Quotations
Economics | Class | Capital | Property | Labor | Education | Happiness | Interactions | Justice | Life | Origins | Politics | Power | Voting | Propaganda | Society | Truth | War
Economics | Class | Capital | Property | Labor | Education | Happiness | Interactions | Justice | Life | Origins | Politics | Power | Voting | Propaganda | Society | Truth | War
"People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as 'parasites' fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society."
– Jason Read, posted to Facebook on 12/29/2011
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
– Warren Buffet, as quoted in In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning by Ben Stein, The New York Times, 11/26/2006
"I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country–a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress."
– Douglas Fraser, letter of resignation from Jimmy Carter's Labour Management Group, 1978
"The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes."
– Marguerite Blessington, Desultory Thoughts and Reflections, 1839
"Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves."
– Larry King?
"All babies are born naked, but soon after some are dressed in expensive clothes bought at the best boutiques, while the majority wear rags."
– Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, 2017
"Poverty is the worst form of violence."
– Mohandas Gandhi?
"The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of laborers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital under which they carry their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves."
– John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Volume II, 1899, pp. 201-281
"When an executive makes $50,000 an hour, this is insane. 'Insane' is the correct word to apply. When millions of fellow human beings are forced by capitalism to suffer through grinding poverty on 38 cents an hour, this is also insane. The fact that these two things are happening simultaneously... there is no word in the English language to adequately describe the amount of insanity taking place. Such a system is demonic, and it is important to face and acknowledge the monstrosity of it, rather than turning away."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism, 2018
"The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam."
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
"As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it."
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
– Eugene V. Debs, statement upon his conviction for violating the Sedition Act, 9/18/1918
"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
– Eugene V. Debs, statement upon his conviction for violating the Sedition Act
"The American capitalistic economy is like a big, unruly game of musical chairs:
Everyone in the crappy folding chairs, and everyone left without a chair at all, lives in or near poverty."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism
"Think about Walmart. The vast majority of workers get paid their meager wages. The executives get paid their absurdly enormous salaries—for example the CEO receives $25 million per year or $12,500 per hour. The fleet of 22 private executive jets is paid for. Ads are paid for. The thousands of lawsuits are paid for. Everything is paid for. And then, last year, Walmart overcharged its customers by an additional $14.5 billion. This is the 'profit'. Much of this money was handed to 'shareholders'—people who do no work at all to receive it. $3 billion of it was handed to the children of Walmart's founder, again for no reason...
Why will the market 'bear' Walmart's extraction of $14.5 billion in profit? Why would the 'invisible hand' want Walmart to hand $3 billion per year to 5 oligarchs for doing no work—for no reason at all other than the fact that a Sam Walton sperm cell happened to impregnate a woman? Why would the 'invisible hand' want anyone to earn $25 million per year, or for hundreds of Walmart executives to earn their equally absurd salaries? Why hasn't the 'invisible hand' corrected all of this graft and waste? It is because Walmart is a gigantic incumbent and, as such, it is largely immune to competition."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism
"Is it fair to say that the founder of a company or a CEO (e.g the CEO of Nike) is doing essentially nothing? The CEO of Nike is not sewing together any shoes. He is not designing any shoes. He is not designing or making any of the machines that help make shoes. He is not transporting shoes. He is not planning the company strategy (hundreds of employees do this). He is not monitoring the company finances (there are hundreds of people who do this) or the company's technology (ditto) or the company's operations (ditto). The thousands of other employees in the company are doing all of the actual work. If the CEO dies, it has no consequence. He is easily replaced. As an example of how easily replaceable CEOs are, take Steve Jobs at Apple—one of the most famous CEOs in history. Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. He was quickly replaced by Tim Cook, and Apple never missed a beat. Why? Because Apple has over 100,000 employees. The contributions of any one person are insignificant in that context, and therefore any one of these employees is easily replaced, including the CEO."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism
"Poverty Is Both a Political and a Moral Choice Made By the Powerful.
Decades of planning enabled right-wing plutocrats to take power in the US, so they could let most Americans 'fall by the wayside'.
As a result of their success, poor people in the US today have discarded the American Dream. They have learned that hard work won't get them a decent life in the US. Especially poor whites have given in to despair.
At the economic level, they are right. Hard work to make money won't get most poor Americans a decent life, because the rich take most of the value of their work.
However, there is another kind of hard work which could enable everyone to have a decent life: work to elect progressive leaders that will make the rich give back what they took."
– Richard Stallman, Political Notes, 12/27/2017
"In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes. On the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount of capital employed more considerable, wealthy and educated men come forward to embark in manufactures which were heretofore abandoned to poor or ignorant handicraftsmen. The magnitude of the efforts required, and the importance of the results to be obtained, attract them. Thus at the very time at which the science of manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters."
– Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Book Two, Chapter XIX, 1835
"If someone works full-time yet still needs government assistance to make ends meet, it's their employer who is getting the handout."
– Shane Hughes,
Changing the rules of the game to help build new local economies, 3/12/2014
"In one way the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. citizens are in much the same socioeconomic position. The Communist party which runs the U.S.S.R. consists of about 1 percent of their total population, while the U.S.A. is controlled by about the same 1 percent, who are the LAWCAP [lawyer-dominated capitalism] strategists of the great U.S.A. corporations."
– Buckminister Fuller, Critical Path, 1981, p. 118
"The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich."
– Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, 1973
"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
– John D. Rockefeller
"...the devil took Him [Jesus] up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to Him, 'All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.' Then Jesus said to him, 'Away with you, Satan! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.'"
– Matthew 4:8-10
"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages."
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises."
– Óscar Romero
"Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,
Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."
– Psalm 1:1-3
"The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn."
– Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951
"Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
– Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
"...high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages. [...] In raising the price of commodities the rise of wages operates in the same manner as simple interest does in the accumulation of debt. The rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chapter 9, 1776
"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire."
– George Monbiot
"In many cases, like the medical sector, profit can be unbounded. Companies simply set a price according to 'what the market will bear.' Since the alternative to paying the price is death, the price can be extremely high. The price has absolutely no relationship with the cost of production. All of the extra money earned is 'profit', and all of the profit goes to a tiny slice of the population known as the 'wealthy elite.' The absurdity of this situation is indescribable."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism
"What is a picklock to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank? What is the murder of a man to the employment of a man?"
– Bertolt Brecht, from his play, The Threepenny Opera, 1928
"And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 5/28/1816
My imagination will not set bounds to the daring depravity of the times; as the stock jobbers will become the pretorian band of the government; at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses; and overwhelming it by clamors and combinations."
– James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 8, 1791
"It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of it's [England's] people, but this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall on that hereditary autocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trail of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to George Logan, 1816
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
– Jesus Christ as quoted in Matthew 6:19-21
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero."
– Voltaire?
"Most socialistic writers appear to me to exhibit too keen a desire to appropriate old forms of wealth, either by purchasing out or by taxing out the owners, and they seem to have little conception that the truer method is to create new forms and to create them under juster conditions."
– Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 1902
"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, as quoted by Theodore Roosevelt during a speech given at Osawatomie, Kansas, 8/31/1910
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, for the people, by the people, but a government of Wall Street, for Wall Street, by Wall Street. The great common people of the country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The west and south are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing east. Money rules and our vice-president is a London banker."
– Mary Elizabeth Lease, 1891
"[The mine owners] did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!"
– Bill Haywood, The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, 1929
"In the evolution of capitalism, society has been divided mainly into two economic classes: a relatively small class of capitalists who own tools in the form of great machines they did not make and cannot use, and a great body of millions of workers who did make these tools and who do use them, and whose very lives depend upon them, yet who do not own them..."
– Eugene Debs, Industrial Unionism, 12/10/1905
"There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed."
– Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal, 1896
"Here we have a rich landowner; he demands the eviction of a cotter tenant who has not paid his rent. From a legal point of view the case is beyond dispute; since the poor farmer can't pay, out he must go. But if we look into the facts we shall learn something like this: The landlord has squandered his rents persistently in rollicking pleasure; the tenant has worked hard all day and every day. The landlord has done nothing to improve his estate. Nevertheless its value has trebled in fifty years owing to rise in price of land due to the construction of a railway, to the making of new highroads, to the draining of a marsh, to the enclosure and cultivation of wastelands. But the tenant, who has contributed largely towards this increase, has ruined himself; he fell into the hands of usurers, and, head over ears in debts, he can no longer pay the landlord. The law, always on the side of property, is quite clear: the landlord is in the right."
– Peter Kropotkin, An Appeal to the Young, 1880
"If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: What is property! may I not likewise answer, It is robbery, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?"
– Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, 1840
"Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives."
– Muhammad Yunus, Nobel lecture, 2006
"I despise a stingy man. I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea."
– Robert Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child, 1877
"...man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits...In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade...But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness..."
– Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, 1792
"Property is theft. Nobody owns anything. When you die, it all stays here."
– George Carlin?
"Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy."
– Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 1948
"Work...institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing—or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for."
– Bob Black, The Abolition of Work, 1985
"A human being says, 'I am standing right here, I am ready and willing to work, and work hard. I am happy to do anything necessary to earn the money that I must have in order to purchase the food, clothing, housing, etc. I need in order to survive.' And then capitalism basically laughs in this person's face. Capitalism provides no job, or provides a job paying 50 cents an hour. What kind of response is this? Why would human beings tolerate such an absurd economic system? This is a horrific way to run an economy—it is a form of torture really, for billions of people. This is capitalism."
– Marshall Brain, Replace Capitalism
"Business blames inflation on workers, the poor, the consumer and uses it as a club against them. Price hikes and profit increases are ignored while corporate representatives tell us we can't afford to stop killing and maiming workers in unsafe factories. They tell us we must postpone moderate increases in the minimum wage for those whose labor earns so little they can barely survive."
– Douglas Fraser, letter of resignation from Jimmy Carter's Labour Management Group, 1978
"What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [owners and workmen], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen."
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
"That invisible hand of Adam Smith's seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people."
– George Carlin
"If you're a member of the working class, and you read Marx objectively, it's really, really hard to disagree with the basic premise that waged workers are exploited for surplus value.
Which is why the ruling class teaches us to hate Marxism from birth onward."
– The Millennial Snowflake, posted to Twitter on 12/13/2020
"The worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservience."
– Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, 2017
"Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most your waking life; an autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you that Stalin never dreamt of. Stalin never thought he could tell people you're allowed to go to the bathroom for five minutes at 3:00 or you have to wear these clothes and not some other clothes. Or you have to race from this spot in the warehouse to this spot in the warehouse that I've laid out for you, and if you go a little bit to the side you get a notice saying you get a demerit. Stalin didn't do that. But that's having a job. 19th century workers regarded that as a fundamental assault human rights and human dignity. The Republican Party agreed. One of the platforms the Republican Party is that wage labor is no different from slavery except that it's temporary, so you have a chance to become a free person again. And that's the 19th century. Goes back millennia. The idea of being dependent on another person is a fundamental attack on dignity, and having a job means that's most of your waking hours. It took a long time to beat this into people's heads and make them think that's the goal in life."
– Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on Religion, Consciousness, Black Lives Matter #BLM, and Education, 2020
"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.
The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole."
– Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism, 1847
"The true remedy for capitalist oppression where it exists, is not the strike of no work, but the strike of true work, and against this last blow the oppressor has no weapon. If labour leaders spent half the energy in co-operative organization that they now waste in co-operative disorganization, the end of our present unjust system would be at hand."
– Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 1902
"It is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself and thus weaken the bond of brotherhood between those on whom the burden and hardships of labor fall. The fortunate ones of the earth, who are abundant in land and money and know nothing of the anxious care and pinching poverty of the laboring classes, may be indifferent to the appeal for justice at this point, but the laboring classes cannot afford to be indifferent. What labor everywhere wants, what it ought to have, and will some day demand and receive, is an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. As the laborer becomes more intelligent he will develop what capital he already possesses that is the power to organize and combine for its own protection. Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other."
– Frederick Douglass, Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting between the White and Colored People of the United States, 1886
"In effect, male economists define the work males traditionally do as inherently important, while the work that has fallen to women isn't even considered work. Writing ad copy for Marlboros or Twinkies is a matter of grave importance; raising children or caring for the older folks doesn't count. By extension, volunteerism doesn't count either. If it did, economists would count it as carefully as they monitor the gross national product."
– Edgar Cahn and Jonathan Rowe, Time Dollars, 1992
"Often, people work long hard hours at jobs they hate, to earn money to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like."
– Nigel Marsh, How to make work-life balance work, 2010
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
– Lily Tomlin, in an interview with People magazine, 1977
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.
You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything and he has everything, and some of you imagine that if it were not for him you would have no work. As a matter of fact, he does not employ you at all; you employ him to take from you what you produce, and he faithfully sticks to this task.
If you can stand it, he can; and if you don't change this relation, I am sure he won't. You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride."
– Eugene Debs, Industrial Unionism
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
– Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
"[T]he writers of our Constitution...thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. It did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people's minds, what they thought and knew. That idea was to come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education."
– John Caldwell Holt, The Right to Control One's Learning, 1974
"The notion of 'the intellectuals' as a distinct social category independent of class is a myth. All men are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having an intellect and using it, but not all are intellectuals by social function."
– Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, introduction to The Intellectuals, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci
"...there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school."
– George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny's First Play. With a Treatise of Parents and Children, 1914
"A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning; that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.
No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us."
– John Caldwell Holt, The Right to Control One's Learning
"What, then, is the school of today, no matter whether public, private, or parochial?
It is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier—a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself.
I do not mean to say that this process is carried on consciously; it is but a part of a system which can maintain itself only through absolute discipline and uniformity; therein, I think, lies the greatest crime of present-day society.
Naturally, the method of breaking man's will must begin at a very early age; that is, with the child, because at that time the human mind is most pliable; just as acrobats and contortionists, in order to achieve skill over their muscles, begin to drill and exercise when the muscles are still pliable."
– Emma Goldman, The Social Importance of the Modern School, 1916
"Schools seem to me among the most anti-democratic, most authoritarian, most destructive, and most dangerous institutions of modern society. No other institution does more harm or more lasting harm to more people or destroys so much of their curiosity, independence, trust, dignity, and sense of identity and worth. Even quite kindly schools are inhibited and corrupted by the knowledge of children and teachers alike that they are performing for the judgment and approval of others - the children for the teachers; the teachers for the parents, supervisors, school board, or the state. No one is ever free from feeling that he is being judged all the time, or soon may be. Even after the best class experiences teachers must ask themselves, "Were we right to do that? Can we prove we were right? Will it get us in trouble?"
– John Caldwell Holt, The Right to Control One's Learning
"In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk."
– Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, 2001
"When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than students value learning."
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, posted to Twitter on 4/14/2013
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
– Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855
"Reason, Observation and Experience—the Holy Trinity of Science—have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
"The ultimate goal of moral action is the promotion of happiness in the world."
– John Deigh, An Introduction to Ethics, 2010
"There are two ways of being happy,—we may either diminish our wants, or augment our means—either will do—the result is the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest. If you are idle, or sick, or poor, however hard it may be to diminish your wants, it will be harder to augment your means. If you are active and prosperous, or young, or in good health, it may be easier for you to augment your means than to diminish your wants. But if you are wise you will do both at the same time, young or old, rich or poor, sick or well; and if you are very wise you will do both in such a way as to augment the general happiness of society."
– Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, compiled by S. Austin Allibone, 1880
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarianism] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough."
– Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007
"Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth.
If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light."
– Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, 1959
"If you are going through hell, keep going."
– Winston Churchill?
"Blessed is that man who is afraid of no man and of whom no man is afraid."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, The Improved Man, 1892
"The fact is that this dissent is the highest form of patriotism. It is the peaceful American way to turn the nation away from a self-defeating course."
– John Lindsay, during a speech at Columbia University, New York City, 1969
"...man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart."
– 1 Samuel 16:7
"...to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature..."
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
"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, Man and Superman, 1903
"If one gives food to others, one will improve one's own lot, just as, for example, if one lights a fire for others, one will brighten one's own way."
– Nichiren Daishonin, The Three Virtues of Food, c. 1278
"It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was 'to be as rich and as wise as an American'. What happened?" An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by country, intervention by intervention. The opportunity to build the war-ravaged world anew, to lay the foundations for peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight of anti-communism."
– William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 2003
"As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
– Pythagoras, as quoted in The Extended Circle by Jon Wynne-Tyson, 1985
"Who can appreciate the mercy of so making the world that all animals devour other animals? so that every mouth is a slaughterhouse and every stomach a tomb. Is it possible to discover the infinite intelligence and love in universal and eternal carnage?"
– Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
"Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
– Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, 1997
"I love people as I meet them one by one, people are just wonderful as individuals; you see the universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, when there's five of them, or ten, or even groups as small as two, they change, they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group."
– George Carlin, in an interview with Charlie Rose, 1996
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."
– Henry David Thoreau, Journal entry, 1847
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
– Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge, 1894
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
– Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chapter V, 1776
"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."
– Japanese proverb
"Charity gets you canonized; justice gets you crucified."
– John Dominic Crossan, as quoted in A Conspiracy of Love by Kurt Struckmeyer, 2016
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
– Honoré de Balzac?
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation."
– Clarence Darrow
"Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime."
– G. Gordon Liddy, as quoted in Does Crime Pay, The Scandal Annual, 1987
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
– Benjamin Franklin?
"When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals."
– Edward Snowden?
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
– Fyodor Dostoevsky?
"...the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he's the one who succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside because they—the criminals, the people we lock up in jail—are simply the people who didn't make it."
– Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness, 1960
"Well, you put a man in prison, say he stole a watch, it cost 150 dollars, and it's the fourth time he committed that crime, so you put him in jail for seven years, that's a hell of a lot of watches you can give him. Figure the cost of that, feeding him, medical care for seven years; let him have the watch! It's much cheaper to give people things they need than to kill them. It's much cheaper. Think of a man in jail for life. You know how much that costs? They worry about the fact that he tried to rob a jewelry store of maybe three or four hundred dollars. It's always cheaper to feed people, and when they go to jail, I can assure you, they don't come out any better. They call them correctional institutes. They don't even know how to correct people. They're not people trained in that area."
– Jacque Fresco, lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, 2010
"Prisons have often been called 'schools for crime,' I'd call them graduate schools for crime. People often have to become violent in order to survive them. Or, even if they're not attacked by others, they are subjected to conditions of degradation and humiliation and intimidation and threats that I think might drive the most saintliest of people...to become violent in response."
– James Gilligan, A New Approach to Violence Treatment, 2009
"...The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, Crumbling Creeds, 1889
"I was very struck this week reading—I'm sure you saw it—the pope's brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, who runs the choir school in Regenesburg. He's discovered recently there's been some unpleasantness at this school, of which he was the steward for about 20, 30 years. He said he didn't know about any of that and surely claims not to have taken any part in it. But he did used to smack the boys around quite a lot. So until Bavarian law changed and made it illegal for teachers to hit children, well, I don't want to be told anymore that without religious people we wouldn't know what morality was. He didn't know this until the secular law intervened and taught him how to behave. What is the church defending, what is the whole racket of the church in this, protecting itself from? It's saying they were all ordered don't go near the courts, don't go near the police, we'll sort this out among ourselves. And they say they're the people who prevent us from succumbing to moral relativism? I'm not hearing it from them. I'm sorry; it's insulting to be talked to in that way."
– Christopher Hitchens, in a debate with David Wolpe, 2008
"Evil always ends the same way. The occupier becomes a capitulator, the invader—a fugitive. War criminals become defendants. Aggression becomes a court verdict. Destruction turns into reparations. Enemy equipment becomes museum exhibits."
– Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speech given on 10/27/2022
"A world in which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced, automatically, by computers. After all, it's difficult to imagine an AI device that's capable of noticing a person breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even it if could be, toward leniency or forgiveness. [...] Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. [...] Most of our lives, even if we don't realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, and borrow a stranger's Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn't pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal."
– Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, 2019, pp. 196-197
"In the United States the state defines it as civil disobedience to, let's say, derail an ammunition train that's going to Vietnam; and the state is wrong in defining that as civil disobedience, because it's legal and proper and should be done. It's proper to carry out actions that will prevent the criminal acts of the state, just as it is proper to violate a traffic ordinance in order to prevent a murder.
If I had stopped my car in front of a traffic light which was red, and then I drove through the red traffic light to prevent somebody from, let's say, machine-gunning a group of people, of course that's not an illegal act, it's an appropriate and proper action; no sane judge would convict you for such an action.
Similarly, a good deal of what the state authorities define as civil disobedience is not really civil disobedience: in fact, it's legal, obligatory behaviour in violation of the commands of the state, which may or may not be legal commands.
So one has to be rather careful about calling things illegal, I think."
– Noam Chomsky, debate with Michel Foucault, 1970
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
– Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963
"Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?
Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?"
– Isaiah 58:6-7
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
– Frederick Douglas, Strong to Suffer, and Yet Strong to Strive, 4/16/1886
"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994
"Fortunately, the Sun does not demand payment for all the energy that it delivers by radiation to Earth in the overall cosmic scheme, which is trying to make humanity a success despite our overwhelming ignorance and fear. The stars are trying to tell humanity to awake and prosper and to consciously assume the important cosmic responsibilities for which it was designed."
– Buckminister Fuller, Critical Path, p. 119
"After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
– Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, 1995
"Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible god and destroys a visible nature. Unaware that this nature he's destroying is this god he's worshiping."
– Hubert Reeves?
"I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is."
– B. F. Skinner as quoted in Unpacking the Skinner Box: Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens by Dana Salter, 2008
"My children didn't choose to be born, I chose to have children. They owe me nothing, I owe them everything."
– Joyce Maynard, The Usual Rules, 2003
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [...] In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
– Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, 1995, pp. 131–132
"There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, The Christian Religion
"So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun."
– Ecclesiastes 4:1-3
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
"Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means."
– Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section 2, 1785
"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."
– Jesus Christ, as quoted in Luke 17:21
"...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963
"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
– Alan Watts
Human life is not eternal, but science and knowledge cross the threshold of centuries.
– Igor Kurchatov
"Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, At His Brother's Grave, 1879
"You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it."
– Victor Hugo, from his novel Les Misérables, 1862
"I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we."
– Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963
"...you're expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way and try not to do anything ghastly to your fellow creatures."
– Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, 2010
"No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"In the case of using language, we're all extraordinarily good and essentially undifferentiable, one from another. But when we get to something like chess, which I assume is at the borders of our cognitive capacity, the individuals of very similar intellectual makeup will nevertheless diverge very significantly in their ability to deal with these exotic problems. That's what makes it an interesting game."
– Noam Chomsky, in an interview with the BBC, 1970s
"Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent."
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950
"Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee – or to watch out for – long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer."
– Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, 2004
"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either."
– Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
– James Joyce, from his novel Ulysses, 1922
"The past is the all, the present is nothing, the future is a hope. The dead control the living; the present is in the grasp of the dead. Civilization is a corpse. A grander cemetery than was ever conceived by human imagination is the broad highway of human history, and its cities are tombstones. Civilization marches over the bones of countless millions – over the wrecks of unknown nations. It is built on the ruins of races, and is nourished by the blood and tears of the conquered. It is a mighty fabric, dyed in human tears, and embroidered in human blood. It is upheld by the fierce and cruel passions of selfish men. It is adorned by the rainbow dreams of poets and the midnight visions of ambition. It is a mortal monster, begotten of pride, and reared in corruption, blasting everything that comes within its reach – crushing everything that opposes its power."
– Robert Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
"Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man. To each reader the bible conveys a different meaning. About the meaning of this book, called a revelation, there have been ages of war, and centuries of sword and flame. If written by an infinite God, he must have known that these results must follow; and thus knowing, he must be responsible for all."
Is it not infinitely more reasonable to say that this book is the work of man, that it is filled with mingled truth and error, with mistakes and facts, and reflects, too faithfully perhaps, the "very form and pressure of its time?"
"If there are mistakes in the bible, certainly they were made by man. If there is anything contrary to nature, it was written by man. If there is anything immoral, cruel, heartless or infamous, it certainly was never written by a being worthy of the adoration of mankind."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, Mistakes of Moses, Section XII, SATURDAY, 1880
"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'"
– Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"Agriculture is a fairly recent human invention, and in many ways it was one of the great stupid moves of all time. Hunter-gatherers have thousands of wild sources of food to subsist on. Agriculture changed all that, generating an overwhelming reliance on a few dozen domesticated food sources, making you extremely vulnerable to the next famine, the next locust infestation, the next potato blight. Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them—stratification of society and the invention of classes. Thus, it allowed for the invention of poverty."
– Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, 1994
"...from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops."
– Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
"Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness. It is easy to see how the establishment of one community made that of all the rest necessary, and how, in order to make head against united forces, the rest of mankind had to unite in turn. Societies soon multiplied and spread over the face of the earth, till hardly a corner of the world was left in which a man could escape the yoke, and withdraw his head from beneath the sword which he saw perpetually hanging over him by a thread."
– Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
"...I began to learn about science and nature. I realized then that the universe is governed by laws, and that the human being along with society itself was not exempt from these laws. Then came the crash of 1929, which began what we now call The Great Depression. I found it difficult to understand why millions were out of work, homeless, starving, while all the factories were sitting there; the resources were unchanged. It was then that I realized that the rules of the economic game were inherently invalid. Shortly after came World War II, where various nations took turns systematically destroying each other. I later calculated that all the destruction and wasted resources spent on that war could have easily provided for every human need on the planet. Since that time, I have watched humanity set the stage for its own extinction. I have watched as the precious finite resources are perpetually wasted and destroyed in the name of profit and free markets. I have watched the social values of society be reduced into a base artificiality of matertialism and mindless consuption, and I watched as the monetary powers control the political structure of supposedly free societies."
– Jacque Fresco, This Shit's Got to Go, 2011
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
– George Orwell, from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
"We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?"
– Emma Goldman, during a speech given before the U.S. District Court, New York City, 1917
"The State's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence 'law'; that of the individual, 'crime.'"
– Max Stirner, as quoted in The Great Quotations, edited by George Seldes, 1960
"Kings cannot get along without rascals. On the contrary, they should fear to trust the honest and upright."
– Sallust, first century B.C., as quoted in Live Free or Die by Camille Desmoulins, 1788
"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.'"
– Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (Translation by Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A., 1871, p. 140), 426
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
– William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, 2000
"If you allow the government to break the law in an emergency, they will always create an emergency to break the law."
– Unknown
"because experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its controul is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State..."
– James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788
"...if you want to know how your congressmen and senators are going to vote..., maybe they should be like NASCAR drivers. They should actually have to have jackets with the names of all the people who are sponsoring them. Wouldn't that be cool? Then you might have a clue to why the fuck they voted that way."
– Robin Williams, Weapons of Self Destruction, 2009
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
– Ronald Reagan
"American democracy is an illusion. The people do not govern. Politicians respond almost exclusively to the desires of special interests and the wealthiest citizens."
– Charles Wheelan, It's Official: In America, Affluence Equals Influence, U.S. News & World Report, 4/22/2014
"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest civilzatrice."
– Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978
"...humanity is running the Universe wherefore, if its power-structure leaders decided that it is valid to cash in all of nature's available riches to further enrich the present rich or to protect them militarily from attacks by their assumed enemies—all at the cost of terminating human presence on planet Earth—that is the power-structure leaders' divine privilege."
– Buckminister Fuller, Critical Path, p. 229
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
– Thomas Jefferson?
"Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? 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 others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
– Patrick Henry, speech to the Second Virginia Revolutionary Convention, St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775
"The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many."
– Richard Wolff, in an interview with The Progressive, 4/10/2014
"Within the corporation, all policies emanate from the control above. In the union of this power to determine policy with the execution thereof, all authority necessarily proceeds from the top to the bottom and all responsibility from the bottom to the top. This is, of course, the inverse of 'democratic' control; it follows the structural conditions of dictatorial power."
– Robert Brady, Business as a System of Power, 1943
"Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
– Bob Black, The Abolition of Work
"The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine."
– George Bernard Shaw, from a letter, September 1899
"The modern conservative is engaged in mankind's oldest exercise in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
– John Kenneth Galbrath, 1946
"People have power, but they want more and more and more; nothing is ever enough for them. Acquisition. Corporations that must own more and more and more. Oil that leads to the wealth and the products made accessible to us by oil. Look at the negative consequences on the environment: we're destroying the very earth that we inhabit for the sake of that addiction. Now these addictions are far more devastating than in their social consequences than the cocaine or heroin habits of my downtown / East-Side patients. Yet they're rewarded and considered to be respectable. The tobacco company executive that shows a higher profit will get a much bigger reward. He doesn't face any negative consequences legally or otherwise; in fact, he's a respected member of the board of several other corporations. But tobacco smoke-related diseases kill 5 1/2 million people around the world every year. In the United States, they kill 400,000 people a year. And these people are addicted to what? To profit. To such a degree are they addicted that they're actually in denial about the impact of their activities, which is typical for addicts, is denial. And it's respectable to be addicted to profit no matter what the cost, so what is acceptable and what is respectable is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society. And it seems like the greater the harm, the more respectable the addiction."
– Gabor Maté, at about 18:30 min in Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, 2011
"...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 V. Debs, The Canton, Ohio Speech, 1918
"The power has remained where it resided. The tools of modern men have been disregarded at this level of recursion, and there is no one left to say aloud 'no to that!' until the people themselves say no. So this is why I contend that we are considering a future demanded now. Every time we hear that a possible solution cannot be done, we may be sure on general scientific grounds that it can. Every time we hear that a solution is not economic, we ought to ask "for whom?" since it's people, just people, that will have to pay. Every time we hear that a proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say "Thank God, at last." Whenever we hear that it will destroy our freedom, we should be very cautious indeed, since such freedom that we have is our most treasured possession, and we know how to be vigilant. Yet for that very reason, this is the simplest method that the powerful have to cling to power, to convince people that any other concession of that power would be unsafe."
– Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom: The Future That can be Demanded Now, 1973
"As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles."
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950
"Freedom is participation in power."
– Cesar Chavez?
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
– W. E. B. Du Bois
"They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
– Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's Contributions to the Conference on February 17: Four Drafts, 1775
"These demonstrations, these wonderful demonstrations that we have seen very recently on behalf of immigrant rights, say, and you've seen those signs saying, you know, 'No human being is alien.' And I think that's true. Except for the people in Washington, you see.
They've taken over the country. They've taken over the policy. They've driven us into two disastrous wars, disastrous for our country and even more disastrous for people in the Middle East. And they have sucked up the wealth of this country and given it to the rich, and given it to the multinationals, given it to Halliburton, given it to the makers of weapons. They're ruining the environment. And they're holding on to 10,000 nuclear weapons, while they want us to worry about the fact that Iran may, in ten years, get one nuclear weapon. You see, really, how mad can you be?"
– Howard Zinn, in a lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
"Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume–a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power–an elected Marxist in power."
– William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 2003
"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
"We can either 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
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."
– Franklin Roosevelt, Simple Truths, 1938
"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!"
– Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917
"In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."
– W. E. B. Du Bois, I Won't Vote, The Nation, 1956
"The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse."
– Ralph Nader, speech to the Green Party, 2/21/2000
"When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
– Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, 2014
"If voting could change anything it would be made illegal!"
– Robert S. Borden, "Voice of the People," Lowell Sun, 1976
"No man can get rich in politics unless he's a crook."
– Harry S. Truman, as quoted in Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman by Merle Miller, 1973
"Candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population. Somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy. Suppose I'm running for office, I don't tell people what I think or what I'm going to do, I tell them what the pollsters have told me is going to get me elected. That's expressing utter contempt for the electorate. That's saying 'Okay, you people are going to have the chance to push your buttons, but once you're done, I'll do exactly what I intend, which is not what I'm telling you.'"
– Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Bill Moyers, 1988
Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
– H.L. Mencken
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."
– George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
"Governments lie all the time. Well, not just the American government. It's just in the nature of governments. Well, they have to lie. I mean, governments in general do not represent the people of the societies that they govern. And since they don't represent the people and since they act against the interest of the people, the only way they can hold power is if they lie to the people. If they told people the truth, they wouldn't last very long. So history can help in understanding deception and being skeptical and not rushing to embrace whatever the government tells you.
And if you know some history, you would understand something which is even more basic, perhaps, than the question of lying about this war or lying about this invasion, lying about this intervention, something more basic, if you knew some history: you would understand a sort of fundamental fact about society, and including our society, that the interests of the government and the interests of the people are not the same.
It's very important to know this, because the culture tries very hard to persuade us that we all have a common interest. If they use the language 'national interest' – there's no national interest. There's their interest and our interest. National security – now, whose security? National defense, whose defense? All these words and phrases are used to try to encircle us all into a nice big bond, so that we will assume that the people who are the leaders of our country have our interests at heart. Very important to understand: no, they do not have our interests at heart."
– Howard Zinn, in a lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."
– I.F. Stone
"So, how did these rulers manage to maintain their power, distributing surplus as they pleased, undisturbed by the majority? The answer is: by cultivating an ideology which caused the majority to believe deep in their hearts that only their rulers had the right to rule. That they lived in the best of all possible worlds. That everything was the way it was destined to be. That the situation on the ground reflected some divine order. That any opposition to them clashed with that divine power's will, threatening to send the world spinning out of control."
– Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism, 2017
"We're all bought, and what's more we're bought with our own money. Every one of those poor downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick doll's house that's called Belle Vue because there's no view and the bell doesn't ring—every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from Bolshevism."
– George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, 1939
"Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"In England, we can do what we like as long as we do what we're told"
– Peter Ustinov?
"A 'gaffe' is the opposite of a 'lie': It's when a politician tells the truth."
– Michael Kinsley, Home Truths, The New Republic, 1984
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
– CIA Director William Casey during a meeting at the White House?, 1981
"[Islamophobia is to me] a de facto blasphemy law because, up until I left Jordan, I was the animal, the pig, the kafir, the apostate, the person who should be put to death and all of that. But I was never an Islamophobe. No one would accuse me of Islamophobia back in Jordan. I could be, I'm the worst person ever, but we don't have such things. Islamophobia only exists when there is no laws to govern your speech. Then we will tell you that you're an Islamophobe so you will do your own censoring."
– Mohammed al Khadra, in an interview with Amit Pal, 2019
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the oppressors."
– Malcolm X?
"When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: 'Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me...why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense.' But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports."
– Noam Chomsky
"It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
– George Carlin, Life is Worth Losing, 2005
"They talk about how we have freedom of choice, you know, we have freedom of choice, yeah, very limited, the important things, limited choice. Two political parties essentially, two, big media companies, five, six oil companies down to three down overall, three or four banks, the big banks, the big brokerage houses, accounting firms, all the things that are important, reduced in choice. Newspapers in the cities, how many, used to be three, four, now it's one or two, and they're owned by the same people, and they also own the radio station and the TV station. But jelly beans, 32 flavors, ice cream, all the things that don't matter. The unimportant things, lot of choices. You know what I say, you know what your freedom of choice is in America, paper of plastic. That's it man, it comes down to paper or plastic, cash or charge, aisle or window, smoking or nonsmoking, Coke or Pepsi, these are your choices, everything else is kind of laid out for you. They get to do what they really want. The ones who own this country, they do what they want."
– George Carlin, George Carlin on Freedom of Choice, a YouTube video posted on 6/5/2009
"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude."
– Aldous Huxley?
"It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, Individuality, 1873
"It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights."
– Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
"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, as quoted in United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal
"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
– Ariel, a character in The Tempest by William Shakespeare, 1611
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
– Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1914
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, as quoted in The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut, 1975
"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind."
– C.S. Lewis?
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
– Marcus Aurelius?
"Utopian psychology starts from one simple sentiment: the feeling of waste which can come over an observer when he sees the great discrepancy between the potentiality for a rich and happy life that every infant brings with it into the world and the actual life lived by most adults."
– George Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies, p. 130, 1963
"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958
"Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done. Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego."
– B.F. Skinner, Walden Two, 1948
"The world for the most part is ruled by the tomb, and the living are tyrannized over by the dead. Old ideas, long after the conditions under which they were produced have passed away, often persist in surviving."
– Robert G. Ingersoll, Is Divorce Wrong, 1889
"When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of."
– Confucius, The Analects, c. 500 B.C.
"...when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."
– Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"Competition is dangerous, socially offensive, considered right and normal, because you are brought up to that value system. What kind of competition did Jesus have? What kind of competition is there in your body? Suppose your brain said, 'I'm the most important organ!' And the liver said, 'I am. And I want a Free Enterprise system!' You'd rot away in a month if every organ of your body went out for itself."
– Jacque Fresco, in an interview with Larry King, c. 1974
"Compare two people, one of whom has been crippled by an accident, the other by an early environmental history which makes him lazy and, when criticized, mean. Both cause great inconvenience to others, but one dies a martyr, the other a scoundrel."
– B.F. Skinner, About Behaviorism, 1974
"About 90 percent of all U.S.A. employment is engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth. These non-life-support-producing employees are spending three, four, and more gallons of gasoline daily to go to their non-wealth-producing jobs—ergo, we are completely wasting $3 trillion of cosmic wealth per day in the U.S.A.
In real, energy-time, know-how accounting of wealth the planet Earth's four billion billionaires have not yet ben notified of their good fortune. Their heritage probating is being postponed by the lawyers for the now inherently-obsolete power structures of all kinds—religious, political, financial, professional, and academic—all of which exploitative systems are organized only to take the biased advantage of all scarcities, physical and metaphysical."
– Buckminister Fuller, Critical Path, p. 200
"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading - the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the 'gourmet mansardic' junk-food joints, the Orwellian office 'parks' featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call 'growth.'"
– James Howard Kuntsler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, 1993
"...everybody knows the U.S. infrastructure, bridges, subways, and so on, is in terrible shape, needs a lot of repair. The American Association of Engineers gives it a failing mark every year. All right, finally Congress did pass a limited infrastructure bill, to rebuild bridges and so on. It has to be called a China competition act. We can't rebuild our bridges cause they're falling apart; we have to rebuild our bridges to beat China. It's pathological. And that's what's happening inside the country. Take [Justice Clarence] Thomas' decision in the recent case in which he invalidated a New York law, this is last October, a couple weeks ago, invalidated a New York law going back to 1913 that required people to have some justification if they wanted to carry concealed weapons in public. He withdrew that with a very interesting decision. He said the United States...is such a decaying, collapsing, hateful society, that people just have to have guns. I mean, how could you expect someone to go to the grocery store without a gun in a country as disgusting and hideous as this one? It's essentially what he said; those weren't his words, but they were the import."
– Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Lex Fridman, 2022
"There are still some good people out there doing good, so if good people can flourish good people can flourish in a negative environment, imagine how well good people would flourish in a good environment."
– Jacque Fresco
"What Orwell missed with 1984 was that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody's watching."
– Keith Lowell Jensen, posted to Twitter on 4/14/2013
"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new."
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"I would say there is a detectable underlying strain of anxiety that is underneath all the frivolity of daily life and the superficial social interactions. I think a lot of people are aware of the insecurity we face, and in the USA especially there's an underlying sense of unease in America, but a lot of this has to do with a lot of the practical things of existence in the United States, which are really beginning to affect people's lives. For example, our healthcare system is so bad. It has become such a matrix of racketeering and money grubbing that people are afraid to go to the doctor, not because of what they're going to find out about their body but because of whats going to happen to them financially. You know, they end up in the hospital, and they have this bad insurance that has a $5,000 deductible ceiling to it, and they end up with up a bill for $5,000 for a broken finger. You go into the emergency room with a rather inconsequential injury, and all of a sudden, you have four figures of debt that you pay. And its strictly racketeering. It's a hostage racket literally because they have you at a weak moment when you're injured or ill and then they work their hoodoo on you. And I think this makes people extremely nervous. The job insecurity issue is another problem. People working for corporations that threat them like bananas where they peel them, they eat them, and they throw the skin away in the garbage. So they treat people like banana skins and they just throw them away. They have very little security with that and there's, I think, a certain knowledge that if you're over 50 years old, you may be unemployable for the rest of your life because nobody wants to take you on. So there's that. And there's the general whatever, what we've already discussed, a general isolation and alienation of the way American life is arranged on the landscape: the fiasco of suburbia, the isolation of people stuck in their cars for hours every day and having no place to go to meet anybody or to be with people other then their family. And your family can't be everything. You need more than your family to function as an adult in this world."
– James Howard Kunstler, in an interview with Piero San Fiorgio (at around 33 min), 9/14/16
"If [people] can't afford medical care, the word democracy has no meaning at all."
– Jacque Fresco
"[Adam Smith] posed a direct challenge to the medieval world view and the bonds of affinity that held it together. According to The Wealth of Nations, human well-being (the original meaning of the word 'wealth') would arise if all sought to increase their personal, private gain. This pursuit became a virtue; economics was yanked out of the context of social and moral teachings and set free in a universe of its own, governed by separate laws.
Today, Smith's theories are favored on the political Right, which claims also the mantle of traditional family and community values. Yet these values are precisely what Smith's economics tend to replace."
– Edgar Cahn and Jonathan Rowe, Time Dollars
"I suggest that we join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in the existing structures, and where possible, to use those existing structures, to humanize them... Even if such structures were only partially successful, they would bring pressure to bear on the official structures, which would either collapse...or regenerate themselves in a useful way."
– Vaclav Benda, The Parallel Polis, 1978
"...I don't think that we're unique and special because that's arrogant in that we have so many billions of planets with conditions similar to those on Earth, but also, you know, I don't think that we are behaving very intelligently right now. We are engaged in zero-sum games, the way we were when we started, you know, when there was food that was limited, that, if one person gets it, another does not, so it's a zero-sum game. But what science brings to the table is a reality of abundance, where everyone gains from scientific knowledge. It's an infinite-sum game. That's what people do not understand. I think that's the mark of a intelligent species, once it gets to the point where it stops engaging in zero-sum games and starts working on infinite-sum games."
– Avi Loeb, in an interview on the Event Horizon podcast, 9/3/23
"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
– Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
– Winston Churchill?
"If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
– Anatole France as quoted in Listening and Speaking by Ralph G. Nichols and Thomas R. Lewis, 1954
"If you want to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh or they'll kill you."
– George Bernard Shaw
"A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed–what gospel is that?"
– Óscar Romero
"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment."
– John F. Kennedy during a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961
"The liberties of a people never were, or ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
– Patrick Henry
"When the media is behind your movement, you aren't the resistance."
– Hunter Hawkins, posted to Twitter on 8/29/2020
"They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth."
– Gerald Massey, A Retort, Gerald Massey's Lectures, edited by Martin Euser
"Should I take the [Biblical] texts literally? I don't know; I just know what the texts say."
– Christopher Hitchens?
"There are no final solutions. There is no absolute truth. There is no supreme leader. There is no totalitarian solution that says if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you will just give up, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours. But you have to begin by repudiating all such claims. Grand rabbis, chief ayatollahs, infallible popes, the peddlers of a surrogate and mutant quasi political religion and worship-the dear leader, the great leader, we have no need of any of this."
– Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001
"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."
– Garry Kasparov, posted to Twitter on 12/13/2016
"If we lie to the Congress, it's a felony and if the Congress lies to us it's just politics"
– Ken Huber, What Has America Become, Iosco County News Herald, 6/9/2010
"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 as quoted in the Kansas City Star, 5/7/1918
"I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one"
– Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 1960
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
– A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker, 5/14/1960
"Privacy is the right to a free mind. Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
– Edward Snowden, during a panel discussion hosted by the University of Arizona, 3/25/2016
"Do I believe in conspiracies? Nah. Do I believe powerful people would get together and plan certain outcomes? Nah. Do I believe powerful interests would operate outside the law, maybe even kill people? Nah. Do I believe that secret government agencies might feel the need to assassinate a person and cover it up? Nah. I think everything in America is open, clean, and above board, and powerful people always play by the rules."
– George Carlin?
"If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone."
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950
"Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truth of both."
– Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here?, 1967
"The real revolution is the revolution of consciousness, and each one of us first needs to eliminate the divisionary, materialistic noise we have been conditioned to think is true, while discovering, amplifying, and aligning with the signal coming from our true empirical oneness. It is up to you."
– Peter Joseph, Zeitgeist: The Movie, 2007
"If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.
Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life."
– Sun Tsu, The Art of War, c. 5th century B.C.
"War poisons everybody who engages in it. You start off as the good guys, as we did in World War II. They're the bad guys. They're the fascists. What could be worse? So they're the bad guys, we're the good guys. And as the war goes on, the good guys begin behaving like the bad guys. You can trace this back to the Peloponnesian War. You can trace it back to the good guy, the Athenians, and the bad guys, the Spartans. And after a while, the Athenians become ruthless and cruel, like the Spartans.
And we did that in World War II. We, after Hitler committed his atrocities, we committed our atrocities – you know, our killing of 600,000 civilians in Japan, our killing of probably an equal number of civilians in Germany. These, they weren't Hitler, they weren't Tojo. They weren't – no, they were just ordinary people, like we are ordinary people living in a country that is a marauding country, and they were living in countries that were marauding countries, and they were caught up in whatever it was and afraid to speak up. And I don't know, I came to the conclusion, yes, war poisons everybody.
And war – this is an important thing to keep in mind, that when you go to war against a tyrant – and this was one of the claims: 'Oh, we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein,' which was, of course, nonsense. They didn't – did our government care that Saddam Hussein tyrannized his own people? We helped him tyrannize his people. We helped him gas the Kurds. We helped him accumulate weapons of mass destruction, really.
But when you go to war against a tyrant, the people you kill in the war are the victims of the tyrant. The people we killed in Germany were the victims of Hitler. The people we killed in Japan were the victims of the Japan Imperial Army, you know. And the people who die in wars are more and more and more people who are not in the military. You may know this about the different ratio of civilian-to-military deaths in war, how in World War I, 10 military dead for one civilian dead; in World War II, it was 50-50, half military, half civilian; in Vietnam, it was 70% civilian and 30% military; and in the wars since then, it's 80% and 85% civilian."
– Howard Zinn, in a lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime."
– Ernest Hemingway?
"Memorial Day will be celebrated...by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments."
– Howard Zinn, Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Boston Globe, 1976
"I'm not proud of the part I've played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I'm such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war and attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is: When a war starts, every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon has been available. That is the lesson learned time and again. Therefore, we must expect, if another war—a serious war—breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form. That's due to the imperfection of human beings."
– Hyman Rickover, testimony to Congress, 1/28/1982
"War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other."
– Niko Belic, a character in Grand Theft Auto IV, 2008
"...the people don't want war...Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
...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 danger. It works the same way in any country."
– Herman Goering, as quoted in the diary of Gustave Gilbert, 4/18/1946
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
– Voltaire?
"A few profit—and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get."
– Smedley Butler, War is a Racket, 1935
"If you give several sovereign states the means to eradicate the world many times over, sooner or later the Day of Judgment will arrive. You may avoid it once, you may avoid it twice, you may avoid it a thousand times. But sooner or later it will come. Given the nature of the world system prevailing in the last half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first, World War III was inevitable. The only oddity was that it did not occur much sooner."
– W. Warren Wagar, A Short Story of the Future, 1989
"Why did wars occur at all? The central, tragic fact is simple: coercion works; those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance, and from that compliance draw the multiple advantages of money, goods, deference, access to pleasures denied to less powerful people. Europeans followed a standard war-provoking logic: everyone who controlled substantial coercive means tried to maintain a secure area within which he could enjoy the returns from coercion, plus a fortified buffer zone, possibly run at a loss, to protect the secure area. Police or their equivalent deployed force in the secure area, while armies patrolled the buffer zone and ventured outside it; the most aggressive princes, such as Louis XIV, shrank the buffer zone to a thin but heavily-armed frontier, while their weaker or more pacific neighbors relied on larger buffers and waterways. When that operation succeeded for a while, the buffer zone turned into a secure area, which encouraged the wielder of coercion to acquire a new buffer zone surrounding the old. So long as adjacent powers were pursuing the same logic, war resulted."
– Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, 1990, pp. 70-71
"The bombs in Vietnam explode at home–they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America."
– Martin Luther King, as quoted in the New York Times, March 26, 1967.
"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
– Isaiah 2:4
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Version 1.2.1
Created: 04/24/23
Last Updated: 07/01/24