Some quotations
Just a quick thought. I find it ironic in a not very funny way that the rich now accuse people who stand up for American democracy as engaging in "class warfare" – the "warfare" seems to me to be going in the other direction.
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”
— Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address
March 4, 1861
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience…”
— John Locke
1690
2nd Treatise on Government
Chapter 19 paragraph 222
“We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.”
— Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President
“We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.”
— Louis Brandeis
Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939
plutocracy, n. 1. government by the wealthy 2. a government or state in which the wealthy rule 3.a group of wealthy people who control or influence a government 4.a controlling class of rich men – plutocrat.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”
— Benito Mussolini
1883-1945
Fascist dictator of Italy
“Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”
— General William Westmoreland
United States Army
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
— William Colby
former Director of the CIA
“We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”
— David Boylan
WTVT station manager
April 16, 1997
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
“At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.”
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984
“[In the U.S. mass-media] words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
— Herman Goering
Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander
at the Nuremberg War-Crimes Trials, 1946
“Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”
— David McGowan
from the introduction to Derailing Democracy
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
“Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984
“The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President’s foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.”
— Ralph McGehee
former CIA intelligence analyst
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA
“The great masses of the people… more easily fall victims to a big lie than a small one.”
— Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf
“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1916
"The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Osama bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel — backed by the U.S. — invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists who the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms.”
— Arundhati Roy
East Indian activist and fighter for women’s rights
Author of The God of Small Things
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”
— Ramsey Clark
former U.S. Attorney General
“What would you think of a man who not only kept an arsenal in his home, but was collecting at enormous financial sacrifice a second arsenal to protect the first one? What would you say if this man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from him?
“What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the education of his children?
“What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a traitor and a bum and disowned him? And he took another child who obeyed him faithfully and armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors?
“What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes?
"What if this man not only is feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of the city and even in the suburbs?
“Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic… with homicidal tendencies.”
— Robert Anton Wilson
“The trouble is that when American dollars earn only six percent over here, they get restless and go overseas to get 100 percent. The flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
“I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to defend some lousy investment of the bankers. We should fight only for the defense of our home and the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
“There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It had its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparations and a ‘Big Boss’ — supernationalistic capitalism.
“I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class 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.
“War is a racket.”
— General Smedley D. Butler
former U.S. Marine Commandant
in Common Sense
November 1935
“I will never apologize for the United States of America — I don’t care what the facts are.”
— President George Bush
1988
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it … always.”
— Mahatma Gandhi