martha Ackelsberg

"Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair."

--George Burns

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

--Paulo Friere

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests."

--George Santayana (1863-1952)

"If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all."

--Noam Chomsky

"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living."

--Yiddish Proverb

"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie ... It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist." -

-- George Orwell

"The complaints of the privileged are too often confused with the voice of the masses."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.

--Mark Twain

"I would rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck."

--Emma Goldman

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.

-Mark Twain

"I would rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck."

-Emma Goldman

"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

-Unknown

"We are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp over which economic/political/social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsover's benfit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential?"

-Toni Cade Bambara

"American politics are deeply contradictory of course, but anti-intellectualism . . . is the common strain. This includes a deep suspicion of anything that isn't simple, fundamental, traditional, down-to-earth and "American" in the ideological sense, and can be exploited easily by demagogues and cynical politicians of the right. The key word is "freedom", which includes the freedom to own and use firearms, the freedom to trade and use the marketplace without restraint even if it means serious injury to health and decency, the freedom above all to make America's will rule all over the earth."

--Edward Said

"Since woman's greatest misfortunes has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes."

-Emma Goldman

"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."..

Bertrand Russell, in "Roads to Freedom"

"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

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them--and then, the opportunity to choose."

--C. Wright Mills

"There is substantial evidence that the fear of domestic disruption has inhibited murderous plans. One documented case concerns Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized the need that 'sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control.' if they sent troops to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, and Pentagon officials feared that escalation might lead to massive civil disobedience, in view of the large-scale popular opposition to the war, running the risk of 'provoking a domestic crisis of unprecented proportions.' A review of the internal documents released in the Pentagon Papers shows that considerations of cost were the sole factor inhibiting planners, a fact that should be noted by citizens concerned to restrain the violence of the state. In such cases as these, and many others, popular demonstrations and civil disobedience may, under appropriate circumstances, encourage others to undertake a broader range of conventional action by extending the range of the thinkable, and where there is real popular understanding of the legitimacy of direct action to confront institutional violence, may serve as a catalyst to constructive organization and action that will pave the way to more fundamental change."

--Noam Chomsky

"So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary and that everything which is usual appears natural"

-John Stuart Mill

"....the most inspiring thought I bumped into last year was the concept of JUBILEE 2000 a call to cancel third world debts going into the next millennium and to give crippled nations a chance to get up off their knees and walk again. ...Without a real commitment to do something about the dire circumstances of a third of the population of the planet, all new year's eve 99 will amount to is an up drawbridge scenario, a fancy dress ball at the castle where we all play louis 14 pissing across a moat of champagne on the poor."

Bono, lead singer of U2

"Equality, because without it there can be no liberty."

J. J. Rousseau

"A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
`Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you;'
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will all say, `We did this ourselves.'"

Lao Tzu

"The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal "underlying." It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctnaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-backed "progressivism" until it is like a diamond hidden under a monition of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world."

George Orwell

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.. ...human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.... We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of NOW. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.... this is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action."

--Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr.

"There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it...."

--Mark Twain

"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 civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines."

- John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

"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

"It was too successful. What were we going to do with the supervisors - the managers? We didn't need them anymore. Management decided that it didn't want operators that qualified. The employees' newly revealed ability to carry more responsibility was too great a threat to the established way of doing things and to established power patterns.

Patrick Michael Rooney quoting a Polaroid official after a participation project was stopped

"The best antidote to the shortcomings of participation is still more participation."

Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick

"It is not enough that the forms of government should have the passive or "implied" consent of the governed, but that the Society will be in health only if it is in the full sense democratic and self-governing, which implies not only that all the citizen should have a `right' to influence its policy if they so desire, but that the greatest possible opportunity should be afforded for every citizen actually to exercise this right."

G.D.H. Cole

"There's a certain instinct that a worker has, much more so than some candy-assed storeowner. He understands who's scewing him, but he doesn't understand how to get unscrewed."

Ed Sadlowski, a steelworkers' union official

"There is hardly a study in the entire literature which fails to demonstrate that satisfaction in work is enhanced or that other generally acknowledged beneficial consequences accrue from a genuine increase in workers' decision-making power. Such consisncy of findings, I admit is rare in social research.

Paul Blumberg

"Listen, Revolution,
We're buddies, see --
Together,
We can take everything:
Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
All the tools of production,
(Great day in the morning!)
Everything --
And turn 'em over to the people who work.
Rule and run 'em for us people who work."

Langston Hughes

"The justice yet the uselessness of my complaints left in my mind the seeds of indignation against our foolish civil institutions, whereby the real welfare of the public and true justice are always sacrificed to an apparent order, which is in reality subversive of all order, and of which the only effect is to bestow the sanction of public authority upon the oppression of the weak and the injustice of the strong."

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions

"It is of great importance that the general public be given the opportunity to experience, consciously and intelligently, the efforts and results of scientific research. It is not sufficient that each result be taken up, elaborated, and applied by few specialists in the field. Restricting the body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty."

Albert Einstein

"For most of my life, I've been active in human rights campaigns, including the movements for trade union democracy and for civil rights. Animal rights, for me, was nothing more than a logical extension of these concerns... It would seem to me that a rational leftist would recognize that the ultimate in exploitation and domination and treating living beings as mere objects for profit is nowhere seen in a purer form than in our relation to animals raised for food."

--Henry Spira

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind"

Mahatma Gandhi

"Possession is 9/10 of the problem."

John Lennon

"A good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge"

Bertrand Russell

"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."

Benjamin N. Cardozo

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation."

John Maynard Keynes

"A good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge"

Bertrand Russell

"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."

Benjamin N. Cardozo

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation."

John Maynard Keynes

"There are two ways not to suffer from the inferno we are all living in every day. The first suits most people: accept the inferno and become part of it to the point where you don't even see it any more. The second is riskier and requires constant attention and willingness to learn: seek out and know how to recognize whoever and whatever, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno, and help them last, give them space."

--Italo Calvino

"He who is morally impressed by power is never in a critical mood, and he is never a revolutionary character."

--Erich Fromm

"The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas."

--Pierre Joseph Proudhon

"When you argue or plead with a Politician, expecting him to suddenly become as smart as required by Law, you will have much greater Assurance in Hope and Fun watching the Melting of the Greenland Ice."

--Poldi Meindl

"From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them."

--Wilhelm von Humboldt

"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip."

--George Orwell
Submitted by Fady Tabbara

"Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commisars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion."

--Noam Chomsky

"What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass."

--August Strindberg, 1884
Submitted by Tor Wennerberg

"When the mass media in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of their government, the result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the result is responsible journalism."

--Norman Solomon
Submitted by Fady Tabbara

"Let us not flatter ourselves for our human victories over nature. For every such victory, it takes its revenge on us. … At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature. But that we with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst."

—Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature

"Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control."

- Denis Diderot, 1796

"I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great man must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor."

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1880

"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are
being used by the owning elite's as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad"

Smedley D. Butler, Major General (U.S. Marine Corps)

"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head."

--George Bernard Shaw

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

H.L. Mencken

"Any ruling founded on injustice is not justice. The righteous fight for life, liberty, and for justice can only continue."

-- Mumia Abu-Jamal

Be patient. It may take thirty years, but sooner or later they'll listen to you, and in the meantime, keep kicking ass.

-- Florynce R. Kennedy, Color Me Flo

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

--Stephen Jay Gould

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediencey.

--Theodore Roosevelt, 1900

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

--Adrienne Rich

It has been said that the hungry cannot hear. In my experience the exact opposite is true, it is the satisfied that cannot hear.

--anon

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity has been achieved.

--Immanuel Kant

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society

--Krishnamurti

In going from the present to the future, from "here" to "there," we must ask: what is power? Under what conditions is it dissolved? And what does its dissolution mean?

--Murray Bookchin

Facts, facts, facts

--Charles Dickens, Hard Times

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

--Upton Sinclair

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

--Steven Biko, 1971

The task of the human-hearted man is to procure benefits for the world and to eliminate its calamities. Now among all the current calamities of the world, which are the greatest? I say that attacks on small states by large ones, disturbances of small houses by large ones, oppression of the weak by the strong, misuse of the few by the many, deception of the simple by the cunning, and disdain toward the humble by the honored: these are the misfortunes of the world.

--Mo Tzu, China, 479-381 BCE

The superior person understands rightness; the inferior person understands profit.

-- Confucius, China, 551-479 BCE

All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.

Schopenhauer

The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education....The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world. Thoughts are a boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life.

Abdu'l-Baha, Persia, 1875

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

Raymond Williams

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they are unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat.

--Aldous Huxley, in The Devils of Loudun, 1952

Plainly speaking, and dispensing with all paraphrase, punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law?

--Karl Marx

Bush's press secretary told reporters after a 1984 debate with his then vice presidential opponent: "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 2,000, or 20,000."

--Holly Sklar

Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then you will find that money cannot be eaten.

--Cree Indian Prophecy

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Mario Savio

...But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.

-Mark Twain

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

-James Madison

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.

-Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations

I do not deny the allegation, I deny the allegator.

--Jesse Jackson

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always a vice.

--Thomas Paine

Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.

- Mumia Abu-Jamal

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. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? 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, the Chief of Staff for the New York Times,1953

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everwhere else.

--H. L. Mencken

....in the United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything...in the most trivial matters of everyday life.

--H. L. Mencken

[W]hile violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. From this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all. In historical experience and traditional theory this combination, even if it is not recognized as such, is known as tyranny, and the time honored fear of this form of government is not exclusively inspired by its cruelty, which--as the long series of benevolent tyrants and enlightened despots attests--is not among its inevitable features, but by the impotence and futility to which it condemns the rulers as well as the ruled.

--Hannah Arendt

Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.

- Mumia Abu-Jamal

The citizen's job is to be rude--to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.

--John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion

What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some freshstart, an island, a new continent, dispossess, them, give them a new planet sure! So they don't have to deal with our history. Ever since More they've been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start. So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don't speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the inside of a paperweight, pretty, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we're stuck here and no one's going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.

Stuck in history like a wedge in a crack With no way out and no way back- Split the world!

Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.

--Kim Stanley Robinson (One of the great utopian novelists of current science fiction.)

Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and the selectivity connected with it has by many people been cited as authorization of the encouragement of the spirit of competition. Some people also in such a way have tried to prove pseudoscientifically the necessity of the destructive economic struggle of competition between individuals. But this is wrong, because man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a socially living animal. As little as a battle between ants of an ant hill is essential for survival, just so little is this the case with the individual members of a human community.

---Albert Einstein, from an address at Albany, NY, October 15, 1936

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

`They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, because your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea - something you can set up and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...'

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

What kind of person to be?, a kind to use people and love things?,or to love people!! and use things?

anon.

I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.

-H.L. Mencken

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

- Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
(http://www.henrygeorge.org/chp1.htm)

The greatest problem facing our country is the breaking down into two classes, those who have and those who have not. The growing differences between the incomes of the skilled and the less skilled, the educated and the uneducated, pose a very real danger. If that widening rift continues, we're going to be in terrible trouble. The idea of having a class of people who never communicate with their neighbors - those very neighbors who assume the responsibility for providing their basic needs - is extremely unpleasant and discouraging. And it cannot last. We'll have a civil war. We really cannot remain a democratic, open society that is divided into two classes. In the long run, that's the greatest single danger. And the only way I see to resolve that problem is to improve the quality of education.

- Milton Friedman, TECHNOS Quarterly, For Education and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1996 (http://www.ait.net/journal/volume5/1friedman.htm)

The magic word before whose power
Even the people's masters cower,
Flapping their wigs officiously--
Prick up your ears; the word--it is publicity.

-- Late 18th Century German verse

Contrary to today’s stereotypes, racists do not always chew tobacco and drive pickup trucks with gun racks. They wear silk shirts, treat women as possessions, and talk about human rights at cocktail parties far from communities of people of color. The men in pickup trucks are just as likely to be as warm and caring as the high minded liberals are to be racists.

-Wilma Mankiller (Former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation)

Business knows no pity, and cares for justice only when justice is seen to be better policy. If it had power to control the elements, it would grasp in its iron clutches the waters, sunshine and air and resell them by measure, and at exorbitant prices to the millions of famished men, women and children.

-W. A. Duncan in the Cherokee Advocate, 1892

Hey, let's get serious...
God knows what he's doin'
He wrote this book here
An' the book says:
"He made us all to be just like Him,"

So...
If we're dumb...
Then God is dumb...
(An' maybe even a little ugly on the side)

Frank Zappa "Dumb all over", You are What You Is, 1981

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

--Adam Smith

The only possible alternative to being the oppressed or the oppressor is voluntary cooperation for the greatest good of all.

--Errico Maletesta

The familiar notion of planning is that done by experts, with scientific knowledge. We have seen the results of that rational planning: tower blocks, food additives, valium--the list of horrors is endless.

--Sheila Rowbotham

Although it is a daring thing to discuss a subject that others have made a profession, neverthless I do not believe it is wrong to occupy with words a rank which many with greater presumption have held with deeds, for the errors that I commit in writing can be corrected without harm, but those which others have committed in practice cannot be recognized except through the downfall of their governments.

-Nicollo Machiavelli, The Art of War.

I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses - you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.

--Eugene Debs

The outcome of today's struggles does not matter. It does not matter in the final count that one or two movements were temporarily defeated because what is definite is the decision to struggle which matures every day, the consciousness of the need for revolutionary change, and the certainty that it is possible.

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara

The love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life--will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

--John Maynard Keynes

Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of social organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

--Albert Einstein

The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the intellectual contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing peoples' consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.

--Michel Foucault

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. ... The hand entrusted with power becomes either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by un-intermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity .. Never look, therefore for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirrior of Freedom... As health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through roil, so there is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust..

--Wendell Phillips.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

I know that there are no limits to which the powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

--Mother Jones

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains. Every wheel in the creation every mine and every mill; fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still.

--Joe Hill

When a man is running from his boss
Who holds the gun that fires "cost"
And people die from being cold
Or left alone because they're old
And bombs are dropped on fighting cats
And children's dreams are run with rats
If you complain you disappear
Just like the lesbians and queers...

-- Pete Townshend, from Quadrophenia "Helpless Dancer"

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

-James Madison

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.

-Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations

The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind....We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they promise us any substantial reform.....They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires."

--From the preamble to the platform of the People's Party (1892)

Fighting crime by building more jails is like fighting cancer by building more cemeteries.

-- Paul Kelly, New Party representative (Little Rock, AR)

Let no one believe ... that the many are so exhausted by activities dictated by the need for earning a living, that freedom of thought is useless to them, or even disturbing. Or that they can best be activated by the diffusion of principles handed down from on high, while their freedom to think and to investigate is restricted.

--Wilhelm Von Humboldt

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and justice for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

That takes us to the dark side of America's technology paradox. Rushing to embrace the mantra of the new paradigm entails a real risk of overlooking the most basic and powerful benefit of an improvement in overall productivity - an increase in the national standard of living. On this count, the evidence is hardly circumstantial - more than 15 years of virtual stagnation in aggregate real wages, an unprecedented widening in the inequalities of the income distribution, and a dramatic shift in the work-leisure trade-off that is putting increasing stress on family and personal priorities. Yet, at the same time, there can be no mistaking the windfalls that have accrued to a small slice of the U.S. population - mainly those managers, executives, and investors who have been fortunate enough to have benefited from the corporate earnings and stock market bonanza of the 1990s.

In the end, I continue to fear that much of the debate over the fruits of the Information Age boils down to the classic power struggle between capital and labor that I have labeled "worker backlash." I find it difficult to believe that Corporate America can forever stay the course of unrelenting cost-cutting; there's a real limit as to how far managers can take the credo of "lean and mean," and there are signs that the limit is now in sight. I find it equally difficult to believe that workers will continue to acquiesce to a system that rewards few for the efforts of many, especially in the context of a dramatic cyclical tightening of the labor market that has taken the national unemployment rate to its lowest level in 24 years; a recent upturn in the wage cycle suggests that the forces of supply and demand are now beginning to weigh in with the same cyclical verdict. All this implies that the pendulum of economic power may now be starting a long overdue swing from capital back to labor, repeating the timeworn patterns of past power struggles

-- Stephen S. Roach - Chief Economist Morgan Stanley

Most everybody I see knows the truth but they just don't know that they know it.

--Woody Guthrie

Millions of words are printed each month on the doings of high society, the devious machinations of their politicians, the cultural concerns of the middle class and on their sports heroes. Seldom is an attempt made to give voice to the longings, the anguish, and the desperation of the deprived. Perhaps, the preoccupation of making a living among and delivering a message to these brothers and sisters may qualify me to convey something of their thoughts.

-- Conrad Lynn (from "There Is A Fountain: The Autobiography
of Conrad Lynn". Lawrence Hill Books: 1979, 1993)

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility.

--Lewis Mumford

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.

--Milton Friedman

1. Let Jesus save you.
2. Come out of your blanket, cut your hair, and dress like a white man.
3. Have a Christian family with one wife for life only.
4. Live in a house like your white brother. Work hard and wash often.
5. Learn the value of a hard-earned dollar. Do not waste your money on giveaways. Be punctual.
6. Believe that property and wealth are signs of divine approval.
7. Keep away from saloons and strong spirits.
8. Speak the language of your white brother. Send your children to school to do likewise.
9. Go to church often and regularly.
10. Do not go to Indian dances or to the medicine men.

-- from a wall poster, given to a Lakota Sioux student in a Christian missionary boarding school. Quoted in "Lakota Woman," by Mary Crow Dog (Harper, 1991)

Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.

--Bertolt Brecht

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are routinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

--E.L. Doctorow

Pleasure and pain are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the Calculus of Economics. To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort...is the problem of economics.

--Jevons

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.

--John Ralston Saul

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.

--Ogden Nash

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is -- people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson

We who have a Voice must be a Voice for the Voiceless!

Oscar Romero, 1980

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

--Noam Chomsky

Few markets can ever have been as competitive as those that flourished in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, when infants became deformed as they toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country. And there is no lack of examples today to confirm the fact also that well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity.

--Robert Solo

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.

--Edward Bellamy

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.

--Martin Buber

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist who is asked if he is a 'Newtonian' or if he is a 'Pasteurian'.

--Che Guevera

"Give a person a fish, and she eats for a day. Teach her how to fish, and she eats for the rest of her life."
I already know how to fish, thank you very much -- the problem is, somebody else owns the pond!!!

--Anon

The Law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose.

---Anon

If you give me a fish, you have feed me for a day. If you teach me to fish, then you have fed me until
the river is contaminated or the shore line seized for development. But if teach me to organize, then whatever the challenge I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution.

--Ricardo Levins Morales

In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success.

--Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.

--Pierre Joseph Proudhon quoted in The Match!

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men - true nobility is being superior to your former self.

--Anon

Any order of phenomena, however complicated, may be studied scientifically provided the rule of proceeding from the simple to the complex is always observed.

--Walras

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn’t communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?

--Noam Chomsky

Viewed as a body of substantive hypotheses, theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to "explain."

--Milton Friedman

Hope is the basic ingredient of all vitality.

-Erik Erikson

As long as someone else controls your history the truth shall remain just a mystery.

-Ben Harper

Can a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? All poets believe it does. And in ages of imagination, such firm persuasions have moved mountains.

-- William Blake

The Creator has a master plan Peace and happiness through all the land

--Leon Thomas, Pharaoh Sanders

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privelege to do for it whatever I can. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Few markets can ever have been as competitive as those that flourished in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, when infants became deformed as they toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country. And there is no lack of examples today to confirm the fact also that well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity.

--Robert Solo

The familiar notion of planning is that done by experts, with scientific knowledge. We have seen the results of that rational planning: tower blocks, food additives, valium--the list of horrors is endless.

--Sheila Rowbotham

Politicians blow hot air across wind chimes and expect the people to hear the national anthem.

--Anon

[The best strategy is to] "Be nice, retaliatory, forgiving and clear."

-Robert Axelrod, "The Evolution of Co-operation", 1984.

I see in the near future a crises approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country....corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic in destroyed

Abraham Lincoln Nov. 21, 1864

The ancients worried about the moods of the skies,mountains, seas, and forests. We're placating a pavement.

-- ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich speaking about Wall Street

They will do whatever we let them get away with.

-- Joseph Heller

I know there are people in this world who do not love their fellow man, and I HATE people like that.

- Tom Lehrer

Right is only in question between equals, and while the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.

--Thucydides

Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening theatre, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting—all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby’s teeth rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals, figurines and souvenir and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. After one block, Shevek had felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes. But to Shevek the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possessions. How was he to know what a goods’ production entailed? How could they expect him to decide if he wanted something? The whole experience was totally bewildering. Were his hosts in this strange world, the "shoppers" of A-lo, really capable of such daily acts of social irresponsibility?

Ursula Leguin

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

--Adam Smith

Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens. supporting markets in the mainstream and on the left as well.

--Adam Smith

One cannot say that all conservatives are stupid people, one can say that most stupid people are conservative.

-- John Stewart Mill

Woe betide that man of power who takes the side of those who have no power.

--St Augustine

... Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be, but for seeking practical indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth might be. He was executed not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others.

-- John Ralston Saul The Unconscious Civilization

Another poll revealed that "faith in God is the most important part of American's lives." Forty percent "said they valued their relationship with God above all else"; 29 percent chose "good health" and 21 percent "happy marriage." Satisfying work was chosen by 5 percent, respect of people in the community by 2 percent. That this world might offer basic features of a human existence is hardly to be contemplated. These are the kinds of results one might find in a shattered peasant society. Chiliastic visions are reported to be particularly present among blacks; again, not surprising, when we learn from the New England Journal of Medicine that "black men in Harlem are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh."

--Noam Chomsky

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

--Adam Smith

The only possible alternative to being the oppressed or the oppressor is voluntary cooperation for the greatest good of all.

--Errico Maletesta

Those whom we would banish from society or from the human community itself often speak in too faint a voice to be heard above society's demand for punishment. It is the particular role of the courts to hear these voices, for the Constitution declares that the majoritarian chorus may not alone dictate the conditions of social life.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan

What is hateful...is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.

Speech in the House of Commons(Canada),
16 March 1886. in Oscar Skelton, Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier

If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

-- John Ralston Saul The Unconscious Civilization

All communities divide themselves into the many and the few. The first are rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second...

-Alexander Hamilton,

The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made.

-- Groucho Marx

The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve. Indeed, if one examines the relationship between nations, as well as between individuals, one comes to the conclusion that objectivity is the exception, and a greater or lesser degree of narcissistic distortion is the rule.

--Eric Fromm

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the small towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know before hand that they would never appear in print...The business of the NY journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press". Ware are the tools and vassals of rich mend 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, Former Chief Editor of the New York Times

Buying and selling is essentially anti-social.

--Edward Bellamy

It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of valuable property...can sleep a single night in security.

--Adam Smith

It is necessary, with bold spirit and in good conscience, to save civilization…. We must halt the dissolution that corrupts the roots of human society. The bare and barren tree can be made green again. Are we not ready?

Antonio Gramsci

I never would believe that Providence had sent a few rich men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.

--Richard Rumbold

[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous--and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed....

--Keynes

The system of corporate life is a new power for which our language contains no name. We have no word to express government by moneyed corporations.

--Charles Francis Adams.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity.

--George Bernard Shaw

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so SICK AT HEART, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.

--Mario Savio

The most serious threat to democracy is the notion that it has already been achieved.

- Author unknown

That which we are, we are. And if we are to be any better now is the time begin.

-Alfred Tennyson

To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

--Aristotle

Nice guys finish last.

--Leo Durocher

In the good old puritan tradition we have taken the book of Genesis seriously and set out to subdue the Earth, and to have dominion over all things. And in two hundred years we have subdued it with asphalt, DDT and industrial waste. But some of our leaders seem to think that it is the will of God, and if you tend not to believe it, then you can check the GNP.

-- Rev. Channing E. Phillips, Washington DC, April 22, 1970

El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido.

More generally, people have little specific knowledge of what is happening around them. An academic study that appeared right before the presidential election reports that less than 30 percent of the population was aware of the positions of the candidates on major issues, though 86 percent knew the name of George Bush's dog. The general thrust of propaganda gets through, however. When asked to identify the largest element of the federal budget, less than 1/4 give the correct answer: military spending. Almost half select foreign aid, which barely exists; the second choice is welfare, chosen by 1/3 of the population, who also far overestimate the proportion that goes to Blacks and to child support. And though the question was not asked, virtually none are likely to be aware that `defense spending' is in large measure welfare for the rich. Another result of the study is that more educated sectors are more ignorant--not surprising, since they are the main targets of indoctrination. Bush supporters, who are the best educated, scored lowest overall.

--Noam Chomsky

There is only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

--Immanuel Kant

He who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other hesitant, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but--a hiding.

--Karl Marx

Everything is falling into place. It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean they'll be destroyed by nuclear weapons... Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Isreal, will come out of the north... Gog, must be Russia...now that Russia has set itself against God...it fits the description of Gog perfectly.

-- Future President Ronald Reagan, (1971)

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women... It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become Lesbians.

-- Televangelist Pat Robertson

Seeing that the religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences, I feel impelled to reiterate my demands for justice, liberty, and equality in the Church as well as the State.

-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

...The Director General invites you to examine the planisphere hanging on the wall. The varied color scheme indicates:

1) the countries where all books are systematically confiscated
2) the countries where only books published or approved by the State may circulate
3) the countries where existing censorship is crude, approximate, and unpredictable
4) the countries where the censorship is subtle, informed, sensitive to implications and allusions, managed by meticulous and sly intellecuals
5) the countries where there are two networks of dissemination: one legal and one clandestine
6) the countries where there is no censorship because there are no books, but there are many potential readers
7) the countries where there are no books and nobody complains about their absence
8) the countries, finally, in witch every day, books are produced for all tastes and all ideas, amid general indifference.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do...

--Italo Calvino

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

--Helder Camara

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens canchange the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has.

--Margaret Mead

Once upon a time there was a magnet, and in its close neighborhood lived some steel filings. One day two or three filings felt a sudden desire to go and visit the magnet, and they began to talk of what a pleasant thing it would be to do. Other filings nearby overheard their conversation, and they, too, became infected with the same desire. Still others joined them, till at last all the filings began to discuss the matter, and more and more their vague desire grew into an impulse. "Why not go today?" said some of them; but others were of the opinion that it would be better to wait until tomorrow. Meanwhile, without their having noticed it, they had been involuntarily moving nearer to the magnet, which lay there quite still, apparently taking no heed of them. And so they went on discussing, all the time insensibly drawing nearer to their neighbor; and the more they talked, the more they felt the impulse growing stronger, till the more impatient ones declared that they would go that day, whatever the rest did. Some were heard to say that it was their duty to visit the magnet, and that they ought to have gone long ago. And, while they talked, they moved always nearer and nearer, without realizing they had moved. Then, at last, the impatient ones prevailed, and, with one irresistible impulse, the whole body cried out, "There is no use waiting. We will go today. We will go now. We will go at once." And then in one unanimous mass they swept along, and in another moment were clinging fast to the magnet on every side. Then the magnet smiled—for the steel filings had no doubt at all but that they were paying that visit on their own free will.

Oscar Wilde

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

William Blake

The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments ... the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding ... and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be ... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes pains to prevent it.

Adam Smith

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

--John Maynard Keynes

God is voluptuous and delicious.

--Meister Ekhart

What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes.

--Edward Sapir

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

--George Bernard Shaw

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity.

--George Bernard Shaw

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ` conceptual necessities,’ etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors. It is therefore not just an idle game to exercise our ability to analyze familiar concepts, and to demonstrate the conditions on which this justification of their usefulness depends.

Albert Einstein

Now, as to occupations, we shall clearly not be able to have the same division of labor as now: vicarious servanting, sewer emptying, butchering, letter carrying, boo-blacking, hair dressing, and the rest of it will have to come to an end … we shan’t put a pattern on a cloth or a twiddle on a jug-handle to sell it, but to make it prettier and to amuse ourselves and others.

William Morris

The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social science is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation. When, therefore, we say that we are operating at a high level or abstraction, we mean that we are dealing with a relatively small number of aspects of reality; we emphatically do not mean that those aspects with which we are dealing are not capable of historical investigation and factual illustration.

Paul Sweezy

How many care to seek only for precedents? How many fiery innovators are mere copycats of bygone revolutionaries?

Peter Kropotkin

...the validity of a particular theory is a matter of its logical derivation from the general assumptions which it makes. But its applicability to a given situation depends upon the extent to which its concepts actually reflect the forces operating in that situation.

--Lionel Robbins

Woe betide those who seek to save themselves the pain of mental building by inhabiting dead men’s minds.

--G.D.H. Cole

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.… Above all, always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world.

--Che Guevara

To create a new culture does not only mean to make original discoveries on an individual basis. It also and especially means to critically popularize already discovered truths, make them, so to speak, social, therefore give them the consistency of basis for vital actions, make them coordinating elements of intellectual and social relevance.

Antonio Gramsci

The raging productivity of the Victorians shattered nerves and punctured stomachs, but it was a thing noble, glorious, awesome in itself.

--Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal, Women in Literature

To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

Aristotle

One of the great ironies of our present situation is that overwork for the majority has been accompanied by the growth of enforced idleness for the minority. The proportion of the labor force who cannot work as many hours as they would like has more than doubled in the last twenty years. Just as surely as our economic system is "underproducing" leisure for some, it is "overproducing" it for others.

Juliet Schor

I were better to be eaten to death with rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

--Shakespeare, Henry IV

I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense, like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others. I don’t know any way to prove this. It’s really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently, those aspects of human nature will be realized.

Noam Chomsky

The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness.

-- Albert Einstein

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings.

--John Stuart Mill

The Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. "What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?"
Simon shook.
"There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the beast."
Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
"Pig’s head on a stick."

--William Golding

Disciples do own onto masters only a temporary belief and a suspension of their own judgement until they be fully instructed, and not an absolute resignation or perpetual captivity.

--Francis Bacon

Works are of value only if they give rise to better ones.

--Von Humboldt

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

--Bertrand Russell

When we should have been planning switches to smaller, more fuel efficient, lighter cars in the late 1960s, in response to a growing demand in the marketplace, GM refused because `we make more money on big cars.’ It mattered not that customers wanted the smaller cars, or that a national balance of payments deficit was being built.... Refusal to enter the small car market when the profits were better on bigger cars, despite the needs of the public and the national economy, was not an isolated case of corporate insensitivity. It was typical.

--John DeLorian, former head of Pontiac Division at GM

I never would believe that Providence had sent a few rich men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.

--Richard Rumbold

After years of 'taking it on the chin,' working families are telling big companies that we will fight for the American dream. This is not just a Teamster victory, this is a victory for all working people.

--Ron Carey

If you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.

-- I.F. Stone

His name was George F. Babbitt, and ... he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

--Sinclair Lewis

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

--Anonymous

[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed....

--John Maynard Keynes

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

--Simone de Beauvoir

How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertion?

--Mary Wollstonecaft

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditures twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

--Charles Dickens

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

--George Bernard Shaw

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

--Frederick Douglass, 1849

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that could change.

--Dan Quayle

Few markets can ever have been as competitive as those that flourished in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, when infants became deformed as they toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country. And there is no lack of examples today to confirm the fact also that well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity.

—Robert Solo

As it happens, there are no columns in standard double-entry book-keeping to keep track of satisfaction and demoralization. There is no credit entry for feelings of self-worth and confidence, no debit column for feelings of uselessness and worthlessness. There are no monthly, quarterly, or even annual statements of pride and no closing statement of bankruptcy when the worker finally comes to feel that after all he couldn’t do anything else, and doesn’t deserve anything better.

--Barbara Garson

I wanted to see whether or not the great Louis XIV style, which I consider the most beautiful style, could work in a modern building. I didn't want to buy old columns, because they're cracked and broken. I waited to have brand-new minted marble columns... I've used all onyx. Onyx is a precious stone, many times more beautiful. I don't believe there is an apartment like this anywhere in the world. The view, the solid bronze window frames, the fountain all brand new and carved. Did you see the way the window shades go up and down, all remote? And they're bulletproof... I don't care about material needs. I could be happy in a studio apartment with a television and a telephone.

--Donald Trump

There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.

--David Ricardo

"Incapacity of the masses." What a tool for all exploiters and dominators, past present and future, and especially for the modern aspiring enslavers, whatever their insignia … Nazism, Bolshevism, Fascism, or Communism. "Incapacity of the masses." This is a point on which reactionaries of all colors are in perfect agreement… and this agreement is exceedingly significant.

-- Voline

A man named Chi-liang tells this story to his ruler in an effort to dissuade him from his plans for war:

"I came across a man at Taihang Mountain, who was riding northwards. He told me he was going to the state of Chu."

"In that case, why are you headed north," I asked him.

"That’s all right," he replied. "I have good horses."

"Your horses may be good, but you’re taking the wrong direction."

"Well, I have plenty of money."

"You may have plenty of money, but this is the wrong direction."

"Well, I have an excellent charioteer."

"The better your horses," I told him, "the more money you have and the more skilled your charioteer, the further you will get from the state of Chu."

An hour’s listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines whose names they could not pronounce. Communism, instead of making them leap forward with fire in their hearts to become masters of ideas and life, had frozen them at an even lower level of ignorance than had been theirs before they met Communism.

--Richard Wright

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

--Bertrand Russell

The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions, however well-founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the remainder of things.
--Alfred North Whitehead

People’s lives are in turmoil. There is a sense of crisis for men as well as for women, and for children too. Do we have an idea or even a glimmering about how people can and should live, not as victims as in the past for women, nor as atoms just whirling around on their own trajectories, but as members of a human community and as moral agents in that community?

--Barbara Ehrenreich

2003-08-26T03:12:00.000-07:00

Environment
The environment exceeding on the level
Of our unconciousness
For example
What does the billboard say?
Come and play, come and play
Forget about the movement

'Anger is a gift'

-- Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against The Machine/Solo), Freedom

2003-07-04T15:34:00.000-07:00

When we were putting the board [of directors] together, somebody [Fred Malek] came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us.

We put him on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.

And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things.

-- David Rubenstein, The Carlyle Group

2003-07-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

So crucify the ego, before it's far too late
To leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical,
And you will come to find that we are all one mind
Capable of all that's imagined and all conceivable.
Just let the light touch you
And let the words spill through
And let them pass right through
Bringing out our hope and reason ...
before we pine away.

-- Maynard James Keenan (Tool), Reflection

2003-06-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, 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 tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

--Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

--George W. Bush

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-edge 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.

-- attributed to Julius Caesar but unknown

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 it's powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.

--Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels in his diary

2003-06-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the news, force-fed to us through the media, corporately-owned, we know the cards are stacked. The corporate view is `objective,' all else is `propaganda.'

-- Studs Terkel

When Ben Bagdikian first published `The Media Monopoly' in 1982, some 50 corporations controlled most of the major media outlets in the United States: 1,787 daily newspapers; 11,000 magazines; 9,000 radio stations; 1,000 television stations; 2,500 book publishers and seven major movie studios. But the time the fourth edition was released in 1993, the number was down to about 20 corporations, and it is still dropping.

-- Molly Ivins, columnist Ft. Worth Star Telegram, from the Introduction to ``Adventures in Medialand'' by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.

At the head of everything is God, the Lord of Heaven. Everyone knows that Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth Then come Prince Torlonia's guards. Then come Trince Torlonia's guards' dogs. Then, nothing at all Then, nothing at all Then, nothing at all Then come the peasants. And that's all.

--description of the traditional hierarchy in southern Italy from ``Fontamara,'' by Ignazio Silone

Advertising tries to con you into thinking you're the one that can do what's never been done that can win what's never been won meantime life outside goes on all around you.

--Bob Dylan, ``It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding''

You can cool it you can heat it cause baby I don't need it take your TV tube and eat it and all that phony stuff on sports and all those unconfirmed reports you know I watched that rotten box until my head begin to hurt from checkin out the way those newsmen say they get the dirt before the guys on channel so and so and further they assert that any show they'll interrupt to bring the news when it comes up they say if the place blows up they will be the first to tell cause the guys they got downtown are workin hard and doing swell and if anybody gets the news before it hits the street they say that no one gets it faster their coverage can't be beat and if another woman driver gets machined gunned from her seat they'll send some joker with a brownie and you'll see it all complete...

--Frank Zappa ``Trouble Comin Everyday''

Honesty is hardly ever heard

--Billy Joel ``Honesty''

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you're so clever and classless and free but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

--John Lennon, ``Working Class Hero.''

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

--John Milton

In the 1990's, blind faith in your leaders will get you killed.

--Bruce Springsteen, introducing the song ``War.''

That government is best that governs least.

--Thomas Jefferson

As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision. Slower speeds of information make delegation and representation mandatory... When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes of the established forms.

--Marshall McLuhan, ``Understanding Media,'' 1964

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, ``Notes on Nationalism''

You're gonna have to serve somebody

--Bob Dylan

Veblen writes of the leisure class as the shrewd, exploiting group in society that holds the strings and dares to be called superior, that takes no part in production, only in the role of entrepreneur smoking cigars and being superior and smug and forgetful, in short, the enemy.

--Jack Kerouac ``Letters 1940-1956

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

--Wendell Phillips, ``Public Opinion'' (speech, 1852)

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course other may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

--Patrick Henry, speech 1775

Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.

--Adolf Hitler, ``Mein Kampf''

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

--Book of John, New Testament

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

--Thomas Jefferson ``Epigrams''

God has left this tincture in the blood That all men would be tyrants if they could.

--Daniel Defoe, ``The Kenfish Petition''

The very first essential for success is perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.

--Adolf Hitler, ``Mein Kampf''

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

--Ernest Hemingway, ``Notes on the Next War''

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

--John Steinbeck, ``The Grapes of Wrath”

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

--Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln-Douglas debate

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

--Thomas Paine, ``Common Sense''

National Socialism does not harbor the slightest aggressive intent toward any European nation.

--Adolf Hitler, to Nazi Congress, 1935

...the ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far more than the temporary failures of democracy.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address, 1937

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

--Abraham Lincoln, from A.K. McClure's ``Lincoln's Yarns and Stories"

O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!

--Walter Scott, ``Marmion''

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side

--J. R. Lowell, ``The present Crisis''

These are the times that try men's souls.

--Thomas Paine, ``The American Crisis''

And who are the greater criminals -- those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them and use them?

--Robert Sherwood, ``Idiot's Delight''

Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land and the workmen's tools, but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive.

--J.B.S. Haldane, ``I believe''

We demand that big business give people a square deal.

--Theodore Roosevelt, letter

It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address, June, 1936

We will grind your revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine have the power.

--Everhard, leader of the Oligarchs, ``The Iron Heel'' by Jack London

Publicity and openness, honest and complete -- that is the prime condition for the health of every society, and ours, too. The man who does not want them in our country is indifferent to his fatherland and thinks only about his own gain.

--Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, in a letter to the writers' union of the Russian Republic, 1969

Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction suppression of that freedom by private interests.

--Supreme Court decision, 1945

It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which the truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it by the Government itself or a private licensee.

--Supreme Court decision, 1969

The business of America is business.

--Calvin Coolidge

Big business is government.

--Morton Mintz and Jerry Cohen, ``America, Inc.''

The vice president [Agnew] is incredible. I feel I should write him a letter. He's amazing, what he has done to the media, helping it to reform itself. I'm a close watcher of newspapers and TV. I think they've taken a second look. You can't underestimate the power of fear. They're afraid if they don't shape up...

--Tricia Nixon, Newsweek, March 2, 1970

I read the news today, oh boy.

--John Lennon-Paul McCartney, ``A Day in the Life''

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.

--Hunter S. Thompson, ``He was a crook,'' Rolling Stone, June 16, '94

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

--Winston Churchill

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

--Harry S. Truman

As I would not be a slave, neither would I be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

--Abraham Lincoln

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right -- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

--Abraham Lincoln

Sunday papers (don't ask no questions) Sunday papers (don't get no lies) Sunday papers (don't raise no objections) Sunday papers (ain't got no eyes)

--Joe Jackson, ``Sunday Papers''

We hold the power and bear the responsibility.

--Abraham Lincoln

It is not possible to found a lasting power on injustice.

--Demosthenes

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

--Leo Tolstoy

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force.

--George Washington

Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away

--Stephen Stills

The legitimate object of a government is to do for a community of people what ever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.

--Abraham Lincoln

How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?

--Charles DeGaulle

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

--Henry Kissinger

History: an account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

--Ambrose Bierce

Man was born free and everywhere he is in shackles.

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Liberty means responsibility. That's why most men dread it.

--George Bernard Shaw

Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see

--John Lennon-Paul McCartney ``Strawberry Fields Forever''

When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again.

--Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn

America is run largely by and for about 5,000 people who are actively supported by 50,000 beavers eager to take their places. I arrive at this figure this way: maybe 2,500 megacorporation executives, 500 politicians, lobbyists and Congressional committee chairmen, 500 investment bankers, 500 partners in major accounting firms, 500 labor brokers. If you don't like my figures, make up your own...

--Robert Townsend, former head of Avis

Burke said there are three Estates in Parliament; but in the reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.

--Thomas Carlyle

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

--A.J. Liebling

If you ever injected the truth into politics, you would have no politics.

--Will Rogers

Politics, and the fate of man, are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.

--Albert Camus

Confusion, indecision, fear; these are my weapons.

--Adolf Hitler

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

--Richard Nixon

Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labors and the produce of his property in peace and safety, and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered.

--Thomas Jefferson

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

--Oscar Wilde

Sure we'll have fascism here but it will come as an anti-fascist movement.

--Huey Long

War is the trade of kings.

--John Dryden

Hitler, the idol of this mass , and himself only a petty bourgeois -- a petty bourgeois posing as a Napoleon -- in reality followed the dictates of a higher power.

--Ernst Henri

A good catchword can obscure analysis for 50 years.

--Johan Huisinga

The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country and not for the benefit of an individual or a party.

--John C. Calhoun

What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

--Thomas Jefferson

Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last becomes a disease.

--Fyodor Dostoevsky

When a tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

--Plato

Who wants yesterday's papers?

--Mick Jagger-Keith Richards, ``Yesterday's Papers''

Oligarchy: a government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.

--Plato

The condition upon which God that given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

--John Philpot Curran

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

--Aristotle

"Ownership" of physical entities by man is untenable in natural law and inherently obstructive to evolution and realization of the comprehensive emancipation of man.... Only one's own personality and life are ownable.

--Buckminster Fuller

There is no program, no policy, no ideology and certainly no philosophy back of Fascism, as there is back of almost every other form of government. It is nothing but a spoils system.

--George Seldes, ``Facts and Fascism,'' 1943

The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside of the frame of experience... The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

--Marshall McLuhan, ``The Medium is the Massage,'' 1967

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology.

--C.G. Jung, ``Contributions to Analytical Psychology'' 1928

The story of El Salvador the silence of Hiroshima destruction of Cambodia short memory short memory must have a short memory

--Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil, ``Short Memory''

There's a battle outside raging It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changing

--Bob Dylan, ``The Times They Are A-Changing''

The rich get richer the poor get the picture

--Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil, ``Read about it''

I find that approximately no one knows what is going on. That's why we have been leaving it to the politicians to make the world work.

--Buckminster Fuller