Quotes




"Without actual participation, democracy is rhetoric."
		--Bob Everton

"Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea,
the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it."
		--Edward Abbey - 

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

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
		--Christopher Hitchens

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming,
he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his
instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."
		--Bertrand Russell

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread"
		--Anatole France

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
		--Bertrand Russell

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more 
and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and 
glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's 
desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright 
moron." 
                --H.L. Mencken

"Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." 
		--Voltaire

"I was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly Vietnamese was to shout “To hell with Ho Chi Minh!”
If he shoots, he’s unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled “To hell with Ho Chi Minh!” and he yelled back,
“To hell with President Johnson!” We were shaking hands when a truck hit us.
		--Tuli Kupferburg

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
		-- Charles Darwin

"We're all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever
believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
		--Richard Dawkins

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at,
for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And
when Humanity lands there, it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets
sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."
		--Oscar Wilde (in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism")

"Hegemony is like a pillow: it absorbs blows and sooner or later the 
would-be assailant will find it comfortable to rest upon."
	        --Antonio gramsci
"Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
                --Samuel Johnson

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it"
		--Mohandas Gandhi 

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
                --Abbie Hoffman

There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed for example
that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.
	        —-Bat Masterson

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror.
Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the
butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out
'stop!' When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable,
the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
		--Bertolt Brecht

"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage
and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What
is it? Distrust."
		--Demosthenes: Philippic 2, sect. 24

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that
numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government
and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem
is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and
stupidity, and war, and cruelty"
                --Howard Zinn

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything
the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."'
		--Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963

"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is
impersonal -- that there is no human relation between master and slave."
		--Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

“Så, nu kan jeg da sove, så længe jeg gider.” ("Well, now I can sleep in as late as I like.")
		--King Frederik VII of Denmark, having just granted a liberal constitution in 1848

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too
strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good
intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They
promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters
            -- Noah Webster

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?
                --St. Augustine

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure
of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are
resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those whom they oppress."
            --Frederick Douglas

"A society gets all the criminals it deserves."
            -- Emma Goldman

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.
There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the
bombing of civilians-----which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our'
side. . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he
has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
            --George Orwell


Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity
asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there
comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but
one must take it because it is right.
            --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner"
            --James Bovard

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of
it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
            --Eugene Victor Debs

"It is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to tell them is that
they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country."
                --Herman Goering

"Our democracy is but a name.  We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between
two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
                        --- Helen Keller

"After the last tree has been cut down,
After the last river has been poisoned,
After the last fish has been caught
Only then will you find
That money cannot be eaten."
                         ---Cree Prophecy

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so SICK AT HEART,
that you can't take part;  and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop."
            --Mario Savio

"We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism
without freedom is slavery and brutality."
            --The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 269

"How dare you molest the seas?" asks Alexander of a pirate he has captured. "How dare you molest
the whole world?" the pirate replies. "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a
thief. You, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor."
                                        --St Augustine (more or less)

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

"I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.
Charity is so vertical. I goes from the top to the
bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other
person. I have a lot to learn from other people."
                                         -- Eduardo Galeano

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid
people are conservative."
                                         -- John Stuart Mill

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
            --Milos Kundera


"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint.
When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
            --Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist

"Theory -- where you have ideas
Ideology -- where ideas have you"
            --Situationist saying

"To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to
be lulled into security is to die."
            --Oscar Wilde

"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car."
            --Garrison Keiler

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see 
that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
	    --Martin Luther King

"Anarcho"-capitalists: Anarchists who want police protection from their slaves"
            --From Kim Stanley Robinson's "Blue Mars"

"Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty 
follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the 
artillery of opinion."
            --William Godwin

"For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a
dollar and didn't get it."
            --Big Bill Haywood

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 
'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real 
founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries 
and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon 
pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow 
men: "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the 
fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one!"
	    --Rousseau 

"The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws
because he has himself recognized them as such, & not because they have
been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine
or human, collective or individual."
            --Mikhail Bakunin, God & the State

"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced 
on parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a 
long time been no guarantee of their security... Political rights do not 
exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only 
when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to 
impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace [....] The 
peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in 
greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to 
their own strength."
	    --Rudolph Rocker 

"Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife & fork?"
            --Stanislaw Lem

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy 
evidence of the fact."
            --George Eliot (1819-1880) 

"Like me, you could...be unfortunate enough to stumble upon a silent war. 
The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've 
seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as 
speaking out. Either way, you're accountable."
	    --Arundhati Roy

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
	    --Sally Kempton

"The Capitalists will compete with themselves to sell us the rope with which 
we will hang them all."
            --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting what's for dinner. Freedom is
a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
            --Ben Franklin

"The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
	    --Steven Biko 

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
            --Denis Diderot

"My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay
right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will
drive me from it. Is that clear?"
	    --Paul Robeson (1898-1976) - from testimony before the House
            Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956

"When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, 
immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are 
strong enough to make good our claim on them."
            --Helen Keller

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."
	    --Upton Sinclair

"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
            --Dan Hirschberg

"A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West
alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the
lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace."
            --Tacitus

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning
you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
	    --Matt Groening


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