|
Selected quotations from the news pages of the Information Clearing House
...about history, patriotism, truth, justice and life......yours and the world's |
|
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad: James Madison = Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces: Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743– July 13, 1793), was a Swiss-born scientist and physician = Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our [1787] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us: Abraham Lincoln - Source: in an 1848 letter to William Herndon = The role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the priveleges and pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side fo the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people; the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered: Martin Luther King - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service: Albert Einstein = They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason: Ernest Hemmingway = Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism: Martin Luther King, Jr.
= War is fear cloaked in courage: William Westmoreland = Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood: Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, 1948 = Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder: Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights" = Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war: Otto Von Bismark = They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people: Eugene Debs = Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control: John Chancellor = A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable: Thomas Jefferson = History is written by the victor: Latin Proverb = One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous: Carl Sagan = Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace: Charles Sumner = It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.: ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs = Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner = A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?: Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience = Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?: Douglas Jerrold = War hath no fury like a noncombatant: Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment = We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it: Patrick Henry = Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny: Barry Goldwater = He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people: Samuel Adams = Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true: Eric Hoffer = The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity: George Bernard Shaw = "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.": Abraham Lincoln = Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.": Harold Evans = "The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.": Georges Bernanos = How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better: Mark Twain = The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent: Charles Eliot Norton = "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.": Thomas Jefferson = The
average age of the world's greatest civilizations Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian = “Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.” : Thomas Jefferson = “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” John F. Kennedy = “Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”: Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia =
= War would end if the dead could return: Stanley Baldwin = It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets: Voltaire, War = All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?: Benjamin Franklin = "The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy." Baron De Montesquieu= The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. Herbert Schiller = Mark Twain: The War Prayer O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; Read
it here: = The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses. -Edward Abbey = The
death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication
of any principle, however sacred. Daniel Berrigan = Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth. : Eugene V. Debs, Speech, June 16, 1918 = "How is a military drilled and trained to defend freedom, peace and ahppiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an efficiently trained generation: 'The soldier must be so trained that he becomes a mere automoton; he must be so trained that it will destroy his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.' This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian . . . but by an American major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automotons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else." : Emma Goldman, Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter = "The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty—all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim." : John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching = We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong: Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941 = Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?: Norman Cousins = The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter: Reginald Wright Kauffman = Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?: Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus" = "That's not really a number I'm terribly interested in." General Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on being asked his assessment of Iraqi military and civilian casualties, April 1991 = Lesley
Stahl: "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. &
— and you know, is the price worth it?" Former U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright, responding to reporter Lesley Stahl as to whether the over half a million Iraqi children killed by the UN sanctions against Iraq were "worth it." CBS May 11, 1996 = "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?": George W. Bush's mother Barbara on ABC/Good Morning America, March 18, 2003 = If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter: George Washington. = "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 = Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. Woodrow Wilson = Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ..: Henry David Thoreau = The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge: Butler D. Shaffer = The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy: Adolf Hitler = The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same: Marie Beyle = "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.": George Orwell = Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction: Blaise Pascal = Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear: Harry S. Truman = Never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy: Sir Winston Churchill. = By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline: Thomas Jefferson = The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing: John Adams = So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men: Voltaire. François Marie Arouet (1694-1778) = "War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder." : Alexander Berkman = "It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations." : Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America = "COWARDICE, n. A charge often levelled by all-American types against those who stand up for their beliefs by refusing to fight in wars they find unconscionable, and who willingly go to prison or into exile in order to avoid violating their own consciences. These 'cowards' are to be contrasted with red-blooded, 'patriotic' youths who literally bend over, grab their ankles, submit to the government, fight in wars they do not understand (or disapprove of), and blindly obey orders to maim and to kill simply because they are ordered to do so—all to the howling approval of the all-American mob. This type of behavior is commonly termed 'courageous.'" : Chaz Bufe = Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear: Albert Camus = It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable: Eric Hoffer = You see what power is -- holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them: Amy Tan = Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice: John Adams = One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence: Charles A. Beard = Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good: Thomas Paine = To change masters is not to be free: Jose Marti y Perez = There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest: Elie Wiesel = What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms: Thomas Jefferson = 19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society: Rocco Galati = Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power: Benito Mussolini = I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either: Edward Zehr = If
men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are
they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a
man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of
their own making?: Herbert Spencer. = Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth: Mark Twain = Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country: Bertrand Russell, attributed = I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in: George McGovern = The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery: Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil = American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians: Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action = War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals: Charles Evans Hughes =
|