the fairest sex... art, activism, parties and politics... the bush boys, nouveau fascists, why we hate indians, evangelical christians who think god made the world 4000 yrs ago and jesus is comin' back on a white horse tomorrow to take it all back so they'd better use up the trees and oil and bomb brown folks 'cuz it was so ordained... the evolutionary backslide of civilization.
Heroes:
KICKING : george carlin, alan moore, alex grey, malcolm mclaren, laurie anderson, sinead o'connor, errol morris, werner herzog, neil young, paul watson, jane goodall, david attenborough, david suzuki, richard dawkins, bill moyers, adam curtis, art spiegelman, robert fisk, greg palast, noam chomsky, howard zinn, joss whedon, the yes men, jon stewart, steven colbert, michael moore and amy goodman. amy goodman for u.s. president!! keith olbermann for Secretary of Defense!!
R.I.P.PING : stanley kubrick, joe strummer, leni riefenstahl, norman mclaren, marshall mcluhan, frank zappa, bob marley, billie holliday, pierre berton, peter sellers, jim henson, hunter thompson, william s. burroughs, kurt vonnegut, albert hofmann, samuel clemens, john steinbeck, johnny cash, che, M.L.K. and, of course, bill hicks.
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KHRONOLOGIA
( I Thought That These Might Be Clues )
"And God said Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the whole earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
- Genesis 1:28
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When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.
But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.
For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
- Deuteronomy 7:1-6
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"even a woman is good and so is a slave, although it may be said that a woman is an inferior thing and a slave beneath consideration"
- Plato, Greece, 427-347 BC
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"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
- Seneca the Younger, Rome, 4 BC-65 AD
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"As for heretics their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money, which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death."
- Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 1225–1274
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"I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them"
- Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist and astronomer, 1564-1642
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"Which is more likely: That the whole natural order is suspended? Or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?"
- David Hume on 'virgin birth', Scottish philosopher, 1711-1776
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"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. 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, French scientist, physician and revolutionary, died 1793
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"Of 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 of morals engendered by both.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
- James Madison, 4th US President, 1795
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"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
- Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founding father of international finance, died 1812
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"There must be Religion. Otherwise the poor would murder the rich."
- Napoléon Bonaparte, 1769–1821
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"President Dew has shown that the institution of Slavery is a principal cause of civilization. Perhaps nothing can be more evident than that it is the sole cause. If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labor beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence. Labour is pain to those who are unaccustomed to it, and the nature of man is averse to pain. Even with all the training, the helps and motives of civilization, we find that this aversion cannot be overcome in many individuals of the most cultivated societies. The coercion of Slavery alone is adequate to form man to habits of labour. Without it, there can be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no taste for comforts or elegancies, which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization. He who has obtained the command of another’s labour, first begins to accumulate and provide for the future, and the foundations of civilization are laid....Since the existence of man upon the earth, with no exception whatever, either of ancient or modern times, every society which has attained civilization has advanced to it through this process."
- William Harper, philosopher, 1837
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"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
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"Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, american author, 1860
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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- Abraham Lincoln, 1864
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(The Potlatch is) "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized."
- William Duncan, Anglican Missionary in BC, 1875
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"The term person means an individual other than an Indian."
- The Indian Act of Canada, 1876 (until 1951)
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Alliance, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without bearing individual responsibility.
Millennium, n. The period of a thousand years when the lid is to be screwed down, with all reformers on the under side.
Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary , circa 1885
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"The law, in it's 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, French author, 1894
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"The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it... we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."
- John Muir, Environmental Pioneer, to the Sierra Club, 1895
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"Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either."
- Mark Twain, 1897
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"The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it."
- Mark Twain, 1903
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"They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."
- Chief Red Cloud, 1822-1909
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"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
- President Woodrow Wilson, 1913
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"We had all left our countries as a result of the war. We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons; we were familiar with the book ‘J'accuse’, and even without it we would have had little confidence in the decency the German Kaiser and his generals. (Hugo) Ball was a conscientious objector, and I had escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who for their so-called patriotic purposes, were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat. None of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets."
- Richard Huelsenbeck, dadaist, 1920
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"Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department."
- Duncan Campbell Scott, poet, essayist and Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 1920
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"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I'm strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes."
- Winston Churchill, speaking of Iraqi Kurds, 1922
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"The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human"
- Adolf Hitler, Führer of the National Socialist Party, 1923
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"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
- Emma Goldman, paraphrased?, 1931
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"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini, 1932
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"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith... We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
- Adolf Hitler, 1933
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"The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were... I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions."
- Adolf Hitler, 1933
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"There is no conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism because the Jewish nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation."
- David Ben-Gurion, 1936
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"One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate - "We lost *our* land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket-take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning - from "I" to "we."
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.""
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
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"I am certainly a hard [man] and willing to help solve the Jewish question, but people who come from our own cultural sphere just are not the same as the brutish hordes in this place. Is the slaughter to be carried out by the Lithuanians and Letts, who are themselves rejected by the population here? I couldn't do it. I beg you to give clear directives [in this matter,] with due consideration for the good name of our Reich and our Party, in order that the necessary action can be taken in the most humane manner. Heil Hitler!"
- Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar for Byelorussia, 1941
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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
- George Orwell, 1945
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"Why, of course, 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. ...voice or no voice, 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."
- Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo, Head of the Luftwaffe, Nuremberg, 1946
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"We have 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, our real job...is to devise a series of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we have to dispense with sentimentality... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization."
- George Kennan, influential US diplomat and advisor to Truman and Eisenhower, 1948
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"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth... doublethink."
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948
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"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948
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"Today, Easter day of the Holy Year
here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris
I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven
I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling
I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality
of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.
Verily I say unto you: God is dead
We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers for your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Go forth then into this tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead
and till this earth anew
with your bare hands
with your PROUD hands
with your unpraying hands.
Today Easter day of the Holy Year
Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of France
we proclaim the death of the Christ-god,
so that Man may live at last."
- Serge Berna, read from the rostrum at Notre-Dame Cathedral during Easter High Mass while dressed as a Dominican monk on April 9th 1950. written by co-conspirator Michel Mourre.
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This 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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron"
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
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"How is it possible, that this culture-loving era could be so monstrously callous and amoral? How is it conceivable that all our lauded technological progress - our very civilization- should become like an axe in the hands of the pathological criminal?"
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955
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"Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate."
- Victor LeBow, Retailing analyst, 1955
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"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."
- John F. Kennedy, 1962
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"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy to Latin American diplomats, 1962
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"It is incredible how tough human life can be, how quickly a person, even with a broken arm, a dislocated foot, a broken head and bitten by dogs, will do what is asked of him when over him hangs the cudgel waved by the goodwill of the Reich."
- Alfred Wetzler, escaped Auschwitz in April 1944 after 2 years imprisonment with a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoriums and a label from a canister of Zyklon gas, irrefutably proving to allied officials that the holocaust was occurring, quoted here in 1963
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"At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love."
- Che Guevara, 1965
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"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
- John Lennon, 1966
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"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"
- Raoul Vaneigem, Situationist International, 1967
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"The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our internal perception tends to be anti social; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to internal interface, to confront environments with a certain anti-social power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes" "Well adjusted" courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The anti-social brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the emperor "ain't got nothin' on." The new environment was clearly visible to HIM"
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is The Massage , 1967
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"The huge vortices of energy created by our technologies present us with unbreathable consequences. put a decent man in an airplane a few hundred feet above a village and he will kill without compunction, inflict appalling pain and injury on men women and children. that bomber pilot is really much like the person introducing any new technology. none of these people ever consider what will be the impact or the effect of what they do when they pull that trigger. we cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to new things. they will destroy us.
how are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity?"
- Marshall McLuhan, 196?
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"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967
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"The Black Panther breakfast for children program is a threat to the internal security of America."
- J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, 1968
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"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."
- Archbishop Hélder Câmara, 1971
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"My friends, surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes.
My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police].
Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.
They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society. I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours -- in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act. They were committed. History will judge them.
Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.
The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason."
- President Salvador Allende's last speech during a coup led by Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, Augusto Pinochet, Santiago de Chile, September 11, 1973
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"Religion has become superstition and image-worship, belief and ritual. It has lost the beauty of truth; incense has taken the place of reality. Instead of direct perception there is in its place the image carved by the hand or the mind. The truth is not to be found in any temple, church or mosque, however beautiful they are. Beauty of truth and the beauty of stone are two different things. One opens the door to the immeasurable and the other to the imprisonment of man; the one to freedom and the other to the bondage of thought".
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian Philosopher and writer, 1973
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"Half-way through making 'The Great Dictator' I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at."
- Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography, 1974 (in 1940 'The Great Dictator' garnered 4 Oscar nominations)
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"Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs."
- Henry Kissinger, 1974
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"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent."
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist, 1975
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"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."
- John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977
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"Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied."
- John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977
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"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, Astronomer and Atheist, 1987
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"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
- plain spoken former CIA Dir. William Colby (died 1996 of 'heart attack' in 'boating accident' at night)
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"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."
- Dick Cheney, 1991
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"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."
- George H.W. Bush, when asked, "What will the people do if they ever find out the truth about Iraq-gate and Iran contra?", 1992
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"(it was) a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
- Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, when asked about 500,000 Iraqi children dead from US sanctions, 1996
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"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome."
- George H.W. Bush, 1998
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"Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist and sadly, a secular defender of Zionism, 1999
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"There outta be limits to freedom."
- Texas Governor George W. Bush, 2000
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"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."
- Grover Norquist, conservative activist, 2004
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"'Politics is the art of controlling your environment.' That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World -- or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property -- or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons -- or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted."
- Hunter S. Thompson, 2004
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"If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well."
- former Israeli Foreign Minister and chief negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami, 2006
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"If we were to strike Iran, it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change...The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."
- John Bolton, most recent former US ambassador to the United Nations, October 2007
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"The risk of further proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible.
The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
- NATO Commanders' manifesto titled "Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World - Renewing Transatlantic Partnership", January 2008
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"During these past ten years more than 150,000 indigenous have died of curable diseases. The federal, state, and municipal governments and their economic and social programs do not take into account any real solution to our problems; they limit themselves to giving us charity every time elections role around. Charity resolves nothing but for the moment, and again death visits our homes. That is why we think no, no more; enough dying this useless death; it is better to fight for change. If we die now, it will not be with shame but with dignity, like our ancestors. We are ready to die, 150,000 more if necessary, SO THAT OUR PEOPLE AWAKEN FROM THIS DREAM OF DECEIT THAT HOLDS US HOSTAGE."
- Subcomandante Marcos, Mexico, ahora
"There was an old lady, from the "Cree" tribe, named "Eyes of Fire", who prophesied that one day, because of the white mans' or Yo-ne-gis' greed, there would come a time, when the fish would die in the streams, the birds would fall from the air, the waters would be blackened, and the trees would no longer be, mankind as we would know it would all but cease to exist. There would come a time when the "keepers of the legend, stories, culture rituals, and myths, and all the Ancient Tribal Customs" would be needed to restore us to health. They would be mankinds’ key to survival, they were the "Warriors of the Rainbow"."
- Lelanie Fuller Stone
"You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour and there are things to be considered: Where are you living? What are you doing? What are your relationships? Are you in right relation? Where is your water? Know your garden. It is time to speak your Truth. Create your community. Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for the leader. This could be a good time!"
- Hopi Elder, Oraibi, Az.
