“It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Secure supplies of energy are essential to our prosperity and security. The concentration of 65 percent of the world’s known oil reserves in the Persian Gulf means we must continue to ensure reliable access to competitively priced oil and a prompt, adequate response to any major oil supply disruption.” ——National Security Strategy of the United States, White House publication, March 1990
“We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” ——Margaret Tutwiler, US State Department spokeswoman, July 24, 1990, nine days before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait
“President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq…I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” ——April Glaspie, US Ambassador to Iraq, in conversation with Saddam Hussein, US State Department transcripts, July 25, 1990, eight days before the invasion
“Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take ALL of Kuwait.” ——April Glaspie, interview with The New York Times, seven weeks after the invasion
“The next time someone tells you America has a two-party system, demand a recount.” ——Mickey Z., DebateThis
“We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.” ——George W. Bush, UN Speech, September 2004
“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right.” ——George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States
“Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. ‘We have a single system,’ he wrote, and ‘in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.'” ——Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.” ——John Adams (1735-1826), Founding Father, 2nd US President
“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.” ——Edmund A. Opitz
“To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.” ——John Ashcroft
“Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can’t help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.” ——John Sheehan, S.J., Jesuit priest
Q: “Mr. President, have you approved of covert activity to destabilize the present government of Nicaragua?” A: “Well, no, we’re supporting them, the – oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador, because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just – I will not comment.” ——Ronald Reagan, former US President, Washington press conference, February 13, 1983, as quoted by John Pilger in Heroes
“If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.” ——Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), political theorist, activist, abolitionist, No Treason, 1867
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” ——James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, 1994
“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.” ——Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), American humorous journalist
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.” ——H. L. Mencken, 1956
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.” ——Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US President
“Your national greatness, swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” ——Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
“Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.” ——David McGowan
“One thing is for certain: There won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.” ——George W. Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, January 12, 2004
“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, September 2, 2005
“We need food and water and they sent us men with guns.” ——Katrina survivor
“The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.” ——Arthur Schlesinger
“A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy…While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader…If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.” ——John Adams
“There are men—now in power in this country—who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.” ——John Lindsay
“Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.” ——Noam Chomsky
“Americans love their captivity. There’s no responsibility. When you’re a captive, you don’t have to make a decision about anything, though you have no Liberty. People don’t want Liberty. Liberty is nothing but uncertainty. It’s much easier to have someone tell you where you’ll be, what you’ll do and who you’ll pay tomorrow than to worry about it yourself. The same goes for what you think.” ——Eustace Mullins, May 8, 2004
“There is nothing left of the American character. Only a people who have lost their soul could tolerate the evil that emanates from Washington.” ——Paul Craig Roberts, A World Overwhelmed By Western Hypocrisy
“Studies show that America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels. Yet, the Tea Party and other anti-tax forces remain determined to protect the historically low tax rates of the rich and push the burden of reducing the federal debt onto the rest of society.” ——Robert Parry, How Greed Destroys America
“Boundless groveling to the commander-in-chief is the new trademark of a good American. Anything less is national suicide.” ——James Bovard, Faith Based Killings: Idolizing Absolute Power
“Nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent. Must be nice.” ——Charles M. Blow, Them That’s Not Shall Lose
“We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.” ——Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
“If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream and never be our destiny.” ——René de Visme Williamson
“If America ever falls, it will be an inside job.” ——Paul Harvey
“…so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” ——Voltairine de Cleyre
“Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful.” ——John Perkins
“A great wave of oppressive tyranny isn’t going to strike, but rather a slow seepage of oppressive laws and regulations from within will sink the American dream of liberty.” ——George Baumler
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” ——Noam Chomsky
“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
“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.” ——Adolf Hitler
“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” ——Robert M. Hutchins
“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.” ——J. G. Ballard
“It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms.” ——John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
“When people ask me, ‘Why can’t labor organize the way it did in the thirties?’ the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal.” ——Thomas Geoghegan
“Since 9/11 2001, America has become a police state.” ——Amitai Tsedek
“The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate…Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred…” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.” ——Whitney Moore, Jr.
“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” ——Noam Chomsky
“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” ——George W. Bush, September 11, 2001, quoted in Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 2004
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.” ——Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.” ——Federico García Lorca, Spanish Poet and Playwright (1898-1936)
“…in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction – enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them.” ——Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery
“What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a ‘philosophy of futility’ and ‘lack of purpose in life’ to ‘concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption’. Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry, and, in the political realm, to the self described ‘intelligent minorities’ who administer power.” ——Noam Chomsky
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ——Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” ——William Casey, CIA Director, from first staff meeting in 1981
“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.” ——Adolf Hitler
“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” ——Katherine Graham
“The two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ of non-recognition, no matter how we vote…May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties.” ——W. E. B. Du Bois
“Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price-individually and collectively-for their nation’s continued efforts to dominate the global scene.” ——Chalmers Johnson
“The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them-violence.” ——Chris Hedges
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?” ——Howard Zinn
“The state-corporate fraudsters, murderers and liars who wrap themselves in the language of freedom and democracy have been getting away with it for so long.” ——Colin Todhunter
“Some of the character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed in many within the political arena…[They] share the traits of psychopaths who are not sensitive to altruistic appeals, such as sympathy for their victims or remorse or guilt over their crimes. They possess the personality traits of lying, narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. These are the people to whom we have entrusted our fate. Is it any wonder that America is failing at home and world-wide?” ——Jim Kouri
“Any president engaged in lying and empire-building must have some of the traits of a psychopath…To murder innocent people in order to aggrandize the American Empire would be extremely difficult if not impossible for someone who feels empathy, remorse and guilt and who is incapable of lying. It might even be suggested that having at least some psychopathic traits is a qualification for the job.” ——David Model, Lying for Empire
“This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships…Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society – one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security.” ——Michael Lerner, journalist
“Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.” ——William Blum
“If cultures whose foundations are deeply set in violence, war, centralized power, fear, disrespect for life, along with the looting and scavenging which, alone, can sustain a privileged caste of cannibals, are fated for collapse. When cannibals have finally despoiled the well-conditioned zombies of the life-force and other energies upon which all of life depends, they will, like other parasites, have to look for new hosts upon which to feed their voracious appetites.” ——Butler Shaffer
“The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it’s the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it’s a democracy they – the herd, that is – are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That’s called an election.” ——Noam Chomsky
“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.” ——Sydney Schanberg
“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…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
“Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for.” ——Brian Reade, London columnist
“The USA is best characterized as a decomposing corpse of a nation lorded over by a tiny clique of oligarchs who control the herd by wielding Orwellian methods of mind control. So far gone is the populace that most of them think that things are just peachy…but a few of them do realize that they all have lots of personal issues with things like violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and gluttony. But don’t call them a nation of violent, drug-abusing gluttons, because that would be insulting. In any case, you can’t call them anything, because they aren’t listening, for they are too busy fiddling with their electronic life support units to which they have become addicted. Thanks to Facebook and the like they are now so far inside Plato’s cave that even the shadows they see aren’t real: they are computer simulations of shadows of other computer simulations.” ——Dmitry Orlov, Extinct-Extincter-Extinctest
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” ——Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.” ——Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again
“When the West collapses from its own evil, peace will return to the world.” ——Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy
“Four sorrows … are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787.
First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut.
Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta.
Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.
Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.” ——Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire