Assorted Quotations Part OneSomething to Think About |
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Americans and Europeans are accustomed to thinking of fascism and communism
as the twin evils of this century. But the century has really been home to three great totalitarian systems--fascism, communism and colonialism--the latter practiced at its most deadly in Africa. In the West we don't want to recognize this because we were complicit in it. Countries that were democratic in Europe conducted mass murder in Africa--with little or no protest.
from an interview with Adam Hochschild author of "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,"
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
A YUPPIE speaks on target policing.
When they targeted the homeless in parks, I worked for a TV station and I cheered.
When they targeted the panhandlers I worked for the Toronto Sun and I cheered even louder.
When they targeted the squeegee kids I worked for the city and I cheered again.
Now I'm unemployed, they've targeted me and the whole neighborhood is cheering as they beat me.
From...
The force of the ruling elites depends on the consent of the ruled.
As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed in the punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing by itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even more troubling.
Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex
By Angela Y. Davis ColorLines Fall 1998
Grandfather
Look at
Our brokenness
Now we must put
The sanctity of Life
As the most sacred principle
Of power,
and renounce
the awesome might
Of Materialism.
We know that in all Creation
Only the family of man
Has strayed,
From the Sacred way.
From "Grandfather Look at our Brokenness", a poem by Art Solomon
Top
Indeed he had almost believed that blood had rained upon him, and cold blood from a sacrifice in heaven; his face was wet and chill and dripping, and he had passed his hand across his forehead and looked at it. A red cloud had seemed to swell over the hill, and grow great, and come near to him; he was but an ace removed from raging madness.
It had almost come to that; the drift and the breath of the scarlet cloud had well-nigh touched him. It was strange that he had been so deeply troubled by such little things, and strange how after all the years he could still recall the anguish and rage and hate that shook his soul as with a spiritual tempest.
The memory of all that evening was wild and troubled; he resolved that it should vex him no more, that now, for the last time, he would let himself be tormented by the past. In a few minutes he would rise to a new life, and forget all the storms that had gone over him.
From "The Hill of Dreams" by Arthur Machen
This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the
fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death
and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers,
and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We
have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for
destruction, and for Black women and white women to face
each other's angers without denial or immobility or silence or
guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies
peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to
alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we
must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?
From Sister Outsider
Listen to Audre
"...the public health is the foundation on which repose the happiness of the people and the power of the country. The care of the public health is the first duty of a statesman." - before the British parliament in 1875 when the Public Health Act was introduced.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Socialism, especially international socialism, is only possible as a stable system if the population is stationary or nearly so.... The white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without help of war and pestilence.... until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves against the more prolific by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923)
See also http://www.inquiria.com/russell/extermination.html and http://www.inquiria.com/russell/icarus.html
"If anarchists are capable of authoritarian attitudes ... I should
no more hail one as a comrade, sight unseen, than I would a state
trooper or used-car dealer. The label is not a warranty."
-- My Anarchism Problem by Bob Black --
"Either you're going to go along with your mind and the truth, or you're going to yield to fear and custom and conditioned reflexes. With our minds alone we can discover those principles we need to employ to convert all humanity to success in a new, harmonious relationship with the universe. We have the option to make it."
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumoured by many.
Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
But, after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
By reasonableness I mean that which assimilates with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought -- which is, itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion -- developing, however, in our acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness.
From "The Book of the Damned", Ch.13
What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearbom, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?
For us to maintain our way of living, we must...tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves...The lies act as barriers to truth. The barriers...are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
But, yes, it's the tactical usefulness of non-violent action that has influenced me...even though we disavow violence as a means to bring about social change, we believe in personal self-defense.
From an Interview with Don Lobo Tiggre, author of Y2K:The Millenium Bug
I, as a spritual Indian man, am convinced that it is time to reach out to my white brothers and sisters and to share with whomever wishes to partake of what we, the indigenous people of this land, still have. It is time that the buckskin curtain be drawn back. It is time, I know it.
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. - 1784 speech
As long as the maximization of profit remains the cornerstone of acquisitive society and capitalist economy, corporations will retain their interest in scarcity as a creator of economic value.
Senator Frank Church concluded:
At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology . . .
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there no return.
1975 27 January - The Senate establishes its Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church (D-ID). The Church Committee investigated the nation's intelligence activities for 15 months and was disestablished upon submission of its final report to the public on 26 April 1976.
1999 26 April - The CIA headquarters compound is dedicated as the George Bush Center for Intelligence as specified in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 1999.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/facttell/keyevent.htm
There must be a threshold of consciousness beyond which a conscious being takes on attributes of God.
From "The Jesus Incident"
...once again, there is no use in wasting time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery. On the contrary, we must become convinced that colonialism is incapable of procuring for the colonized peoples the material conditions which might make them forget their concern for dignity. Once colonialism has realized where its tactics of social reform are leading, we see it falling back on its old reflexes, reinforcing police effectives, bringing up troops, and setting a reign of terror which is better adapted to its interests and its psychology.
From "The Wretched of the Earth", 1963On the meeting at this point of the two trains, the one going south stopped on the track just opposite to the one going north, and it so happened that this Captain McGowan sat at a window where he could see me very distinctly, and would certainly have recognized me had he looked at me but for a second. Fortunately, in the hurry of the moment, he did not see me, and the trains soon passed each other on their respective ways. But this was not the only hairbreadth escape. A German blacksmith, whom I knew well, was on the train with me, and looked at me very intently, as if he thought he had seen me somewhere before in his travels. I really believe he knew me, but had no heart to betray me. At any rate he saw me escaping and held his peace.
The last point of imminent danger, and the one I dreaded most, was Wilmington. Here we left the train and took the steamboat for Philadelphia. In making the change I again apprehended arrest, but no one disturbed me, and I was soon on the broad and beautiful Delaware, speeding away to the Quaker City. On reaching Philadelphia in the afternoon I inquired of a colored man how I could get on to New York? He directed me to the Willow Street depot, and thither I went, taking the train that night. I reached New York Tuesday morning, having completed the journey in less than twenty-four hours. Such is briefly the manner of my escape from slavery and the end of my experience as a slave. Other chapters will tell the story of my life as a freeman.
From the "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" by Frederick DouglassHis knowledge of the significant role women were playing in the Abolitionist movement was an important factor in arousing Douglass' interest in the struggle for Women's Rights. A year after The North Star was founded, the first Women's Rights convention took place at Seneca Falls, New York. Douglass, who had featured the slogan, "Right is of no sex" in the first issue of his paper, attended the convention along with thirty~one other men courageous enough to run the risk of being branded "Hermaphrodites" and "Aunt Nancy Men." The Negro leader was the only man at the convention who was prepared to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton's resolution calling for woman suffrage and, in a speech which helped swing many votes for the proposal, pointed out that political equality was essential for the complete liberation of women. In The North Star of July 28, 1848, Douglass again announced his support of the "grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights for women, and added: "Standing as we do upon the watch tower of human freedom, we can not be deterred from an expression of our approbation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character of any members of the human family. . . . We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. . Our doctrine is that 'right of no sex'. We therefore bid the women engaged in this movement our humble Godspeed."
And a few years before his death, in an address before the
International Council of Women, he declared:
"There are few facts in my humble history to which I look
back with more satisfaction than to the fact, recorded in the
history of the Woman Suffrage movement, that I was sufficiently enlightened at the early day, when only a few years
from slavery, to support your resolution for woman suffrage.
I have done very little in this world in which to glory, except
this one act-and I certainly glory in that. When I ran away
from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights
of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little
nobility in the act."
Few indeed were the Women's Rights conventions held during the 1850's at which Douglass was not a featured speaker and whose proceedings were not fully reported in his papers. Invariably the story of the convention would be followed by an editorial comment in support of the resolu- tions and in which Douglass again insisted "that the only true basis of right was the capacity of individuals."
From "Selections from the writings of Frederick Douglass" edited by Philip S. FonerAll larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.
From the "The Web Of Life"...
After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? .......Death is for many of us the gate of
hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
.........Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice
in death as we rejoice in birth; .....
From A Treatise on Parents and Children
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the
American military-industrial establishment would have to go on,
substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.
Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
Former U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan, 1987.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas qhich it is essential that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ... anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing ...from The Freedom of the Press (1945).
[p. 21] Orwell's essay exposes not just government censorship but the more subtle, less visible, and scarcely acknowledged blockage that publishers exercise among themselves ... "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England," Orwell wrote, "is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban"
The New Unhappy Lords
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
from "The Secret People"
For more of Chesterton's copious works online in the public domain go here. If you're loaded you can buy The Gilbert Magazine.
... like ghosts not yet laid to rest, troubled but invisible, the disposed still wander from place to place in search of recompense.
Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production.... Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now. Would food be considered an instrument of national power?... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?''
— U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger
U.S. National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200
Dec. 10, 1974
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.
Hybrids. -- It is a well-known law of biology that no progeny result from union of animals of different species. Different varieties or races of the same species may form a fertile union, the result of which is a cross between its two parents, possessing some of the qualities of each. Such a cross is called a mongrel. All the varieties of dogs are produced by crossing different races, and so are mongrels. The various mixed races of men, such as mulattoes and half-breeds, are also mongrels. The mule is the product of a union between the horse and the ass, and is a true hybrid. The offspring of hybrids are sterile, almost without exception; for the reason that they do not produce mature elements of generation. In the mule, the zoosperms are either entirely absent, or else very imperfectly developed; hence the fact that a colt having a mule for its sire is one of the rarest of curiosities, though a few instances have been reported. This is a wise law of nature to preserve the purity of species.
from Plain facts for old and young : embracing the natural history and hygiene of organic life.
The Working Class? They're no problem. I can buy one half to kill the other half! - 1991
The medico-drug cartel was summed up by J.W Hodge, M.D., of Niagara Falls, N.Y., in these words: 'The medical monopoly or medical trust, euphemistically called the American Medical Association, is not merely the meanest monopoly ever organized, but the most arrogant, dangerous and despotic organization which ever managed a free people in this or any other age. Any and all methods of healing the sick by means of safe, simple and natural remedies are sure to be assailed and denounced by the arrogant leaders of the AMA doctors' trust as fakes, frauds and humbugs Every practioner of the healing art who does not ally himself with the medical trust is denounced as a 'dangerous quack' and impostor by the predatory trust doctors. Every sanitarian who attempts to restore the sick to a state of health by natural means without resort to the knife or poisonous drugs, disease imparting serums, deadly toxins or vaccines, is at once pounced upon by these medical tyrants and fanatics, bitterly denounced, vilified and persecuted to the fullest extent.'
When we approach our lives with trust rather than with skepticism, we are allowing our minds to be the fertile ground for enrichment. This growth cycle allows each of us to hear the music of our own unique magic...Kokopelli plays the flute and weaves the magic of his songs to remind us that magic is no more than a change in consciousness.
From the Sacred Path Cards: The Discovery of Self Through Native Teachings
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