The Quotes Page. Big Ideas, briefly Stated.
"What is the hardest task in the world? To think."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"No people can be both ignorant and free."
Thomas Jefferson
"While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.
"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
Alex Carey
"Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people."
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
"The news and the truth are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
"Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
Neil Postman
"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."
William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but [an American] political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either."
Edward Zehr
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."
Joseph Stalin
"The United States has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican."
Gore Vidal
"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship."
Senator J. William Fulbright
"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
George Orwell, 1984
"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
Noam Chomsky
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti
"Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all . We must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States."
Harold Pinter
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading them."
Ray Bradbury
"Those who know the least obey the best."
George Farquhar
" They have pillaged the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of "empire." They make a desert and call it "peace"."
Roman historian Tacitus
"Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor."
U.S. Defense Planning Guidance, 1992
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi
"We weren't raised to protest. We weren't raised to question. We were raised to wave the flag. To pledge allegiance. "My country, right or wrong." It's a terrible, terrible trap."
Phil Donahue
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
Edward Abbey
"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 or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."
Ernest Hemingway
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
Bertrand Russell
"You believe you are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists."
Anatoly Franace
"In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
William Blum
" Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini
" In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the l990s it triumphed over democracy. "
David Korten
"Globalization can be seen as the triumph of capitalism: the ascendancy of economics over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of the private over the public interest, of the transnational corporation and its global framework over the national state."
Gary Teeple
"Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world."
Neil Postman
" The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. "
Noam Chomsky
" The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
Former CIA Director William Colby
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people."
Gore Vidal
"There are buried truths in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."
Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell
" We are willing to accept lies if they make our lives easier. "
Producer from the TV series "People's Century"
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein
"Arms manufacturers need war like umbrella makers need rain."
Eduardo Galeano
First they came for the communists, but I was not a communist - so I said nothing.
Then they came for the social democrats, but I was not a social democrat - so I did nothing.
Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew - I did little.
Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me."
Martin Niemoller, German anti-Nazi pastor during World War II
" Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others. "
William Greider
"Why should we worry about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, I'd give them some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too...Why should we criticize them? The death squad - I'm for it."
Former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala
"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal."
William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change."
David Barsamian
"If you want to know about the world and understand and educate yourself, you have to dig;
dig up books and articles, read and find out for yourself."
John Stockwell
" To keep information from the public is the function of the corporate media."
Gore Vidal
"Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something."
Arundhati Roy
"When the powerful begin to act irresponsibly, it's the responsibility of the rest of us to take their power away from them."
Barbara Ehrenreich
"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."
President Bill Clinton
" Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups."
Paul Krugman
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice
"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint.
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."
US General Douglas MacArthur
" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. "
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. ... they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that."
Congressman Otis Pike, 1975, about a Congressional report on CIA activities around the world
" Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. "
George Orwell
"In the media, the world is turned upside down. The contras and the KLA are "democratizers"; the lethal sanctions against Iraq exist to deliver its people from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a "humanitarian intervention."
Michelle Stoddard
" As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society."
Robert McChesney
" ... the airwaves belong to the people. "
from the 1934 Communications Act
" I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. "
Alexis de Tocqueville
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."
William Blum
" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
" Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"
Henry Kissinger
"... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President."
Philip Agee
" It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms. "
John Stockwell
" In the councils of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them."
Harold Pinter
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
" The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic."
John Dewey
" When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking."
John Wooden
"To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization."
Jeremy Seabrook, Third World Network
" Politicians have become corporate prostitutes."
Helen Caldicott, MD
"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
Ambrose Bierce, American writer, 1842-1914
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
"[True] liberty...means allowing people freely to say things you do not want to hear."
George Orwell
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
Mahatma Gandhi
