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Nya citat 2001-11-02
I don't mean to imply that leadership is the same as a con job. The differences are substantial, in the sense that leadership pays much more and doesn't require quick wits.
Scott Adams
The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
Leo Tolstoy
Democracy, thus, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership [of the French Revolution]. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.
Raya Dunayevskaya
Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism.
Mohandas Gandhi
Your movement [Mussolini's fascism] has abroad rendered a service to the whole world... Italy has shown that there is a way to combat subversive forces.
Winston Churchill
...the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's instutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy...
The American Legion is fighting every element that threatens our democractic government - soviets, anarchists, I.W.W., revolutionary socialists and every other red... Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.
Alvin M. Owsley, American Legion Commander, 1923
If I had been an Italian, I am sure I would have been with you [Mussolini] from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
Winston Churchill
Defeat is not always failure. The future does not always belong to those who triumph. We never play our last card.
Isaac Puente
A revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it breaks out and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and impossible.
George Bernard Shaw
In Vietnam, "typical criminal communist violence" is perpetrated against American "strategic operations"; the Reds have the impertinence to "launch a sneak attack" (presumably they are supposed to announce it beforehand and to deploy in the open) ... The Viet Cong attack American barracks "in the dead of night" and kill American boys (presumably, Americans only attack in broad daylight, don't disturb the sleep of the enemy, and don't kill Vietnamese boys). The massacre of hundreds of thousands of communists (in Indonesia) is called "impressive" - a comparable "killing rate" suffered by the other side would hardly have been honoured with such an adjective.
Herbert Marcuse
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is interlorable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
Arthur Miller
...From the first moment of victory, mistrust must be directed no longer against the conquered reactionary parties, but against the workers' previous allies, against the party that wishes to exploit the common victory for itself alone... The workers must put themselves at the command not of the State authority but of the revolutionary community councils which the workers will have managed to get adopted...
from a speech in 1850
Morality, religion, metaphysics, and other ideologies, and their corresponding forms of consciousness, no longer retain therefore their appearance of autonomous existence. They have no history, no development; it is men, who, in developing their material production and their material intercourse, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
The German Ideology, 1846
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence.
from The German Ideology, 1846
When the mass media in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of their government, the result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the result is responsible journalism.
Normon Solomon
We are are the tools and vassals of rich mend 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.
John Swinton, US journalist, in a speech to journalists in New York 12 April 1883
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcolm X
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
George McGovern
Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tom Lehrer
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed - those who are cold and 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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President
The exploitation of man by man and the brutal exploitation of nature are, in fact, one and the same practice. From the moment the market system minimizes the fruits of the earth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labour the market system treats nature as its slave.
Raoul Vaneigem
A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
Ronald Reagan on redwoods, 28 April 1966
Structured around a competitive struggle for accumulation, capitalism's blind unrelenting drive for growth is to the biosphere what a cancerous tumor is to an organism. Capitalism will destroy the ecological life-basis that sustains it just as cancer destroys the organism that sustains it.
Howard Hawkins
Morality - middle-class morality, that is - is for me the immoral, which one must fight. It is the morality that is founded on our most unjust institutions, like religion, fatherland, family, culture - everything that people call "pillars" of society.
Luis Buñuel
Divine morality is based upon two immoral principles: respect for authority and contempt for humanity. Human morality, on the contrary, is based only upon contempt for authority and respect for liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin
Society is like a stew, if you don't keep it stired all the scum settles on the top.
Edward Abbey
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
There is nothing they won't do to raise the standard of boredom.
Guy-Ernest Debord, french situationist
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.
God, Genesis 2:16
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
Jesus Christ, Luke 19:27
Did it ever occur to you that if God wrote the Old Testament and told the Jews to crucify or kill anybody that disagreed with them on religion, and that this God afterward took upon himself flesh and came to Jerusalem, and taught a different religion, and the Jews killed him - did it ever occur to you that he reaped exactly what he had sown?
Robert Ingersoll
When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed and when we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.
Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan independence leader
Men en sak bör man betänka innan man dömer ut talibanerna som monster: Raka av en taliban hans skägg och byt turbanen mot en basebollkeps eller cowboyhatt, och du har en man som skulle smälta väl in i amerikanska mellanvästern - kulturkonservativ, patriotisk, djupt gudfruktig, vänlig och gästfri, men misstänksam mot och okunnig om världen runt omkring honom. Och inte minst redo att när som helst försvara sitt hem och sin familj med vapen i hand.
Gert Holmertz
A three-letter justification for "Murder".
Robert Tefton about God
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
Some people believe themselves very 'marxist' and very 'materialist' when they neglect human factors and only concern themselves with material and economic facts. They accumulate figures, statistics, percentages. They study with extreme precision the deep causes of social phenomena. But because they don't follow with similar precision how these causes are reflected in human consciousness, living reality eludes them. Because they are only interested in material factors, they understand absolutely nothing about how the deprivations endured by the masses are converted into aspirations of a religious type.
Daniel Guérin
All that is needed, is to hammer two facts home into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same, and the other, that socialism is compatible with common decency.
George Orwell
Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.
Adam Smith
The first lesson one learns in Parliament is that the two great parties generally forget their political differences when the just claims of the people threaten their pockets.
Will Crooks
When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
Richard M. Nixon
America: Socializing the risks, Privatizing the profits, Putting business in the democracy, Taking the democracy out of the business.
Christopher Masterjohn
If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
Madeleine Albright
Religious fundamentalists alone are a huge popular grouping in the United States, which resembles pre-industrial societies in that regard. This is a culture in which three-fourths of the population believe in religious miracles, half believe in the devil, 83 percent believe that the Bible is the 'actual' or the inspired word of God, 39 percent believe in the Biblical prediction of Armageddon and 'accept it with a certain fatalism,' a mere 9 percent accept Darwinian evolution while 44 percent believe that 'God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,' and so on. The 'God and Country rally' that opened the national Republican convention is one remarkable illustration, which aroused no little amazement in conservative circles in Europe.
Noam Chomsky
I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are.
George Bush Sr, August 15, 1989, commenting on the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. warship Vincennes, killing 290 passengers
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
George Bernard Shaw
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
Albert Einstein
No matter how remote from these notions the rebellion may be, no matter how destructive and self-destructive it may be appear, no matter how great the distance between the middle-class revolt in the metropoles and the life-and-death struggle of the wretched of the earth - common to them is the depth of the Refusal. It makes them reject the rules of the game that is rigged against them, the ancient strategy of patience and persuasion, the reliance on the Good Will of the Establishment, its false and immoral comforts, its cruel affluence.
Herbert Marcuse
Men should not petition for rights, but take them.
Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man 1791
They couldn't get married; they didn't have a right to an education or a job. But they certainly had a right to kill.
Linda Moore about the mentally retarded soldiers of World War II
We must teach our children... to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.
Bill Clinton, former US President, in 1999 after the Colorado school shootings, but also during the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.
Frederick the Great, King of Prussia
I'm sure there were a bunch of liberal lawyers telling the Jews on the way to Auschwitz that if they didn't make any fuss they'd be out in six months on good behavior.
Jimmy Breslin
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Friere
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
Thank heaven you can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials.
Rick Jones
Americanism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, to bring it up to date, "Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything that's totally vacuous. In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything. That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support out troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people of Iowa.
Of course, there was an issue... The issue was, Do you support their policy? But you don't want people to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for, because nobody knows what it mean
Noam Chomsky
Young Men: The lowest aim in your life is to become a soldier. The good soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong. He never thinks; never reasons; he only obeys. If he is ordered to fire on his fellow citizens, on his friends, oh his neighbours, on his relatives, he obeys without hesitation. If he is ordered to fire down a crowded street when the poor are clamouring for bread, he obeys and sees the grey hairs of age stained with red and the life tide gushing from the breasts of women, feeling neither remorse nor sympathy. If he is ordered off as a firing squad to execute a hero or benefactor, he fires without hesitation, though he knows the bullet will pierce the noblest hear that ever beat in a human beast.
A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. He is not a brute, for brutes only kill in self defence. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistm
Jack London
If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged.
Noam Chomsky
I say one evil empire down... one to go.
Michael Moore, commenting on the fall of the USSR
The war caused by the aggression of the South Vietnamese peasants against the United States.
Noam Chomsky about the Vietnam War
We should declare war on North Vietnam... We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas.
Ronald Reagan, October 1965
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
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