/archive
-quotes

• "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." --a U.S. battalion commander in Iraq, quoted in the New York Times, December 7, 2003.
• "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."--Kurt Vonnegut
• "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -- William James
• "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious" -- George Orwell, 1984
• "Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent." --Napolean Bonaparte
• “True education is to learn how to think, not what to think.”--Krishnamurti
• "I could make more difference with a single bullet than you could with a million protesters." --Drew Padgett
• "A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." --Segal's Law
• "[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.' "--Robert Anton Wilson
• "So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion." --Noam Chomsky.
• "We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of NOW. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. THIS IS A TIME FOR VIGOROUS AND POSITIVE ACTION."-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
• "I don't know if they're happy to see us... I think they're happy because they're carting away refrigerators and TVs." -Marine Colonel John Toolan on the looting in Baghdad.
• "Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence." -Martin Luther King Jr. April 3, 1968
• "At a decisive time for both the country and the media, the US television companies caved in to Government pressure... It was a powerful insight into the enormous sway that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon exert over the media's coverage of the Iraq war. All stations that morning were in intense competition for Mr. Rumsfeld and other key military figures to appear." --Marian Wilkinson of the Melbourne Age.
• "All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." --Edwin Burke
• "Though he has attempted to separate the terrorists from their religion, Mr. Bush invokes his own faith in his call to 'disarm' (the preferred euphemism for attack) Iraq. Having identified Saddam Hussein as evil, it only remains to remove him to achieve good. If this seems a simple-minded solution to a complex problem, it's because it is. That's the beauty of dividing the world into two camps: us and the evildoers. All ambiguity and moral qualms evaporate." -Maryland Writer Gordon Livingston
• "Back at the monument grounds at day's end, one protester spotted [DC Chief of Police] Ramsey and yelled: 'Why don't you arrest that guy in the White House? He's a criminal.'
  Ramsey jokingly responded: 'That's not my jurisdiction.' "
  --Washington Post article on the March 15th Anti-War March
• "There can't be a War on Terror. It's a logical impossibility. The US is one of the leading terrorist states in the world. The guys who are in charge right now were all condemned for terrorism by the World Court. They would have been condemned by the U.N. Security Council except they vetoed the resolution, with Britain abstaining of course. These guys can't be conducting a war on terror. It's just out of the question. They declared a war on terror 20 years ago and we know what they did. They destroyed Central America. They killed a million and a half people in southern Africa. We can go on through the list. So there's no 'War on Terror'." -Noam Chomsky
• "I agree that Saddam Hussein is a great danger to everyone within his reach, just as he was in the 1980s, when his worst crimes were committed. It is, however, elementary logic that that cannot be the reason why the U.S. and Britain are opposing him. His war crimes were committed with the strong support of the United States and Britain, even after the invasion of Kuwait. Furthermore, the United States turned immediately to direct support for Saddam Hussein in March 1991, when he suppressed an uprising in the South that might have overthrown his rule." -Noam Chomsky on war with Iraq
• "Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness." -Leon Trotsky
  
• "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own." --Bertrand Russel
• "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• "We have tried militarism, and it has failed the human race in every way imaginable." --Unknown
• "America to me is a society, a culture. America is my home; if someone were to rob that culture from me, then perhaps there would be reason to resist. I will not die, however, to defend the honor of the government."--Unknown
• "In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else." --H.P Lovecraft
• "In Iraq, though Westerns prefer a different story, they see that US policy in the past ten years has devastated the civilian society while strengthening Saddam Hussein-- who, as they know, the US strongly supported through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds in 1988. When bin Laden makes these points in the broadcasts throughout the region, his audience understands, even those who despise him..." --Noam Chomsky
• "Liberties are not given, they are taken." --Aldous Huxley
• "We all know that Jesus Christ, Son of God, had a vast collection of super powers at his disposal. These super powers enabled him to walk the Earth solving problems and generally raising hell for the establishment. He was kind of like an olden day Michael Knight, except without a talking car sidekick." --SomethingAwful.com
• "Take what you have and give it to the poor." --Attributed to some longhair commie freak.
• "I learned there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've brought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me." --Dr. Seuss
• "Do, or do not. There is no try." --Yoda
• "Life should not be too closely regulated or too methodical, our impulses, when not positively destructive or injurious to others, ought if possible to have free play; there should be room for adventure." --Bertrand Russel, from What I Believe
• "But I do not believe that we can decide what sort of conduct is right or wrong except by reference to it's probable consequences. ...Outside human desires there is no moral standard." --Bertrand Russel, from What I Believe
• "A certain percentage of children have the habit of thinking; one of the aims of education is to cure them of this habit." --Bertrand Russel, from What I Believe
• Yoda Loves Me -- sticker from Unamerican.com
• What Would Ozzy Do? -- sticker from Unamerican.com
• "Records can be destroyed if they do not suit the prejudices of ruling cliques, lost if they become incomprehensible, distorted if a copyist wishes to impose a new meaning upon them, misunderstood if we lack the information to interpret them. The past is like a huge library, mostly fiction." --Henry Ford
• "The Earth isn't dying, it's being killed. These people have names and addresses." -- Theodore Kazcinsky (the Unabomber)
• "To help the American settlers more effectively commit genocide against mother nature, the .45 Long Colt was invented in 1873 as both a revolver and a rifle. This gave Americans the "Freedom of Choice" to decide whether to kill somebody with a handgun or rifle, the same Freedom of Choice that today allows us to either kill our baby via abortion or kill our baby by letting it grow up in a country that gives Jerry Falwell public airtime." --SomethingAwful.com
• "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you." (2 Corinthians 6:14-17).
• "Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds" (2 John 1:9-11).
• "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
• "If we have you use force, it is because we are America." --Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
• "The most hopelessly foolish man is one who is not aware he is wise." --Isaac Asimov
• "...the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude that produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices." --Bertrand Russell