Ascension and Convergence

The Heritage Foundation is the biggest free-market think tank, "in fact the biggest think tank period" in Washington. It has a budget of $25 million and provides "talking points" to conservative Congressmen who don't have time to do their own research. Heritage is a kind of "grey eminence" behind Congress, and very actively helps direct U.S. politics.

Has the Bush Administration really contemplated wafting oceans of hydrofluorocarbons into the atmosphere to help along global warming? Download the full report and search for "hydrofluorocarbons"

Cracking Down on Fracking by Amy Goodman
"Mike Markham of Colorado has an explosive problem: His tap water catches fire."
Because of war criminal Dickless Cheney and his soulless Halliburton company.

Discover the world's most advanced tool for unlocking intuition

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Not sure about that stuff? Scroll to the bottom of this link and
click on Michael Tsarion and the TRUTH about TIME.

Health Sciences Institute
New information links the Gardasil vaccine to thousands of health complaints
and more than 30 deaths. Before there is one more unnecessary death,
get the facts here: http://www.hsibaltimore.com

“Who gives a flying fuck what the polls say,” he screamed at a recent strategy meeting.
“I’m the President and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know shit.”
[Capitol Hill Blue 8/25/05]

http://projectcensored.org
2009 Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave
Rohnert Park CA 94928
707-664-2500

Obama’s own daughters not getting vaccinated!

HHS Secretary Sebelius says that children are the most susceptible to H1N1 flu, and should be vaccinated against it but on October 8, 2009 it was announced that Obama's daughters have not been vaccinated against the H1N1 flu virus. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says, "The vaccine is not available to them based on their risk."

WTF?? Is Gibby talking about the risk of the vaccine itself? Because that is how I read that sentence. The risk of being killed by the vaccine. Don't blame ya, Brock, we feel the exact same about it. Ya Monsanto slaveboy.

Or, does Gibby mean based on both girls' immume systems being compromised by so much cocaine in their systems? Oh, wait a sec, that was Bush's bitches, sorry. I need to get up to speed, I reckon -- so tell me, why are Osama bin Bama's daughter's immune systems so poor that they can't take the perfectly safe vaccine?

Or... does anyone believe a vaccine would not be made "available" to the President's own children?! Lead by example? Not this President. Elites in government that mandate vaccines for our children should be required to get their own children vaccinated.

Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder!

(Why Karen Midthun is not in that list is beyond me. But I imagine she'll fall as collateral damage with oh so many other criminals. Imagine it with me now, Dear Readers, and we can make it come to pass!)

Dr Karen Midthun
WHO & FDA Whore
Enemy of the People, by the People, and for the People
29B, 1H16
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda MD
301-827-0655

"There is no convincing evidence of serious harm from the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines," said Karen Midthun, MD, deputy director for medicine in the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in the IOM's report in 2004.

"At this time, we do not see where this should prevent them from being able to have their vaccine on the market for next year," said Karen Midthun, deputy director for FDA's CBER division.

"This approval of an additional seasonal influenza vaccine for children provides help in protecting them against influenza," said Karen Midthun, M.D., acting director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Everyone of voting age should read Dreams of My Father. (Don't buy it, get it from the library instead).

From Dreams of My Father: 'I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.'

From Dreams of My Father: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race.'

From Dreams of My Father: 'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.'

From Dreams of My Father: 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.'

From Dreams of My Father: 'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself: the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

And this, from Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.'

Where was Brock REALLY born? Kenya? Hawaii? US law specifically states that the President of the United States MUST have been born in the US, or territorial soil (military base, etc). He STILL has not provided evidence or proof of that. The first Birth Certificate he produced was a forged copy of his sister's birth certificate and the second copy he produced has the registration number blacked out. What is Obama REALLY hiding?

And since the bought-and-paid-for media mouthpieces have a lovefest going with Brock, do you really think they would report this, if it is fact?

FACT is, even his grandmother in Kenya has said that she was present at his birth in Kenya, along with others within his family. In those days, if one parent was a US citizen and gave birth outside the US, in order for the child to be considered a "natural born US citizen" the parent had to have lived in the US for at least 5 years after the age of 14. Since his mother was 18 when he was born, if he was born in Kenya, he is not a natural born citizen.

Also, The Constitution doesn't say "a person born abroad can be pres if both parents are US citizens or, if one parent is US citizen, and the other a US national who lived in US for 1 year". Current US immigration law says that a person born abroad is considered a US natural born citizen if that child was born of 2 US citizen parents and is born on US soil (military base, consulate, etc). The Constitution states "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States."

Barach's Hawaiian birth records, what there is to find anyway, state that his birth was REGISTERED in Hawaii, not necessarily born there. If he truly was born in the US then he should have no problem being able to show a full length copy of his birth certificate which would prove it. The short form that seems to be circulating doesn't qualify in this case, because it doesn't show PLACE of birth, only the recorded registration of birth.

"Barack Obama claims to have been born in Honolulu Aug. 4, 1961," explains Farah. "His entire constitutional claim to the presidency rests on this premise. Yet, he refuses to release a copy of his long-form birth certificate – the only document that could possibly corroborate his claim. Therefore, in the interest of truth, justice and the Constitution, I am making the extraordinary offer to entice someone to come forward with the facts of his birth – whether it took place in Hawaii or elsewhere."

Jeff Tollefson says, "'Hey! Why should it matter where the President of the US is born?? Next time they might insert a North Korean, or an Iraqi born in Frankfurt. Maybe they'll find ~~Obama~~ Osama been Bommin and make him Prez, what does it matter? I just don't understand the big fuss. I mean, whose country do you think this is anyway? Yours?"

Yo!bama! Can you tell us when the next "terrorist" attack is coming, and where? You don't
have a cousin named Marvin too, do ya, in charge of security of the place to be bombed?

"The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission -- founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller -- and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens." Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, PhD, former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werne. Source: November 6, 2001, interview with Michael C. Ruppert, From The Wilderness Publications, 2001

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), 'Democracy in America', Vol. II

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." President James Garfield, opponent of the international banking cartel, assassinated in 1881

http://www.relfe.com l
Six years ago, Americans began eating genetically engineered food. Surprised? That's because no one told you. While other countries require mandatory labeling of these food ingredients, our FDA has decided we don't need to know. A Monsanto official told the New York Times, October 25, 1998, that the corporation should not have to take responsibility for the safety of its food products. "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food," said Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."

This video is about cancer milk, but this is how all news is written.... we hear what that want us to hear. This is a nonpartisan video that shows the lengths some will go to further their agendas. It ends with a Florida judge ruling that the news doesn't need to be true. This video is not doom and gloom or conjecture about what could happen, because it did happen. And it's not just Fox that has these policies.

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." Tom Lehrer

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 500 employees and has the following statistics?

29 have been accused of spousal abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
19 have been accused of writing bad checks
117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting
21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is? It's the 535 members of the United States Congress.
The same group of idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line!

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Fascism," said Mussolini, "should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

"In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell

"The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people." -- Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution

"America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole." -- Bobcat Goldthwaite

"A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment." -- Willis Player

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." -- Robert Frost

"America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization." -- John O'Hara

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." --Will Rogers

"When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty." [Norm Crosby]

"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." [Howard Scott]

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author

"The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p10

"The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"The corporations of America today effectively oversee the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and indeed the presidency itself." -- E.L. Doctorow, The Nation magazine, August 7/14, 2000, p13

"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 at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"Stopping terrorism is simple. Just quit screwing around with other people's countries and the terrorists will go home. But the government of the United States wants to go on screwing around with other people's countries, refuses to stop, indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the United States Government to persist in screwing around with other people's countries, and views the inconvenience, increased tax burden, loss of civil liberties, and even deaths among the American people as just another cost of doing business. -- Michael Rivero

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke, British political writer, 1729-1797

"There are many ways to make the death rate increase." -- former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara in New Solidarity, March 30, 1981.

"In the Middle Ages, the sewage wasn't properly disposed of, but people didn't pay attention to it until the waters of the rivers and the filth rose over the doorsteps. Then they had to. That's what is beginning to happen [in American politics]. It is beginning to rise over the doorsteps. " -- Barbara Tuchman, historian and author

"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'." -- Larry Hardiman

"When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled." -- Michael Ventura

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." -- NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical constitution with a radical bill of rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... What's happened in America today is too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no community structure and no work structure. And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it...." -- President Bill Clinton

"We must teach our children ... to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. " -- President Clinton (after the Colorado school shootings) urging young people not to resort to violence, while he continued NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, killing thousands of innocent civilians, including children.

"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." -- President Bill Clinton

"The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who COUNT the votes do." -- Joseph Stalin

"I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought, What a hell of a waste of a man's life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate's parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life-for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners, and patriotic sayings... We've institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two... It gave us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you and me this very moment. For the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up the world into military districts.... You could argue World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped. Unfortunately, we translate it unchanged to the situation today... I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them." -- Admiral Gene LaRocque

"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction." -- Helen Keller, 1940

"We may not be strong enough to stop wars when the powers that be want them, but at least we are wise and humane enough to take political and moral stands as publicly as possible. This is, after all, the foundation we must build from." -- Leslie Cagan, anti-war activist

"Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead. anthropologist

"The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first.... The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war." Then the few will shout even louder.... Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it... Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies...and each man will be glad of these lies and will study them because they soothe his conscience; and thus he will bye and bye convince himself that the war is just and he will thank God for a better sleep he enjoys by his self-deception." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts,
go forth to battle - be thou near them!
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers
to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields
with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
help us to drown the thunder of the guns
with the shrieks of their wounded,
writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes
with a hurricane of fire;
help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows
with unavailing grief ...
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,
blast their hopes, blight their lives,
protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps,
water their way with their tears,
stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it in the spirit of love,
of Him who is the Source of Love,
and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all
who are sore beset and seek His aid
with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain", 1835-1910
(Published posthumously in Harper's Magazine, 1916)

"Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere? . . . once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few." -- Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch humanist, 1466-1536

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good...and it would spread a lively terror.... " -- Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I

"Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. was part of the crew that sold Saddam Hussein the deadly means to wage war with anthrax germs. That's when the United States wanted the 'Butcher of Baghdad' to use anthrax on Iran." -- Air Force Major Glenn MacDonald, explaining HOW anthrax came to be the biological weapon of choice in the world. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. owns 13% of BioPort Corporation, the only source for Anthrax Vaccine.

"Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway. -- Othal Brand, member of a Texas pesticide review board, on chlordane

"There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." -- Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Iran Contra Hearings

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before he was sentenced to death

"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say that by 'patriotism', I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare - never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship." Erich Fromm (1900-1980), U.S. psychologist. Posted on Information Clearing House Newsletter Feb. 19, 2010

"Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."

"The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display."

"The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth."

"How long would authority exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."

"Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass."

"We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens."

"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others."

"When a child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition."

"The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister."

"The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained."

"The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys." Emma Goldman

"Religion is an invention useful to pursuade men to murder each other for conveniently located lands without having to pay them what the job is worth." -- Michael Rivero

"[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands." -- Howard Zinn, historian

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell, writer

"The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war." -- Albert Einstein

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other." -- Thomas Carlyle

"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." -- Malcolm X in Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

"The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA."" -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the (U.S.) media." -- Noam Chomsky

"As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

"[Middle East oil is] a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." -- U.S. State Department, 1945

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel...Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." --Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983.

"Many Americans want to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear victories in the Third World however achieved. " -- Richard Falk, professor

"Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make." -- David Korten, economist and internationalist

"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular." -- David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian, "Of the First Principles of Government" 1758

"[The Third World War] is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. We [the CIA] are responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official

"... the only way to fully comprehend U.S. policies toward the third world is to posit ... "the threat of a good example." Insurgencies in the third world do not challenge U.S. military security or even, ultimately, investments by U.S. corporations.... What they represent is the possibility that emerging nations may demonstrate by example that the United States may not be the last word in democracy, freedom, and opportunity. That threat is much greater if weighed from the perspective of those who see it in their interest to preserve unchanged the present U.S. economic and political order." -- Frances Moore Lappe', Rachel Shuman, and Kevin Danaher, authors

" ... experience requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same 'common sense.' Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and pentrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human." -- Erich Fromm, 1900-1980, American psychoanalyst and author

"In the post-Cold War era, the United States needs to promote the development of democracy and human rights, not militaries that view their own citizens as the enemy. " -- U.S. Senator Richard Durbin

"Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country." -- author unknown

"... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret." -- Peter Dale Scott, author

"By the later years of the Reagan regime, a preferred nomenclature suited to U.S. interests became standardized for the Third World. In the case of nations to be rolled back (e.g., Nicaragua), governments were called terrorist and the insurgents were labeled democratic. In the case of countries to be supported against "communist" insurgencies (e.g., El Salvador and the Philippines), the governments were called democratic and the insurgents were labeled terrorists." -- from the book Rollback by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

"I ask you, what is the difference between 30 million people dead and 130 million people dead? ... With 30 million dead, the United States can survive ..." -- Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and 'father' of the H-Bomb, describing how the "Star Wars" space-based weapons system might allow the United States to fight and "survive" a nuclear war

"The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it." -- Henry Adams, American historian, 1838-1918

"Since the modern world recognizes only wage earners as "productive" members of society -- housewives, traditional farmers and the elderly suddenly become identified as "unproductive."" -- Helena Norberg-Hodge, anthropologist, speaking about the changes in traditional societies as they modernize

"I was nineteen years old, and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do.... But now I tell my sons, if the government calls, ... to use their own judgment, ... to forget about authority ... to use their own conscience. I wish somebody had told me that before I went to Vietnam." -- a U.S. soldier who had participated in the My Lai massacre, in which a company of American soldiers shot to death women and children by the hundreds in a tiny Vietnamese village

"If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World." -- John Pilger, author

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke, British political writer, 1729-1797

"The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense." -- Catholic priest and human rights activist Daniel Berrigan

"I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours. " -- a Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." -- George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwight and critic, 1856-1950

"Good journalism is being criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners. Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member ..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone." -- Daniel Schorr, journalist

"The press ... traditionally sides with authority and the establishment." -- Sam Donaldson, ABC correspondent

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti, political scientist and author

"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system-however irrational-stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense." -- Edwards, David Burning All Illusions, p203

"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy."-- A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"... the establishment can't admit [that] it is human rights violations that make ... countries attractive to business -- so history has to be fudged, including denial of our support of regimes of terror and the practices that provide favorable climates of investment, and our destabilization of democracies that [don't] meet [the] standard of service to the transnational corporation..." - - Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

"There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state." -- Alexander Cockburn, journalist

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." -- Lawrence Summers World Bank economist and Deputy Secretary of Treasury, in a 1991 internal memorandum

"Communism is an enormously serviceable tool for achieving morally dubious goals under a morally acceptable cover. It is not acceptable to destabilize a country, overthrow its democratically elected government, and institute a reign of terror in order to lower taxes and wages for one's own multinational firms. It is necessary to put forward a higher moral imperative." -- Edward Herman, economist and media analyst

"Coming to grips with ... U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

" ... the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author"The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. ... 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars. " -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"If we continue these policies, to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster, we are going to continue to degrade American life." -- Roger Wilkins

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society -- one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security." -- Michael Lerner, journalist

" ...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

"The United States has to realize it does not own Central America or any other part of the world, and that people have a right to shape their own destiny, to choose the type of government they want. We don't lose Cuba, we don't lose Nicaragua, because they were never ours to lose." -- Sister Ita Ford, one of four U.S. churchwomen slain by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980

" ... the operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant -- they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore ... humanizing forces [become] "threats". " "The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package -- the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity -- must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug." " ... there is a system of terroristic states -- the real terror network -- that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World." -- Edward Herman

"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen aknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." -- Michael Rivero

"Great military peoples have conquered their known world time and time again through the centuries, only to die out in the inevitable ashes of their fire. Well over two thousand years ago, the Chinese philospher, Laotzu, concluded that: "Weapons often turn upon the wielder, An army's harvest is a waste of thorns." We may have to resort to arms in the future, as we have in the past. We may have to use them to prevent atomic war from being launched against us. But let us have the wisdom to realize that the use of force is a sign of weakness on a higher plane, and that a policy based primarily on recourse to arms will sooner or later fail." -- Charles Lindburgh, Of Flight and Life, 1948

"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." -- Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.

"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 at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda." -- General Douglas MacArthur

"We live amidst massive inequality. We don't really care that most people have little power to alter the conditions of their lives. We refuse to acknowledge that the earth is dying and that we are killing it. ... Our unthinking celebration of individual achievement and upward mobility works to damage the life-giving ties of kinship and the bonds of community. ...We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence. " -- Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution

"Can it be believed that the democracy which overthrew the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists." -- Alex de Tocqueville

"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of ... [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." -- Thomas Jefferson

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." -- Thomas Jefferson

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." -- Thomas Jefferson

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress. -- John Adams

"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." -- John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country." -- Andrew Jackson

"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand." -- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) Prime Minister of England

"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." -- Thomas Jefferson

"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself." -- Benjamin Franklin

"No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the national one down through all its subordination's, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best." -- Thomas Jefferson, to Joseph Cabell, 1816

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- Abraham Lincoln

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Goverment, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 1861

"Corporations have been enthroned .... An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed." -- Abraham Lincoln, American president, 1861-1865

"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." -- Howard Scott

"... Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention ... will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p561

"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p562

"Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians." -- Chester Bowles

"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it." -- Dick Cavett

"When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies." -- U.S. Representative Ron Paul

"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p595

"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other." -- Philip Agee, CIA Diary, p597

"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." -- William Greider, journalist and author

"As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the "climate of investment," like the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation -- military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate.... The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property. -- Edward Herman, author

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar- soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans." -- General David Sharp, former US Marine Commandant,1966

"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men" (to point out enemies), its "muscle men" (to destroy enemies), its "brain guys" (to plan war preparations), and a "Big Boss" (supernationalistic capitalism). "It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a memeber of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent more of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for captialism. "I suspected I was just a part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested. "During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents." -- General Smedley Butler, former US Marine Corps Commandant, 1935

"The U.S. public is depoliticized, poorly informed on foreign affairs ... and strongly patriotic in the face of a struggle with "another Hitler". Even though the public is normally averse to war, even with modest propaganda efforts ... the public can be quickly transformed into enthusiastic supporters of war." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic, Z magazine June, 1999

" [T]here seems to be nothing to prevent the transnational corporations taking possession of the planet and subjecting humanity to the dictatorship of capital.... In order to crush any thought of organized resistance to the supporters of the new world order, tremendous police and military forces are being used to establish a doctrine of repression...." -- Christian la Brie, Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris) May 1999, (Transatlantic Wheeling and Dealing)

"One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." -- Aldous Huxley, writer

"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he's our son-of-a-bitch." -- President Franklin Roosevelt, justifying support for Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza

"Many members of her family were killed. She personally saw children around the age of eight being raped, and then [the soldiers] would take their bayonets and make mincemeat out of them. With their guns they would shoot at their faces...." The Army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their stomachs as a mocking, [the woman said]. They would slit the stomach of a pregnant woman and take the child out, as if they were taking eggs out of an iguana. That is what I saw." -- Representative Barbara Mikulski (now a US Senator) relating the story of a peasant woman, a victim of the Mazote massacre in El Salvador in 1981, where a US trained elite battalion killed more than 1,000 people.

"The level of pesticide spraying is the highest in the world, and little concern is shown for the people who live near the cotton fields ... 30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning, death can come within hours, or a longer lasting liver malfunction ... the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala are the highest in the Western world. "It's very simple," explained a cotton planter, "more insecticide means more cotton, fewer insects mean higher profits." In an attack, guerrillas destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; the planes were quickly replaced thanks to the genius of American industry ... and all the pesticide you could ever want, from Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis." -- New York Times, 1977, describing pesticide use in Guatemala under US-supported military dictatoship

"We love your adherence to democratic principle." -- V.P. George Bush to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos

"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." Ambrose Bierce

"President Rios Montt [is] a man of great personal integrity and commitment who wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans, and [is] getting a "bum rap" on human rights." -- President Ronald Reagan praising Guatemala's military dictator in 1982; during the 17 months of Rios Montt's "Christian" campaign (1982-83), 400 villages were destroyed, 10,000-20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 were forced to flee to Mexico

"If justice requires the consent of the governed, then our [U.S.] whole past record of expansion is a crime." -- Henry Cabot Lodge

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people." -- Henry Kissinger commenting on Chile, prior to Augusto Pinochet's U.S.-supported military coup against democratically-elected President Salvador Allende

"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." -- William Greider

"It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it." -- Secretary of State Madelaine Albright talking about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the US embargo of food and medicine

"They are going to arrest us all and execute us for Shell." Major Paul Okuntimo, Rivers State Internal Security Task Force, Nigeria

"Shell's operations are impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence." Ken Saro-Wiwa, after reading a secret Nigerian military memo - May 1994. He was executed in 1995.

"Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid -- it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. That Army isn't going to fight the Russians. It's planning to fight the Iranian people." -- Senator Hubert Humphrey

"The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home.... We shall lose the war after we have won it." -- Marilyn Young, historian, talking about US government values and priorities

"A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonels, captains, corporals, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart." -- Henry David Thoreau, in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience"

"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. " -- C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite (book)

"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author

"America's inability to come to terms with revolutionary change in the The Third World...has created our biggest international problems in the postwar era. But the root of the problem is not, as many Americans persist in believing, the relentless spread of communism. Rather, it is our own difficulty in understanding that Third World revolutions are primarily nationalist, not communist. Nationalism, not capitalism or communism, is the dominant political force in the modern world. You might think that revolutionary nationalism and the desire for self-determination would be relatively easy for Americans - the first successful revolutionaries to win their independence - to understand. But instead we have been dumbfounded when other peoples have tried to pursue the goals of our own revolution two centuries ago.... " -- Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, on the shortsightedness of 'rollback' as our foreign policy doctrine

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." -- Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist

"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past." -- Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

"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." -- Howard Zinn, historian and author

"There is ...a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, author, and US media and foreign policy critic

"The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people." -- Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution

"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be 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, in its annual report on U.S. military aid and human rights

"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." -- Bertrand Russell, philosopher - "Roads to Freedom"

"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 intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." -- Arthur Miller playwrite

"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness." -- George Orwell, author of the book "1984"

"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change." -- David Barsamian, journalist and publisher

"The richest plum... was that we took over the publication of all school materials, and therefore could mold public opinion to suit our purposes. The people are only stupid pigs that grunt and squeal the chants we give them... truth or lies. There is no silent majority; the only thing that exists is an unthinking majority and unthinking they will remain... their escape from our rigorous service is the opiate of the entertainment industry." -- Harold W. Rosenthal, former administrative assistant to NY Senator Jacob Javits.

"When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq, I thought to myself, 'What will we tell our children in fifty years when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying.'" -- Mairead McGuire, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Northern Ireland

"How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]." -- Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General and human rights activist

"The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy. " -- Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General

"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire-"Here is $1,000." What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, "Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000." What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe." -- Janice Fine, Dollars and Sense magazine, July / August 2000, p21

"To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think." -- C. Wright Mills - The Power Elite (book) "

"It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture." -- Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Patriotism, like religion, meets people's need for something greater to which their individual lives can be anchored ... America's state religion, [is] patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder or rape." -- William Blum, author of Killing Hope

"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate." -- Jeremy Brecher, historian and author

"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number." -- Arnold Toynbee, historian, 1961

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -- William Blum, Rogue State, p93

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." -- William Blum, Rogue State

"There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. ... they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that." -- Congressman Otis Pike, 1975, on why a congressional report about US covert actions around the world should not be revealed to Americans - from the book Rogue State by William Blum, p9

"... our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishmen ... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." -- William Blum, from the book Rogue State, p7

We spend over $4,000 per capita on personal health care, about twice as much as Canada and the European countries (which cover all their citizens), and the gap is growing. Why is our system such a money sink? Not because our population is older or sicker. All the Western countries have aging populations vulnerable to nearly the same illnesses at roughly the same rates, and ours is actually younger than most. Nor is the reason that we get better outcomes. By all the usual measures of health-life expectancy, infant mortality, childhood immunization rate- we do worse than most Western countries. The only plausible explanation is how health care is financed and delivered. The American health care system is staggeringly wasteful and inflationary. The United States is unique in treating health care as a market commodity distributed according to the ability to pay instead of as a social good distributed according to medical need." -- American Prospect magazine, Nov 6, 2000, p25

"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." -- Henry Kissinger, commenting on the US sellout of the Kurds in Iraq in 1975

"Much of our foreign policy is driven by insatiable corporate pressures to sell military hardware to both the Defense Department and directly to foreign dictators. This happens even if it goes against the interests of our country, taxpayers and the principle of prudently allocated public budgets."
"Fifty years after World War II, tens of thousands of our troops are still in Europe and East Asia, defending prosperous nation allies who are fully capable of defending themselves against non-existent enemies. Yet, useless massive weapons systems remain on the drawing boards to further mortgage our fiscal future and drain money and talent from long overdue civilian projects."

"President Bush declared the end of the Cold War 10 years ago and we still have a Cold War budget. We still have a budget that's going over $300 billion as if we still have enemies called the Soviet Union. When are we going to demobilize? What about the peace dividend?" -- Ralph Nader, Friends Committee on National Legislation newsletter, September 2000

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas." -- Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist - RESIST newsletter, September 2000, p4

"We now live in a state of permanent war - a global arms industry, apparently the largest single international business, must have its products used up so more can be sold. There must be profits for the capitalists and jobs for the proles... Are we not still in Caligula's Rome?" -- David Watson, New Internationalist magazine, May 2000, p35

"The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they ought to run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't understand the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country if they could spare the time. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country." -- The Nation magazine

"Get some new lawyers" -- US Secretary of State Madeline Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal under international law

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism." -- Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran, presently bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL., from The National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 2, 1998

"Terrorism has become a sort of screen created since the end of the Cold War by policymakers in Washington ... It is fabricated to keep the population afraid and insecure, and to justify what the United States wishes to do globally." -- Edward Said, Palestinian activist and author, International Socialist Review, Aug/Sep 2001, p30

"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe." -- A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate

"In feudal times, kings and lords held power through divine right. To challenge their authority was to oppose God, a heresy worthy of death. Now enlightened, we view such notions as foolish. Yet the divine right of yore has been replaced by a pantheon of free market verities whose lock on popular thought is so strong that heresy can be kept in check through ridicule." -- Joel Bleifuss, In These Times magazine, September 2001, p1

"Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"Powerful people in the American ruling class fear democracy." -- Tim Robbins, actor and progressive activist, The Nation, August 6/13, 2001, p25

"America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power. ... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way." -- Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, p15

"...a number of financial and industrial figures of World War II and several members of the government served the cause of money before the cause of patriotism. While aiding the United States' war effort, they also aided Nazi Germany's. " -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiii

"... several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G. Farben, the colossal Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz." -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiv

"The tycoons were linked by an ideology: the ideology of Business as Usual. Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought a common future in fascist domination regardless of which world leader might further that ambition." -- Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983, pxiv

"What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?" -- Charles Higham, researcher, about U.S.-Nazi collaboration during WWII

"Gerhart Riegner, a German Jew, had fled to France, then Switzerland, in 1933. In July 1942, Riegner, who manned a "listening post" in Switzerland, learned of Nazi plans for the Holocaust. On August 8, 1942, he sent a telegram through a friend at the U.S. consulate detailing Hitler's "final solution" -- a scheme to deport Jews to camps in Eastern Europe and exterminate them. The warning was ignored until January 1944, when President Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board. That was too late: an estimated six million Jews were gassed or worked to death in the concentration camps. "Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of disaster and horror to the free world and no one believed me," Riegner wrote in his memoirs. As a lawyer after the war, he worked to improve relations between the Vatican and Israel, and was the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress from 1965 to 1983. He also received the Legion of Honor from France in 1987. He died December 3 in Geneva at age 90."
SUBSCRIPTIONS to "This is True" are FREE. Just send a blank message to join-this-is-true@lyris.net or see our web site. Published weekly by
Freelance Communications, PO Box 17326, Boulder CO 80308 USA since 1994 (ISSN 1521-1932). TRUE is available to newspapers as a regular feature column. "This is True" is a registered trademark.

"If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realization that the New World Order, means we are all to be managed and not represented." -- Tony Benn, British Labour Party member of Parliament - CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001, p43

"All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the suppression of the internet is really aimed at suppressing knowledge of the radical politic alternatives that are now available." -- Tony Benn, British Labour Party member of Parliament - CovertAction Quarterly, April / June 2001, p43

"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p96

"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." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p68

"The Pentagon has a fantastic budget that enables it to dream of putting down the much-needed revolutions which will arise in Peru, in the Philippines, and in other benighted countries." William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p41

"The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars." -- William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion, 1969, p10

"Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies." -- Vandana Shiva, The Progressive magazine, April 2001, p44

"We no longer have senators and congressmen who represent our interests. The great project of America has been hijacked by big corporations and the super rich." -- Doris "Granny D" Haddock

"The corporations of America today effectively oversee the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and indeed the presidency itself." -- E.L. Doctorow, The Nation magazine, August 7/14, 2000, p13

"War is the biggest business in America." -- Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney, prosecutor in the 1967 JFK assassination conspiracy trial - from his jury summation in the Oliver Stone movie JFK

"The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy." -- John le Carre', The Nation magazine, April 9, 2001, p11

"Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders." -- John le Carre', The Nation magazine, April 9, 2001, p13

"Leaders symbolize what the country stands for. As corruption becomes routine in Washington in both parties, it trickles down as a corrupting influence in everyone's lives... Democracy is the ultimate casualty, and the sapping of democratic life is the most serious contribution of corporate ascendancy to our spiritual decline. As democracy ebbs, Americans retreat into private cocoons, feeling helpless to make a difference... In a democracy, civic participation and the belief in one's ability to contribute to the common good is the most important guarantor of public morality. When that belief fades, so too does the vision of the common good itself." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p317

"Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p250

"There is no free lunch for the creature comforts delivered by the corporation. The ravaging of nature, the erosion of economic security, the destabilization of the family, the commercialization of all human relationships, the corruption of democracy, and the dissipation of spiritual meaning in the face of rampant materialism - these are all part of the cost of the corporate system as we know it. And they add up to a very high price to pay for the bounty of the great American shopping mall." -- Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, p178

"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport." -- Barbara Jordan, former U.S. Congresswoman

"We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution ... And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food." -- Ralph Nader, Dollars and Sense magazine, Nov/Dec 2000, p12

"We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories." -- Cecil Rhodes, "founder" of Rhodesia

"It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place. " -- Hazel Henderson, economist

"The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.'' -- Adolf Hitler

``The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility.'' -- George H. W. Bush

"As U.S. involvement in Colombia escalates, the situation looks more and more like Vietnam ..." -- The Progressive magazine, July 2001, p8

"The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Martin Luther King is the most notorious liar in the country." -- J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI 1924-1972

"Our loyalties must transend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective." -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global system is harmonizing standards across country after country - down toward the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people." -- David Korten, economist and internationalist

"We, the people of the world, will mobilize the forces of transnational civil society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing we are forging our own instruments and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs." -- "The People's Earth Declaration, UNCED NGO Forum

"True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress?" -- Chief Luther Standing Bear, 1933

"The white race is the cancer of history. It is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.." -- Susan Sontag, American novelist (1933- )

"It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners." -- Albert Camus, French writer and thinker, 1913-1960

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me." -- Martin Niemoller, German anti-Nazi pastor during World War II

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." -- Winston Churchill

"Truth certainly exists. But it is very hard to put together. It's always an assembled truth. Truth must be assembled." -- Heinrich Bolk

"A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." Dresden James

"Even when all the experts agree, they may well be mistaken." -- Bertrand Russell

"What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man." -- Ralph G. Ingersoll

"In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives." -- Albert Schweitzer

"Indifference will not wreck a man's life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run." -- Bliss Carman

“It’s not my job to express my opinions. I obviously have my private views and will continue to have them. But I don’t think you’ll ever know what they are on air. I’m committed to that.” – George Stephanopoulos, St. Petersburg Times 7-25-02

"Have you ever fed your pocket and starved your soul?" -- Ivana Santilli, Too Deep

"The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race." -- Don Marquis (1879 - 1937)

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw

"If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic." -- Hazel Henderson

"Everybody can be great ... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker

"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men (plus a few women). This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order. A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment — the ruling class — is not supposed to be discussed." -- Arthur S. Miller, George Washington University Professor of Law

"The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people's lives for personal gains." -- Michael Rivero

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do." Samuel P. Huntington (04/18/1927-12/24/2008), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

"The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place." -- Edwin Feulner, Founder and President of the Heritage Foundation

"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else." -- P. J. O'Rourke, US political commentator

"The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch." Warren Rudman (1930- ) US Senator (R-NH)

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." -- Lord Acton, i.e. John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham

"Power corrupts. But it does more than that. Power attracts the corrupt, then corrupts them further." -- Don Matthews (1939- ), former head coach of several teams in the Canadian Football League

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." -- Ayn Rand (02/02/1905-03/06/1982), The Fountainhead

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill." -- Albert Camus, The Plague

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -- Winston Churchill

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." -- George Bernard Shaw

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money." -- G. Gordon Liddy

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -- James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)]

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." -- Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." Will Rogers

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!" P.J. O'Rourke

"In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." -- Voltaire (1764)

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!" -- Pericles (430 B.C.)

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." --Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." -- Ronald Reagan

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."-- Winston Churchill

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." -- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

"There is no distinctly native American criminal class...save Congress." -- Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." -- Edward Langley, Artist

"How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? ...he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." -- Henry David Thoreau, in 'Civil Disobedience', 1848

"Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are...the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ..." William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice

"Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society." -- Francis Wright in a lecture 1829.

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself." -- Justice Potter Stewart (1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice

"The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech." -- Anthony Kennedy, U. S. Supreme Court Justice

"Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure." -- Bertrand Russell

"If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." -- George Bernard Shaw

"The enemy will not appear among us as an enemy. He will appear as one who wishes to save us from disaster." -- Jozsef Mindszenty

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so." -- Robert A. Heinlein

"Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you." -- Stephen Vizinczey

"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." -- Niccolo Machiavelli

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military." -- William S. Burroughs

"A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims." -- Ayn Rand

"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." -- Mike Rivero

"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [as television]." -- Fred W. Friendly, former president of CBS News

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power - because they control the minds of the masses." -- Malcolm X

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." -- Confucius

"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children." Howard Zinn. 08-24-1924-01-27-2010

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"All war will permanently come to an end when parents start loving
their sons and daughters more than they love the state." Anonymous

Called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, "What wine goes best with an M-16?"
The guy who answered did his best to be helpful: "That depends. What are you smoking?"

WE A-SEE-L-YOU: Mayor Stephen P. Laffey of Cranston, R.I., says he did nothing improper when he hired a private detective to make videos of city employees sleeping on the job. "That's a public building and there's not a reasonable expectation to privacy there," the mayor said after being criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union. "There is no civil liberty to sleep on the job." (Providence Journal) ...Well that's
certainly going to be a surprise to a lot of people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS to "This is True" are FREE. Just send a blank message to join-this-is-true@lyris.net or see our web site. Published weekly by ThisIsTrue.Inc, PO Box 668, Ridgway CO 81432 USA since 1994 (ISSN 1521-1932). TRUE is available to newspapers as a regular feature column. "This is True" is a registered trademark.

(click image to see your tax dollars hard at work [FDA] murdering people and tearing up families)

See also "The Yes Men Fix the World"
"...a little imagination can go a long way towards vanquishing the Cult of Greed.
Who knew fixing the world could be so much fun?"

"They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate.
Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business
conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways - basically
doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world."