Assorted Quotations Part TwoSomething to Think About |
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Hereinafter, then, you have an attempt to depict a special temperament--one in essence "literary"--as very variously molded by diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its ability to the demands of a certain hour.
From "The Certain Hour" by James Branch CabellOf all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. - April 20, 1795
A religion is only as good as the people who practise it.
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.
Confident and unafraid, we must labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace. - from a speech June,1963
Democracy is NOT government FOR the people,
NOR goverment OF the people,
for such are basically totalitarian concepts:
DEMOCRACY is government BY the PEOPLE.
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Public opinion is the "product rather than the motive power of the political process."
The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological. And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and reveal their origins; they speak in disguised language of secrets too terrible for words.
From "Trauma and Recovery", 1992
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your barefeet and the winds long to play with your hair.
The old political battles that have consumed humankind during most of the 20th century - black vs white, left vs right, male vs female - will fade into the background. The only battle still worth fighting and winning, the only one that can set us free, is The People vs The Corporate Cool Machine!
Adbusters 23, 1998
Whatever proportions these [Nazi] crimes assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in basic attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitatable sick."
— Dr. Leo Alexander, Expert Adviser to Nuremberg Tribunal
July 14, 1949
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Lord Adrian, member of the Eugenics Society, the British NAMH and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, expressed this kind of charity in a speech he gave in 1956:
"...preventive health services are bound to interfere with individual liberty... and if they aim at mental as well as physical health they must be prepared to separate mothers from children and to supervise the lives of people who would like to be let alone."
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the govenment's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
US Supreme Court Justice, Dissenting, Olmstead v. US, 277 US, 438 (1928)
It is probable too that a new science, the general theory of information, will soon make it possible to express quantitatively the ideas we are now expounding qualitatively. By distributing equitably among men the knowledge mankind already possesses, and by encouraging them to exchange their knowledge so as to produce new combinations, we shall increase the intellectual potential of human society no less rapidly and surely than by multiplying the number of geniuses."
From "The Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, 1960One day, after spending months walking around watching, talking to my fellow human beings, and listening, I thought about what we have done as human beings, the way we treat each other, what we have created, and the state of the world, and I sat down under a tree and cried.
from NOW IS THE TIME AND WE ARE THE ONES A Vision for the New Generation By Lyle Bradley
SATYAGRAHA (Civil disobedience or literally "clinging to truth")
We must dismiss the idea of overawing the Government by huge demonstrations every time some one is arrested. On the contrary, we must treat arrest as the normal condition of the life of a non-co-operator. For we must seek arrest and imprisonment, as a soldier who goes to battle seeks death. We expect to bear down the opposition of the Government by courting and not by avoiding imprisonment, even though it be by showing our supposed readiness to be arrested and imprisoned en masse. Civil disobedience then emphatically means our desire to surrender to a single unarmed policeman. Our triumph consists in thousands being led to the prisons like lambs to the slaughter house. If the lambs of the world had been willingly led, they would have long ago saved themselves from the butcher's knife. Our triumph consists again in being imprisoned for no wrong whatsoever. The greater our innocence, the greater our strength and the swifter our victory.
As it is, this Government is cowardly, we are afraid of imprisonment. The Government takes advantage of our fear of gaols. If only our men and women welcome gaols as health-resorts, we will cease to worry about the dear ones put in gaols which our countrymen in South Africa used to nickname His Majesty's Hotels.
We have too long been mentally disobedient to the laws of the State and have too often surreptitiously evaded them, to be fit all of a sudden for civil disobedience. Disobedience to be civil has to be open and non-violent.
Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion - a refusal to obey every single State-made law. It is certainly more dangerous than an armed rebellion. For it can never be put down if the civil resisters are prepared to face extreme hardships. It is based upon an implicit belief in the absolute efficiency of innocent suffering. By noiselessly going to prison a civil resister ensures a calm atmosphere. The wrong-doer wearies of wrongdoing in the absence of resistance. All pleasure is lost when the victim betrays no resistance. A full grasp of the conditions of successful civil resistance is necessary at least on the part of the representatives of the people before we can launch out on an enterprise of such magnitude. The quickest remedies are always fraught with the greatest danger and require the utmost skill in handling them...
We dare not pin our faith solely on civil disobedience. It is like the use of a knife to be used most sparingly if at all. A man who cuts away without ceasing cuts at the very root, and finds himself without the substance he was trying to reach by cutting off the superficial hard crust. The use of civil disobedience will be healthy, necessary, and effective only if we otherwise conform to the laws of all growth. We must therefore give its full and therefore greater value to the adjective 'civil' than to 'disobedience'. Disobedience without civility, discipline, discrimination, non-violence is certain destruction. Disobedience combined with love is the living water of life. Civil disobedience is a beautiful variant to signify growth, it is not discordance which spells death.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed human beings can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
(In answer to the question, "Why should it be the artist rather than the scientist who perceives these relationships and foresees these trends?")
MCLUHAN: Because inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the message--that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists. (from the Playboy interview of 1968).
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous,
he will not
bite you;
that is the principal difference between
a dog and a man."
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." -- 'The Mysterious Stranger,' 1916
True peace is not merely the absence of tension.
It is the presence of justice."
"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
"One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
It's either NON-VIOLENCE or NON-EXISTENCE!
First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak
up because I
wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the
Catholics, and I
didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes its laws.
The next revolution - World War 3 - will be waged inside your head. It will be, as Marshal McLuhan predicted, a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or around international fishing boundaries on the high seas, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in cyberspace. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future.
Disinformation, in order to be effective, must be 90% accurate."
Some call it Marxism. I call it Judaism.' (The American Bulletin, May 5, 1935)
"There is a surplus of democracy in the world which is interfering with the
free movement of capital and investment."
Renato Ruggiero, Former Director of the World Trade
Organization
The editor of a newspaper has the power to decide what events shall be reported as "news". Unless an event is reported, it is not "news" and has no public existence beyond earshot of those initially present; and what is not news cannot possibly become "history".
It is obvious that in a state-supported literary society such as Soviet Russia, certain writers and styles are disseminated to the exclusion of others; yet too many of us remain oblivious to similar forces and pressures shaping the public life of American writing today. The pervasive neglect of whole classes of literature suggests the possible existence of a "conspiracy" ... The most sophisticated explanation of this incongruity would probably show how what might seem the result of a "conspiracy" was actually caused by a confluence of attitudes, historical precedents, and initially independent discriminations, all of which combine to function with conspiratorial effectiveness. It is also true that one definition of a "conspiracy" is that all parties act toward a common goal, whether by design or by independent cooperation that is only retrospectively apparent. ...
from The End of Intelligent Writing
http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/.
In the hours after the ceasefire north of the Iraqi border, it was impossible to drive on the highway without running over parts of human bodies. I watched wild dogs feasting on Iraqi flesh and camera crews filmed all this. But scarcely a frame reached television viewers. Faced with the reality they supposedly craved, nearly all television editors decided that 'good taste' would restrict their reports now that government officials were no longer there to censor them. Having therefore offered viewers war without responsibility, television ended the Gulf conflict by giving them war without death.
Robert Fisk, Irish Times
And that is one of the problems with Middle East reporting. It is not fair. It is biased.
Q: Why is it biased?
Fisk: One is because U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive. America's great ally is Israel. When you're given ten seconds to try and explain why you might be critical of an American ally, whoever it might be, it becomes a very odd and weird experience.
American journalists go for safe stories. They don't like controversy. They don't like to say, "I was a witness. I saw this. This is true. This is what happened." You have this constant business where journalists can never be the source; there has to be this anonymous diplomat.
The conformity of American journalism is going to be one of the nails in its coffin. All American journalists write in the same style, and there is a kind of sickness among a lot of Western correspondents in that they have this dreadful reliance on their own governments, their own embassies. I can remember many, many times when an American journalist arrives in town and they go to the U.S. embassy, the French embassy, the British embassy. They get their accreditation from the ministry of information and maybe ask for a couple of interviews. And then you get the report like the one reprinted in the International Herald Tribune Paris edition I was reading the other day. It was, in all, twelve paragraphs, and unnamed diplomatic sources were quoted ten times.
robert fisk interviewed by M. Rothschild.
http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Fisk/
The greatest obstacle our government faces today in assuring national security and national competitiveness--the cause of causes for conflict and economic loss--is the growing gap between those with power and those with knowledge.
from Takedown: Targets, Tools and Technocracy by Robert David Steele
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/takedown1.htm
Long before Hitler created German laws requiring forcible sterilization, euthanasia and his ultimate Eugenics program, the Holocaust, the pioneers of Eugenics who originated Hitler's ideas were British and American scientists. With the financial backing of some of the world's most famous industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Cecil Rhodes, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, they were able to promote Eugenics to an amazingly successful degree. Thanks to a century of propaganda distorting and disguising their real purposes, the influential foundations these men endowed with their wealth are viewed as humanitarian, even as mankind's hope for salvation.
from "Giuliani, the Manhattan Institute, and Eugenics: The Ugly Truth Behind "Quality of Life" located at The Konformist
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands of those who feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you. May posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
The National Security Act of 1947, which gave birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) among other agencies and departments, enabled corporate elites to more directly and more secretly control war making policies essential for global economic expansion and stability. It was the stronger centralization, the more severe set of checks and balances against public power that many of the more conservative members of the Constitutional Convention such as Hamilton had argued for in 1787. Moreover, the act created a new kind of transnational army within the CIA suitable for suppressing insurrections and overthrowing governments ("such other functions and duties") on a global scale just as the Framers had created a national army in 1787 to suppress insurrections on a state or regional scale.
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/authors/fresia/c5.shtml
It is naive to expect the initiative for reform of the state to issue from the political process that serves the interests of political capitalism. This structure can only be reduced if citizens withdraw and direct their energies and civic commitment to finding new life forms. Toward these ends, our whole mode of thinking must be turned upside-down. Instead of imitating most other political theories and adopting the state as the primary structure and then adapting the activity of the citizen to the state, democratic thinking should renounce the state paradigm and, along with it, the liberal-legal corruption of the citizen. The old citizenship must be replaced by a fuller and wider notion of being whose politicalness will be expressed not in one or two modes of activity - voting or protesting - but in many.
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/authors/fresia/c7.shtml
What Revolutionary Action Means Today, Democracy, Fall 1982, 27.
ADDICTION, THE OPIATES, AND OTHER DRUGS IN AMERICA The belief in addiction encourages a susceptibility to addiction. In Addiction and Opiates, Alfred Lindesmith states that addiction is more regularly a consequence of heroin use now than in the nineteenth century, because, he argues, people now "know" what to expect from the drug. In that case, this new knowledge we have is a dangerous thing. The very concept that one can be addicted to a drug, especially heroin, has been put into people's minds by society's belaboring of that idea. By convincing people that such a thing as physiological addiction exists, that there are drugs which can take control of one's mind and body, society makes it easier for people to relinquish themselves to a drug's power. In other words, the American conception of drug addiction is not just a mistaken interpretation of the facts, it is itself part of the problem—part of what addiction is about. Its effects go beyond drug dependencies per se to the whole issue of personal competence and the ability to control one's destiny in a confusing, technologically and organizationally complex world. So it is important that we ask why Americans have believed in addiction so strongly, feared it so much, and linked it so erroneously with one class of drugs. What characteristics of American culture account for such outsized misunderstanding and irrationality?
from "Love and Addiction" by Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky. 1975Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that lacks it hath a maimed mind.
There is only one political sin: independence; and only one political virtue: obedience. To put it differently, there is only one offense against authority: self-control; and only one obeisance to it: submission to control by authority.
The Control of Conduct: Authority vs Autonomy by Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.
Objectivity in journalism is advocacy for the status quo. - Tom Wicker, former writer for the New York Times
Bilderberg appears to allow information to leak out to right-wing organisations like The Spotlight in the US so that information can be discredited as the rantings of extremists. Bilderberg produces official participant lists - which are on my site - but I have testimonial evidence [www.bilderberg.org/1998.htm#Blair] these lists are only partial and that heads of state, influential bankers and others are 'missed off' the list to make the meeting seem less newsworthy.
Anything you can do to discredit the lies and prompt informed discussion about the Bilderbergers amongst journalists and in the newspapers/radio/TV etc. will be a service to the public.
I think we are entering a very dangerous time in history with the prospect of Global Corporate Rule moving ever nearer. These corporations and their top-down structures are totalitarian and apparently immortal. It is important that people are informed as to the dangers but they stand little chance of that with the media becoming idealogically narrower and every day being consolidated into fewer hands.
It is worth remembering that the solution to the cloud of darkness these great de-humanised profit machines cast across our world may well be spiritual rather than political.
Instead of the destroyed New York edifices, the twin towers of Peace and Justice must be built.
What is to give light must endure burning.
Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there."
William Commanda, Algonquin Nation, Maniwaki, Canada, 1991
CONTROLLED LANGUAGE
"...You know, language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of people. the more a foreigner knows about the language of another country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore, if the foreigner is an enemy of the country, to the extent that he knows the body of the language, to that extent is the country vulnerable to attack or invasion of a foreign culture. For example, you take the slave, if you teach him all about your language, he will know all your secrets, and he is then no more a slave, for you can't fool him any longer and having a fool is one of the basic ingredients of and incidents to the making of the slavery system."
From "LET'S MAKE A SLAVE"
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