Attitude - Perspective
Hellen Keller: "Security is mostly a superstition. Avoiding danger is no safer then outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."
Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive."
Emma Goldman: "If I cannot dance, I want no part in your revolution. Let's dance!"
Kurt Vonnegut: "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
Victor Frankl: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last set of the human freedoms - to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way."
Capitalism
Bertrand Russell: "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: "The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."
William O. Douglas: "Our upside down welfare state is 'socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.' The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people."
George Bernard Shaw: "Capitalism "is neither eternal nor even very old-established, neither incurable nor even very hard to cure when you have diagnosed it scientifically."
Dom Helder Camara: "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
George Bernard Shaw: "Thus Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best!"
John Maynard Keynes: "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
Noam Chomsky: "the rich and privileged are no more willing to face market discipline than they have been in the past, though they consider it just fine for the general population."
Eugene V. Debs: "We [propose] to destroy the capitalist and save the man. We want a system in which the worker shall get what he produces and the capitalist shall produce what he gets."
Eugene V. Debs: "Let no one charge that socialists have arrayed class against class in this struggle. That has been done long since in the evolution of capitalist society. One class is small and rich and the other large and poor .... One consists of capitalists and the other of workers. These two classes are at war. Every day of peace is at the expense of labor. There can be no peace and good will between these two essentially antagonistic economic classes."
Noam Chomsky, referring to Capitalist societies, stated: "wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on."
Noam Chomsky: "Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level--there's little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."
Character
Thomas Paine: "Character is much easier kept than recovered."
Dag Hamarskjold: "It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character."
Thomas Paine: "Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always a vice."
Marcus Aurelius: "If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it"
Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire: "I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race."
Friedrich Nietzsche: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do."
Jack Kerouac: "But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after it as Ive been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!"
Checks and Balances
Thomas Jefferson: "The purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove."
Thomas Jefferson: "In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Baron Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu: "there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislature and executive. Were it joined to the legislature, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression ... There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals...."
Civil Disobedience
Martin Luther King, Jr.: "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
Louis Brandeis: "If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Good men must not obey the laws too much."
John Locke: "Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers."
Howard Zinn: "the most formidable military machine depends ultimately on the obedience of its soldiers, ... the most powerful corporation becomes helpless when its workers stop working, when its customers refuse to buy its products. The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure - these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power."
Carl G. Jung: "Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right', no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code."
Compassion
Albert Einstein: "The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness"
Martin Luther King: "True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
Albert Einstein: "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to enhance all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Thomas Paine: ""When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners; my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government."
Che Guevara: "One has to have a great dose of humanity, a great dose of the feeling of justice and of truth not to fall into extreme dogmatism, into a cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as motivation."
Mario Cuomo: "To deal effectively with our problems we must understand, accept, and apply one fundamental, indispensable proposition. It is the ancient truth that drove primitive people together to ward off their enemies and wild beasts, to find food and shelter, to raise their children in safety, and eventually to raise up a civilization. Now, in this ever more complex world, we need to accept and apply this basic truth: "that we're all this together, like a family, interconnected and interdependent, and that we cannot afford to revert to a world of 'us against them'. It is the one great idea that is indispensable to realizing our full potential as a people."
George Bernard Shaw: "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity."
Eugene Debs: "while there is a lower class, I am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Eugene Debs: "Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is not inspired by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think of me if I were capable of gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death."
Conservatism
John Kenneth Galbraith: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made."
Abraham Lincoln: "What is conservatism? Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?"
Adlai Stevenson: "I am not even sure what it means when one says that he is a conservative in fiscal affairs and a liberal in human affairs. I assume what it means is that you will strongly recommend the building of a great many schools to accommodate the needs of our children, but not provide the money."
Corporations
Noam Chomsky: "what is called 'capitalism' is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society."
Jim Hightower: "Where did we get the corporate structure? From the jolly Brits, who devised a devilish scheme called 'joint stock companies' during their colonial phase The corporate entity was (and is) a legal fiction, first invented by the crown to assist the barons, merchant traders, and bankers of the day in plundering the wealth of the Empire's colonies ... It was a way to amass the large sums of capital they needed to plunder faraway places, collecting money from investors to finance their plundering, then distributing the booty back to those investors".
Jim Hightower: "The corporate construct is dangerous not only because it can agglomerate an absolutely domineering amount of financial power but also because it allows the owners of the corporation (the shareholders) to profit from its business activities, yet accept no responsibility for any harm done by their companies' business activities. All gain, no pain. The corporation is a legal shield, granting its owners an extraordinary protective privilege that no other businesses are allowed."
Thomas Jefferson: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of the country."
Abraham Lincoln: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, 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 until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war."
Corruption
George Washington: "Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
Abraham Lincoln described politicians as "a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people" and who "are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men."
Erich Fromm: "The lust for power is rooted not in strength, but in weakness."
Louis D. Brandeis: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites every man to become a law unto himself, it invites anarchy."
P.D. Ouspensky: "In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes."
Thomas Paine: "The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."
Voltaire: "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other".
Democracy
Aristotle: "'The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages."
George Orwell: "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
Arundhati Roy: "Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. .... Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism".
Louis Brandeis: "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
John Dewey: "The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the power of pooled and cooperative experience."
Thomas Jefferson: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
Jim Hightower: "Democratic power is never given; it always has to be taken, then aggressively defended, and retaken when it slips from our hands, for the moneyed powers relentlessly press to gain supremacy and assert their private will over the majority."
Dissidence
Eugene Debs: "If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."
Vaclav Havel: "You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
Susan B. Anthony: "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."
Wendell Phillips: "The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense."
H.L. Mencken: "The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
Mark Twain: "Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let them label you as they may."
Krishnamarti: "It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Martin Luther King: "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
Helen Keller: "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."
Diversity
Thomas Szasz: "The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, mono-medicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man."
Karl Popper: "Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
Carl Jung: "The shoe that fits one pinches another. There is no recipe for living that suits all cases."
Thomas Jefferson: "And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?"
Eugene McCarthy: "As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences".
Economic Systems
Abraham Lincoln: "No duty is more imperative in government than the duty it owes the people of furnishing them a sound and uniform currency."
Kim Stanley Robinson: "Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."
Albert Einstein "The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax."
Jacques Roux: "Liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class of men is allowed to condemn another to starvation without any measures being taken against them. And equality is also an empty shell when the rich, by exercising the economic monopolies, have the power of life and death over other members of the community."
Eugene V. Debs "Full opportunity for full development is the unalienable right of all. He who denies it is a tyrant, he who does not demand it a coward; he who is indifferent to it is a slave; he who does not desire it is dead. The earth for all the people! That is the demand."
Kwame Nkrumah: "Political independence, without economic independence, is but an illusion."
John Kenneth Galbraith: "In a rich society, no one should be allowed to suffer from deprivation such as homelessness, starvation, and illness. This ideal is essential, not simply as a matter of human good, but as the price we pay for a measure of domestic tranquility."
Albert Camus: "Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity."
Mahatma Gandhi: "Poverty is the worst form of violence."
Aristotle: "Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."
Egocentrism
Bertrand Russell: "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
Arthur Schopenhauer: "Most men are so thoroughly subjective in that nothing really interests them but themselves. They always think of their own case as soon as any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally, be it ever so remote."
Howard Zinn: "But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world - by a teacher, a writer, anyone - is a judgment."
Mahatma Gandhi: "It is unwise to be too sure of ones own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."
Election Law
Christopher Lasch: "The Lincoln-Douglas debates exemplified the oral tradition at its best. By current standards, Lincoln and Douglas broke every rule of political discourse. They subjected their audiences (which were as large as fifteen thousand on one occasion) to a painstaking analysis of complex issues. They spoke with considerably more candor, in a pungent, colloquial, sometimes racy style, than politicians think prudent today. They took clear positions from which it was difficult to retreat. They conducted themselves as if political leadership carried with it an obligation to clarify issues instead of merely getting elected."
Noam Chomsky: "There is essentially one political party, the business party, with two factions . . . Elections are largely a ritual form. In congressional elections, virtually all incumbents are returned to office, a reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the choices it offers. There is scarcely a pretence that substantive issues are at stake in the presidential campaigns. Articulated programs are hardly more than a device to garner votes, and candidates adjust their messages to their audiences as public relations tacticians advise."
Eugene V. Debs: "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it.
Elitism
George Bernard Shaw: "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
Bertolt Brecht:
"Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand Sacrifice
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of Wonderful times to come
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men"
Noam Chomsky: "it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change."
Niccolo Machiavelli: "A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promises".
Charles de Gaulle: "In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
Henry Kissinger: "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves... I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people"
Che Guevara: "Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel."
C. Wright Mills: "the power elite": "interlocking directorate of moneymen, politicians and military men who shape national policy no matter who is elected."
Ethics
Albert Einstein: "A mans ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and reward after death."
Albert Einstein: "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it."
Albert Schweitzer: "Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil."
Abraham Lincoln: "When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. Thats my religion."
Excellence
Salvador Dali: "The difference between mediocrity and excellence is attention to detail."
Salvador Dali: "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. : "If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself."
Henri Matisse: "It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision- a creative operation requiring an effort."
Albert Einstein: "True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."
Maurits Cornelius Escher: "Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he lacks in most cases is the tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate gnashing of teeth and saying, Although I know it cant be done. "
Federalism
Thomas Jefferson: "Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook [oversee] all details necessary for the good government of the citizens, and the same circumstance, by rendering direction impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste. And I do verily believe, that if the principle were to prevail, of a common law being in force in the United States, (which principle possesses the general [national, or central] government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government,) it would become the most corrupt government on the earth."
Abraham Lincoln: "The maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions, according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to the balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "To bring about government by oligarchy [unlimited political power in the hands of a very small group of persons], masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our national government. The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed."
U Thant: "World Federalists hold before us the vision of a unified mankind living in peace under a just world order... The heart of their program- a world under law - is realistic and attainable."
Albert Einstein: "There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government."
Freedom
John Stuart Mill: "The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
Noam Chomsky: "we can hardly rest comfortably with the assumption that freedom declines as equality - for example, in control over resources and means of production - increases. It may be true that equality is inversely related to the freedom to dispose of and make use of property under the social arrangements of capitalism, but the latter condition is not to be simply identified as 'freedom'".
John Locke: "Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative authority vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man."
C. Wright Mills: "Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose."
Human Nature
Noam Chomsky: "Whether a person who advocates reform or revolution, or stability or return to earlier stages, or simply cultivating one's own garden, takes stand on the grounds that it is 'good for people.' But that judgment is based on some conception of human nature, which a reasonable person will try to make as clear as possible, if only so that it can be evaluated."
Aristotle: "Man is a goal seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals."
George Orwell: "On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not all the time."
Aristotle: "All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire."
Albert Einstein: "Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of social organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate."
Albert Einstein: "Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society."
Mark Twain: "There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce."
Ignorance
Mark Twain: "In religion and politics peoples beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire: "As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities."
Eugene Debs: "When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
Labor
Bertrand Russell: ""Work is of two kinds: "first, altering the position of matter at or near the Earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so."
Abraham Lincoln: "Labor is prior to, and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration."
Big Bill Haywood: "For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it."
Leo Tolstoy: "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."
J. J. Rousseau: "The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one."
Thomas A. Edison: "People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest."
Jimmy Carter: "Every advance in this half-century - Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another- came with the support and leadership of American Labor."
Eugene Debs: "The members of a trades union should be taught that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it."
Lawyers
Plato: "The lawyer has learned how to flatter his master in word and indulge him in deed; but his soul is small and unrighteous ... from the first he has practiced deception and retaliation, and has become stunted and warped. And so he has passed out of youth into manhood, having no soundness in him."
Abraham Lincoln: "Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough." \
Sir Thomas More: "They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession is to disguise matters."
William Shakespeare: "Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where may be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?"
Legal Systems
Hugo Black: "there can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has."
Jack White (labor activist): "You have become blind and deaf to the rights of man to pursue life and happiness, and you have crushed those rights ... Then you tell me to respect the law. I do not. I did violate the law, as I will violate every one of your laws and still come before you and say 'To hell with your courts I know what justice is'."
Mark Twain: "We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
William Shakespeare: "The jury, passing on the prisoner's life; May, in the sworn twelve have a thief or two; Guiltier than him they try."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress."
Bertolt Brecht: " You want justice, but do you want to pay for it? When you go to a butcher you know you have to pay, but you people go to a judge as if you were off to a funeral supper."
Henry David Thoreau: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave state in which a free man abides with honour."
Majority Rule
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights--that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system."
Thomas Jefferson: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."\
Abraham Lincoln: "a majority, held in check by constitutional checks, and limitations is the only true sovereign of a free people Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."
Minimalism
Thomas Jefferson: "A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned- this is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson: "My reading of history has convinced me that most bad government results from too much government."
Thomas Jefferson: "I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
Albert Einstein: "Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
Immanuel Kant: "The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing."
John Stuart Mill: "... every increase of the functions devolving on the government is an increase in its power, both in the form of authority, and still more, in the indirect form of influence. Hence it is no less important in a democratic than in any other government, that all tendency on the part of public authorities to stretch their interference, and assume a power of any sort which can easily be dispensed with, should be regarded with unremitting jealously. Perhaps this is even more important in a democracy than in any other form of political society; because, where public opinion is sovereign, an individual who is oppressed by the sovereign does not find a rival power to which he can appeal for relief".
Misc
Mark Twain: "I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
Samuel Butler: "When you have told someone that you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing is to die at once."
Portugese Proverb: "A house without a dog or a cat is the house of a scoundrel."
Mark Twain: "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
Abraham Lincoln: "It has been my experience that folks with no vices have very few virtues."
Morality
Thomas Jefferson: "No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
John Stuart Mill: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."
Professor John Hospers of Brooklyn College: "we are not responsible for our actions, since we are not responsible for the character out of which those actions spring ... if he has the will power to overcome the effects of an unfortunate early environment, this again is no credit to him; he is just lucky. If energy is available to him in a form in which it can be mobilized for constructive purposes, this is no credit to him, for this too is part of his psychic legacy. Those of us who can discipline ourselves and develop habits of concentration of purpose tend to blame those who cannot, and call them lazy and weak-willed; but what we fail to see is that they literally cannot do what we expect."
Albert Einstein: "The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes."
Noam Chomsky: "As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."
Mohandas Gandhi: "Hate the sin and love the sinner."
Mary Wollstonecraft "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."
Friedrich Nietzche: "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
Booker T. Washington: "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul my making me hate him."
Bertrand Russell: "It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go."
Voltaire: "What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each others folly - that is the first law of nature."
Immanuel Kant: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
Immanuel Kant: "Everyone must admit that if a law is to have moral force, i.e., to be the basis of an obligation, it must carry with it absolute necessity; that, for example, the precept, 'Thou shalt not lie', is not valid for men alone, as if other rational beings had no need to observe it; and so with all the other moral laws properly so called; that, therefore, the basis of obligation must not be sought in the nature of man, or in the circumstances in the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in the conception of pure reason."
Juvenal: "No one becomes depraved in a moment."
Clarence Darrow: "Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance."
Political Systems
C.S. Lewis: "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Louis Brandeis: "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Abraham Lincoln: "I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on the spot than surrender it."
Andrea Dworkin: "The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable."
Howard Zinn: "The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between the conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners." pg 10
Bertrand de Jouvenel: "A society of sheep must in time beget a society of wolves."
Frederick Douglas: "Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Thomas Jefferson: "The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government."
Alexis de Tocqueville: "In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships."
Progress
Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire: "History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes."
H.L. Menken: "Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent."
Henry Miller: "The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive."
Helen Keller: "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
Thomas Jefferson: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times."
Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Good laws lead to the making of better ones, bad ones bring about worse."
John Stuart Mill: "Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments [values] are better than the existing laws."
Propaganda
Noam Chomsky: "much of the information that is misrepresented to the public" "can be traced back to structures of power that have an interest in preventing understanding, for pretty obvious reasons It will exist as long as concentrations of power engender a kind of commissar class to defend them. Since they are usually not very bright, or are bright enough to know that they'd better avoid the arena of fact and argument, they'll turn to misrepresentation, vilification, and other devices that are available to those who know that they'll be protected by the various means available to the powerful. We should understand why all this occurs, and unravel it as best we can."
Howard Zinn: "If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."
Freidrich Nietzsche: "With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: "it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those around them."
Erich Fromm: "From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard; every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve."
Purpose in Life
Albert Einstein: "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile".
Mark Twain: "When one remembers that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
Barry Lopez: "There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
Tao: "I meant, said Iplsore bitterly, what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile? Death thought about it. CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE. "
Albert Einstein: "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
Mark Twain: "It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake."
Helen Keller: "Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world."
Helen Keller: "Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."
Plato: "Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance."
George Bernard Shaw: "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you."
William James: "These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact."
Reason
Mario Cuomo: "I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in fifty years what my father taught me by example in one week."
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed."
Bertrand Russell: "What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."
Aristotle: "It is easy to fly into a passion--anybody can do that--but to be angry with the right person and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way--that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."
George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Albert Einstein, "All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will play in the political field."
Mark Twain: "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
Religion
Mark Twain: "Faith is believing in something you know ain't true."
Norman Mailer said, "we can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil."
Stanley Milgram: "The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."
Galileo Galilei: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
Homer Simpson: "Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're just making him madder and madder."
Clarence Darrow: "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means."
Mohandas Gandhi: "There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
Robert G. Ingersoll: "The whole power of the pulpit has been used for hundreds of years to destroy the confidence of man in himself - to induce him to distrust his own powers of thought, to believe that he was wholly unable to decide any question for himself, and that all human virtue consists in faith and obedience."
Mohandas Gandhi: "Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is."
Pascal Pensees: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity."
Joe Hill:
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die."
Thomas Jefferson: "I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured and fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and terror all over the earth."
Thomas Paine: "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel."
Isaac Asimov: "Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly ..."
Republicanism
Jeremy Belknap (one of the delegates to the convention): "Let it stand as a principle that government originates from the people; but let the people be taught that they are not able to govern themselves."
James Madison: "in a democracy the people exercise the government in person, in a republic they administer it by their representatives."
James Madison: "In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."
James Madison stated that democracy would allow "government to fall into the hands of those whose ability or situation in life does not entitle them to it."
Plato: "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
Chief Sitting Bull: "Hear me people: We now have to deal with another race---small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule."
Revolution
John F. Kennedy: "If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable."
George Orwell: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
Thomas Paine: "The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood."
Thomas Jefferson: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
Malcom X: ""I believe there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those doing the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin."
Martin Luther King, Jr.: "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."
Frederick Douglass: "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
Malcom X, "Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality of justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."
Alexander Berkman: "Do not confound us with the pacifists. We believe in fighting. Aye, we have been fighting all our lives-- fighting injustice, oppression, and tyranny. Almost single handed at that. We are not pacifists. But we want to know what we are fighting for, and we refuse to fight for the enemies and the exploiters of humanity."
Science
Bertolt Brecht: "The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error."
Edgar Allan Poe: "Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of intelligence."
Heinz Pagels: "Science cannot resolve moral conflicts it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts".
Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach: "Whenever two good people disagree over principles, they are both right."
Charles Sanders Peirce: "There is one more thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be."
Thomas Huxley: "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
Solidarity
Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that has."
Howard Zinn: "There is a chance that such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never done - bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money, control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population."
Eugene Debs: "If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results."
Mother Jones: "My friends, it is solidarity of labor we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: "We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing."
Truth
Noam Chomsky: "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them".
Buddha: "Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true [paraphrased]"
Thomas Paine: "He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
Confucious: "To know is to know that you know nothing. Thats the true meaning of knowledge."
Aristotle: "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold."
Aldous Huxley: "To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!"
War
George Washington: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
Dwight Eisenhower said, "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 ... Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Herman Goering: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, 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 greater danger."
Albert Einstein: "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Words
Mark Twain: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug".
George Orwell: "Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."
Karl Popper: "It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood."
Mark Twain: "There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
John Maynard Keynes: "Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I hate quotations - tell me what you know".
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