Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
--Winston Churchill
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler
it would be if men died for ideas that were true.
--H.L. Mencken,
1919
It is all too obvious that our talk of 'defending democracy' is nonsense
while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child
shall or shall not get the education it deserves.
--George Orwell, The
Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
It is no easy matter to make him obey, who has no wish to command.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to
shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the
dead.
--Arundhati Roy
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospital dying
of nothing.
--Redd Foxx quoted in the Columbus Dispatch
Reality is only an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
--Albert Einstein, quoted in the Hartford Courant
It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. --Mark Twain, quoted in the New York Post
I am not young enough to know everything.
--Oscar Wilde, quoted in The Montreal Gazette.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the
last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
--North American Cree Indian Saying
If you expect an answer to your question during your lifetime, you're not
asking a big enough question.
--I.F. Stone
You never change the existing model by fighting it. Instead create a new model
that makes the old one obsolete.
--Buckminster Fuller
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the
people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament,
or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
You can wake someone who is sleeping but you cannot wake someone who is
pretending to be asleep.
--Chinese proverb
But we live the old spiritual way. If we go blueberry picking, we are taught
to pass by the first seven bushes you come to and treat them as Elders. Then
you can pick from the bushes after that, but you are never to pick a bush clean.
You leave berries on the bushes because you have relatives there--the bears,
the birds, the wildlife. They also eat these berries. So you don't get greedy
and take them all. Respect. Balance. If you take a stone from a creek for a
sweat lodge or something, you don't just take that stone, throw it in the back
of a truck, and go home. You give a gift to the earth in appreciation for that
stone. You sprinkle a bit of cornmeal on the ground and say a prayer of thanks
because Great Spirit created the earth and this stone. If you kill a deer on a
hunt, you thank it for giving its life so your people can live, and one day in
return, your body will be put in the earth and over time will become fertilizer
to help grow green plants so that the deer's descendants will be able to eat.
If you do this with everything, you create a balance. This is the way of our
ancestors, the way we try to live.
--Dorothy White Hawk, Quoted in the book "Gig".
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for
one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting
in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
--Ernest Hemingway
"My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined,
resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one."
From Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut (ch. 28)
It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble.
It's the things we know that just ain't so.
Artemus Ward, 1834-1867
Liberty can and must defend itself only through liberty; to try to
restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous
contradiction.
--Mikhail Bakunin
We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not
nearly enough money for life and constructive development...when the
guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably
suffer."
--Dr. Martin Luther King speaking of the war in Vietnam
"It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in
international affairs. The machineries of government stand between and
hide the hearts of one people from those of another."
--Mahatma Gandhi
The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population,
regard them as superfluous because they're not helping you make those
dazzling profits -- and can you set up a world in which production is
carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in
the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people
of the world? Can you do that? Can you get women in China to work
locked into factories where they're burned to death in fires,
producing toys that are sold in stores in New York and Boston so that
rich people can buy them for their children at Christmas? Can you
have an economy where everything works like that -- production by the
most impoverished and exploited, for the richest and most privileged,
internationally? And with large parts of the general population just
marginalized because they don't contribute to the system -- in
Colombia, murdered, in New York, locked up in prison. Can you do
that? Well, nobody knows the answer to that question. You ask, could
it lead to a civil war? It definitely could, it could lead to
uprisings, revolts.
--Noam Chomsky