Excerpted Books
by Subject
"During times of universal
deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
New World Order
"Capitalism is the extraordinary
belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will
somehow work for the benefit of all."
John Maynard Keynes
Democracy/Society/Politics
"You don't have to burn
books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading
them."
Ray Bradbury
"Paramount among the responsibilities
of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government
from deceiving the people..."
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
"We have about 50% of
the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real
task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will
have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and
our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can
afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction....
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such
as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better."
George Kennan, secret U.S. State
Department memo, 1948
"To oppose the policies
of a government does not mean you are against the country or the
people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition
should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent,
or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing.
Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of
these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer,
do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever
he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and
look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"The people will believe
what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"To criticize one's country
is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a
right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism,
I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
J. William Fulbright, American
senator
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world.
... Instead, news channels
prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information,
all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't
have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations
or further investigations."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
Foreign Policy
"To oppose the policies
of a government does not mean you are against the country or the
people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition
should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent,
or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing.
Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of
these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer,
do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever
he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and
look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"You believe you are dying
for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists."
Anatoly Franace, French writer
"To criticize one's country
is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a
right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form of patriotism,
I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright
"Free and responsible
government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed
public."
Bill Moyers
"It is the absolute right
of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda
minister
" Americans cannot teach
democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"The men the American
people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the
men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them
the truth."
H. L. Mencken
"The fact is ... that
when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball
with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when
Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate
interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy."
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
Third World
"You can always hear the
people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're
plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches
and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's
their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This
ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.
They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny
Got His Gun
"The fact that an opinion
has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
Bertrand Russell, British mathematician,
philosopher
Empire
"There is nothing puzzling
... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy...
What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees,
a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills
reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the
Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free
politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts
public hope."
Walter Karp
Media
"The majority of people
believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority
of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being."
Ashley Montagu, American anthropologist
"Politicians and the media
have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public.
At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle
complex truths, and the news media, especially television news,
basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
"The man who never looks
into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch
as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind
is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Thomas Jefferson
FBI /CIA / NSA
"No matter how paranoid
or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually
doing is worse than you imagine."
William Blum
Prisons / Prison System
"The size of the lie is
a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses
of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived
than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive
simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big
lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies
but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Fascism
"If fascism ever came
to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag,
carrying a cross."
Huey Long
Health, Food, Environment
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world.
... Instead, news channels
prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information,
all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't
have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations
or further investigations."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign
correspondent
Education
"24.9 percent of American
children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France
and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the
wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there
than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families
are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy
of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result
of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract."
Will Hutton
Terrorism
"Throughout much of its
history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S. labor organizations have worked
with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected
governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor
movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive
governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist
and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged
racist campaigns against immigrant workers."
Lee Siu Hin
Economics / Labor / Banks
"For most of the history
of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving
and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites
..."
Cornel West
Corporations / Globalization
"Media manipulation in
the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany,
because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the
information we want. That misconception prevents people from even
looking for the truth."
Mark Crispin Miller
"While free markets tend
to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably
to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.
History
"We were not born critical
of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month,
or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us,
and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed
in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
Religion
Media
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