Quotes and Wisdoms

[Ocean Breeze]

"If you had only known the man you were trying to kill, you would have risked your life, to save his." Harry Pope, ww2 , - Pacific USS LSM 41, 1944 - Occupied Japan, 1950

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Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! : Stephen Decatur

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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. : William Shakespeare

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Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty: George Washington

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All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it: Alexis de Tocqueville

 

[Ocean Breeze]

I have seen men march to the wars, and then I have watched their homeward tread, And they brought back bodies of living men, But their eyes were cold and dead: Edmund Vance Cooke

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When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart." : Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom." : Robert Frost

 

[Ocean Breeze]

“So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

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“A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire — desire for excessive wealth, for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own degradation.”Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

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"Find out just what people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." : Frederick Douglass, African-American slave, and later abolitionist.

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"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." : Samuel P. Huntington

 

[Ocean Breeze]

There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom- freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement: Eric Hoffer

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"I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac." Eric Hoffer, Speaking on Germany - "The True Believer," http://www.erichoffer.net/

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Beat me with the truth, don't torture me with lies: Author - Unknown

re: second in this astute batch:

One can hardly believe that a most gifted , educated nation --blah blah......is surrendering its free will into the hands of the maniac ( in regular folk type clothing) States side......as we speak.

Again .......the abuse of power and the use of fear tactics.....and a "maniac" rules as he wishes. ......or near as such.

brings up the issue of "believers" vs thinkers/analysts.....again. Believers are FOLLOWERS... Thinkers are not.

 

[Haggis McBagpipe]

One of my all-time favourites (hope I haven't already posted it in this thread, if so, oops):

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adam

 

[Ocean Breeze]

It is part of the moral tragedy with which we are dealing that words like "democracy," "freedom," "rights," "justice," which have so often inspired heroism and have led men to give their lives for things which make life worthwhile, can also become a trap, the means of destroying the very things men desire to uphold. Sir Norman Angell (1874 - 1967), 1956.

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"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless." : U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 - (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) - Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

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They (corporations) cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls: Lord Edward Coke

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criminal, n. A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation: Howard Scott

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[Ocean Breeze]

When it comes to things that science doesn’t know, 'God is not an explanation.'

 

[Ocean Breeze]

"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

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"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.": Noam Chomsky

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[JomZ]

George Bernard Shaw's "Really Make You Think" Quotes:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

"That's not really a number I'm terribly interested in.": General Colin Powell, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on being asked his assessment of Iraqi military and civilian casualties, April 1991

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Lesley Stahl: "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. & — and you know, is the price worth it?"

Madeline Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it."

Former U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright, responding to reporter Lesley Stahl as to whether the over half a million Iraqi children killed by the UN sanctions against Iraq were "worth it." CBS May 11, 1996

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In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments : Napoleon Bonaparte : French Emperor (1769-1821)

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No government which governs by the use of force can survive except by force. There is no going back because force begets force and the perpetrators of crimes live in fear that they might become victims in their turn." : Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo - Reconciliation Speech of 24/2/99 at St Mary's Cathedral Hall, Sydney, NSW

 

[Ocean Breeze]

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men: George Orwell

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They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening : George Orwell

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Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind: George Orwell

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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

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive: Henry Steele Commager - (1902-1998) Historian and author

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There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory: Ernesto Che Guevara

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Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace....They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. Eugene V. Debs

 

[Ocean Breeze]

All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing: Dwight Eisenhower - Source: Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Bush and America's Willing Executioners would be Guilty at Nuremberg, The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), 3/2/03

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A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain: Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924)

 

[Ocean Breeze]

The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation.

They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments.

History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."

Leo Tolstoy -- Source: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence (Signet Books, 1968), pp. 238-239.

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"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich." -- Congressman Charles B. Rangel - 09/02/05

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[Ocean Breeze]

Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve.: Eric Fromm

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In the struggle of Good against Evil, it's always the people who get killed.: Eduardo Galeano

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"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.": Bishop Desmond Tutu -(1931- ) Nobel Prize for Peace 1984

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"It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.": Leo Buscaglia, author and university professor (1924-1998)


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[peapod]

"So many of the people in the arena here,
you know, were underprivileged anyway so this
(she chuckled) - this is working very well for them."

Barbara Bush, chuckling at the misery of poor evacuees from new
orleans

 

[Neodim]

Great quotes:
Quotations about Patriotism
http://mindprod.com/politics/patriotism.html

 

[Ocean Breeze]

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"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable." : U.S. historian Howard Zinn, 1993

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You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it: Malcolm X

 

[Reverend Blair]

"You were pinnin' her when you should've been shit-hookin.'" Brent, examaning one of my more spectaclar visits with the ditch.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

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"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." : Texas Governor George W. Bush, April 9, 1999, on the US intervention in Kosovo

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Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

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"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they’re part of the crime.": Olavo de Cavarlho