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Nya citat 2005-07-23
There are instances where it is in the best interests of the nation not to vote the will of the people.
Ex-Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill, Jr., on why Congress gave itself a pay raise without voting on the record for the raise 
I think, the economic logic hind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
Lawrence Summers, chief economist for the World Bank, in an internal memo in December 1991 advocating the migration of "the dirty industries" to less-developed countries
The right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.
Howard Pyle, aide to President Dwight Eisenhower, commenting on the unemployment situation in Detroit
I think that the free-enterprise system is absolutely too important to be left to the voluntary action of the marketplace.
Congressman Richard Kelly (R-Fla.)
My family worked for everything we had. We even have a deed from the King of England for property in South Carolina. Now these jerks come along and try to give it to the Communists.
Martha Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell
I desire the Poles carnally.
President Jimmy Carter's mistranslation in a 1977 speech in Poland
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil ... to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
General Douglas MacArthur, speaking of large Pentagon budgets, 1957
For 50 years, we equipped our football team, practiced five days a week and never played a game. We had a clear enemy with demonstrable qualities, and we had scouted them out. [Now] we will have to practice day in and day out without knowing anything about the other team. We won't have his playhook, we won't know where the stadium is, or how many guys he will have on the field. That is very distressing to the military establishment, especially when you are trying to justify the existence of your organization and your systems.
Col. Dennis Long, director of "total armor force readiness" at Fort Knox, 1992
Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially 'out of control' can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within he minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.
A US Strategic Command internal study from 1995, "Essentials of Post-Cold Deterrence", brought to light in 1998
When you see one redwood, you've seen them all.
President Ronald Reagan
A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
President Ronald Reagan
I don't believe a tree is a tree and if you've seen one you've seen them all.
President Ronald Reagan
It [unemployment insurance] provides prepaid vacations for a segment of our country which has made it a way of life.
President Ronald Reagan
The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.
Sholom Aleichem
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
George Bernard Shaw
We're finally going to wrassle to the ground this giant orgasm that is just ut of control.
Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini on a balanced budget amendment
I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.
Pierre Auguste Renoir, French Impressionist painter and sculptor
There has been no exclusion. We have simply excluded all the women.
Nicolas Romanoff, descendant of last Czar of Russia Nicholas II, on the meeting to form a family foundation
The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.
Henry David Thoreau
The rich aren't like us; they pay less taxes.
Peter De Vries
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
Jean Anouilh
A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be an the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right.
George Bush Sr, 1992
I applaud President Nixon's comprehensive statement which clearly demonstrates again that the President was not involved with the Watergate matter.
George Bush Sr, prior to President Nixon's realization that maybe he was involved after all
Oh, they think it is better not to know. There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. You see, this country went through an awful trauma with Watergate. But even then, all they were asked to believe was that their president had been a bad person. In this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that.
Congressman Otis Pike in 1975, on why very few congressmen used their right to read the complete Pike report on covert actions in the history of U.S. foreign policy
In medieval times he would have been called Zbigniew the Terrible.
William Blum on Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser
...in a foreign policy establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with.
William Blum
Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
A U.S. Department of Defense study in 1997
From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes.
William Blum
...only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S.
James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, advocating the invasion of Iraq by arguing that the Arab public went silent after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing nothing to repair he damage.
William Blum, in the foreword to his book "Rogue State"
Well, there is just not one iota of truth in this. It's just not so in any way, shape or form.
Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, in 1964, about US involvement in the overthrow of the government of Brazil
The President doesn't want any yes-men and yes-women around him. When he says no, we all say no.
Elizabeth Dole, then assistant for public liaison to President Reagan, later Secretary of Labor under President Bush
If a third or more of our population were killed in an attack (a conservative estimate by the standards of the Rand Corporation's "Study of Nonmilitary Defense") a stronger estate tax would have a tremendous revenue potential.
From a 1963 Federal Reserve System planning document
[After a nuclear attack] ... so far as the balance of payments is concerned, our results show exports consistently exceeding imports by amounts varying from about 150 to 200 percent.
Two economists speaking at a Fort Monroe, Virginia, seminar sponsored Civil Defense in 1967
Nobody can influence me. Nobody at all. And a woman still less.
The ex-Shah of Iran
We believe we can literally 'kill them with kindness', moving our guns forward in a seizure of demented charity. It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations etter get behind their bunkers.
Garry Wills
- The question I have, is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should I they be as big news as they've been?
- No. Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.
Fox Network host talking to a guest from National Public Radio about the coverage of the Afghanistan bombings
What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.
David Lawrence, editor of "US News & World Report", February 1966
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.
Senior Pentagon official on reasons why United States military censored footage showing Iraqi soldiers sliced in two by U.S. helicopter fire
This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings ... to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty.
US Army Chief of Staff report on the invasion of Russia in 1918 to 1920
DO NOT USE photos on Page lA showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like.
Memo circulated at the Panama City, Florida News Herald
[It] seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.
CNN chairman advising the news staff during the bombing of Afghanistan
...the people there are dead because we wanted them dead
Pentagon official, talking about an attack on the village Chowkar-Karez in Afghanistan that killed 93 civilians.
I'm an American, and I'm an American reporter. And yes, when there's combat nvolving Americans, you can criticize me if you must, damn me if you must, but I'm always pulling for us to win.
Dan Rather, CBS Evening News anchor
This is not a conventional war. We have to forget propriety.
Colonel Robert A. Koob, tentative head of jury in the Sergeant Charles E. Hutto case. Hutto was accuse of assault in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.
We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers — women and children and farmers and housewives — in those villages around Beirut...
Jimmy Carter
...primitive peoples with lavagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence.
David Lawrence, editor of "US News & World Report", 1966
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, in 1998 on the military aid to Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan
[The bombing will continue] until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed.
Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British Defense Staff, on the bombing of Afghanistan
How can they have the arrogance to dictate to us where we should go or which countries should be our friends? Gadhafi is my friend. He supported us when we were alone and when those who tried to prevent my visit here today were our enemies. They have no morals. We cannot accept that a state assumes the role of the world's policeman.
Nelson Mandela, 1997
Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to he displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.
Amnesty International, 1996
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