“The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America (is that it) has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.” ——Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
“Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.” ——Bill Moyers, PBS Commentator
“The principal power in Washington is no longer the government of the people it represents. It is the Money Power. Under the deceptive cloak of campaign contributions, access and influence, votes and amendments are bought and sold. Money establishes priorities of action, holds down federal revenues, revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class to the very rich. Money restrains the enforcement of laws written to protect the country from abuses of wealth—laws that mandate environmental protection, antitrust laws, laws to protect the consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the securities markets, and many more.” ——Richard N. Goodwin, speechwriter for John F. Kennedy
“I took an oath when I joined the Navy. I swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Nowhere does it state that I must blindly follow the orders of unjust or immoral leaders. This is the reason that I am compelled to speak out against our use of Depleted Uranium. It is the biggest, invisible danger that our troops and the Iraqi people face and most insidious. What we are committing is a silent genocide of both planet and people.” ——Kim Hawkins, Gulf War Veteran
“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” ——Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator, 1851
“Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.” ——William Mather Lewis, President of George Washington University, 1923-1927
“Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president.” ——Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School, September 22, 2002
“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves…too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'” ——Carl Schurz, The Policy of Imperialism, 1913
“I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it.” ——Sen. Orville Platt of Connecticut, 1894
“If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job – yours and mine—to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America’s might.” ——Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defense Mobilization, speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950
“We don’t torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country.” ——George W. Bush, interview with Australian TV, October 18, 2003
“Shamefully we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.” ——Edward Kennedy
“They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay…they are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.” ——Australian attorney Richard Bourke
“Our enemies didn’t adhere to the Geneva Convention. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them.” ——Republican Senator John McCain
“For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.” ——Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1888-1965)
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.” ——Alexis de Tocqueville
“How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” ——Henry David Thoreau
“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our Fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” ——Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President
“There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“As long as an economic system provides an acceptable degree of security, growing material wealth and opportunity for further increase for the next generation, the average American does not ask who is running things or what goals are being pursued.” ——Daniel R. Fusfeld
“I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.” ——George Washington
“The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.” ——Herbert Schiller
“Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation’s future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control.” ——John Chancellor
“The United States stands at the pinnacle of world power. This is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future.” ——Winston Churchill
“One of the great things about America, one of the beauties of our country, is that when we see a young, innocent child blown up by an IED, we cry.” ——President George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2006
“We support the election process, we support democracy, but that doesn’t mean we have to support governments that get elected as a result of democracy.” ——President George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2006
“What is the great American sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of ‘concentrated indignation’ as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed…The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin.” ——Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922
“The debate here isn’t only how to protect the country. It’s how to protect our values. If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles.” ——Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel, The New Yorker, February 27, 2006
“It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president’s say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O’Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he’s connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That’s not the American way. It’s not the constitutional way.” ——Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University
“Too much and too long we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values to the mere accumulation of material things. The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.” ——Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), Address, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
“This great and powerful force—the accumulated wealth of the United States—has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property.” ——Senator Richard Pettigrew, Triumphant Plutocracy, published January 1, 1922
“The convention which framed the Constitution of the United States was composed of fifty-five members. A majority were lawyers—not one farmer, mechanic or laborer. Forty owned Revolutionary Scrip. Fourteen were land speculators. Twenty-four were money-lenders. Eleven were merchants. Fifteen were slave-holders. They made a Constitution to protect the rights of property and not the rights of man.” ——Senator Richard Pettigrew, Triumphant Plutocracy, 1922
“The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.” ——Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th US President, letter, October 1, 1917
“My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal capital out of the passions of his fellowmen. He has lost touch with the ideal of America. For America was created to unite mankind…” ——President Woodrow Wilson, To Americans of Foreign Birth, 1915
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” ——Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President, Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” ——Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President, letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ——Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President
“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” ——Gore Vidal
“America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.” ——John O’Hara
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.” ——Bill Vaughan
“A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.” ——Author Unknown
“They know we own their country. We own their airspace… We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.” ——U.S. Brig. General William Looney, Washington Post, August 30, 1999
“We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr., speech given at Riverside Church, April 4, 1967
“Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.” ——Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, October 17, 2003
“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, author
“But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.” ——Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., author
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” ——Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina…” ——William Shirer, author, 1973
“…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.” ——Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author
“Our men have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up…. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.” ——Philadelphia Ledger, from its Manila (Philippines) correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines, 1901
“It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, any U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.” ——Dahr Jamail
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” ——Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
“It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy…The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.” ——Boutros Boutros-Ghali
“They know we own their country. We own their airspace. We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.” ——US Brig. General William Looney, Washington Post, June 24, 1996