M. B. Hardy (old statistician, new to this)
work: Applied Research Associates, S.E. Div.
8537 Six Forks Rd., # 6000 / Raleigh, NC 27615-2963
(919) 582-3329, fax: 582-3301, email: mhardy(at)ara.com
home email: mbhiii(at)cs.com
Debate edit
KEEP All this nit-picking can be used to improve or expand the article and is better suited for the discussion page, not here. To delete it denies the fact that the article is a potentially useful (however small) collection of links and information on the subject, the primary reason for the existence of Wikipedia, which should not pretend to be a Britannica as the editors do not have sufficient academic standing (although it may in essence contain Britannica one day). To pretend otherwise turns Wikipedia into a useful mule, wasting time, trying to trim down for races in which it can't compete.
(Wikipedia is no final authority, but simply the best website there is to start an investigation.)
Iceberg edit
Deletionist: "The motivation of the contributors to a debate is not relevant to the veracity of their observations."
Mbhiii: "It most certainly is, because of the iceberg theory of mind, only 11% is above water (conscious).
(I.e., if someone who wants to delete, say, the Five clicks to jesus game also advertises his born again status, all the nit-picking he does to delete the article should be immediately suspect. Taking positions based on belief and demanding personal commitment should require an editor to recuse himself, his choice however, from any debate involving that subject, otherwise unconscious bias, the other "89%," can drive these debates. Such an editor who does not recuse himself should, as matter of Wikipedia policy, have his opinions discounted to the extent that others decide his prior beliefs influence his decisions and should not. If you don't think prior beliefs can drive important debates by otherwise intelligent, well-intended people, see Religious and militarist attitudes and E. W. Russell's paradox, or the findings of Bernays, Tversky and Ariely.)
...
(Deletionist name), you must slow down and contemplate the iceberg analogy; it applies to us all."
(For more on deletionist meddling, see The Economist: The battle for Wikipedia's soul)
Political edit
... registered as both Republican and Democrat, at different times in the past, and have cheerfully voted against candidates of both parties - never been Independent though, the better to participate in major party primaries.
... a quick chronology of origins and path our democracy
"Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? ... He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly ..." - Micah 6:7-8
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop (620-560 BC)
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." - Gautama Buddha (ideas echoed much later by Ben Franklin)
"Just because you (do not take an interest in politics)* doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." - Pericles (495-429 BC) (*)original Greek definition of a village idiot, according to JFK
"I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." - Socrates
"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato (427-347 BC) - "The guilt of war is always confined to a few persons." The Republic
"Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved." - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
"The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity, and the brute by instinct." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (The difference here is how wide a view one takes before acting. Lacking the necessities of life can make a brute of anyone. The immediacy of such a situation can interfere with foresight that wisdom requires, however ...)
"We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right." - Seneca (4BC-65AD) Roman Statesman, Philosopher (so be moderate in all things, especially in what we consume)
"cui bono" Latin for "to whom the benefit?"
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" - Matthew 16:26
"Jesus answered (Pilate), 'My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (to defend him), ...' " - John 18:36 -- why "Christian nation" cannot be an official position. There are only Christian people, possibly in Christian communities. Beyond that are the "things which are Caesar's" - Matthew 22:21
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." (Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.) - Saint Augustine
"My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned (Church officials) here, who... have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?" - Galileo, 1610 letter, and "... Let us be concerned only with gaining knowledge for ourselves, and let us find therein our consolation." - to Benedetto Castelli.
"The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)
"... the ultimate goal of a business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is the general welfare." - Adam Smith (1723-90), considered by many to be the father of the capitalist system; also, "The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." - Edmund Burke (1729-97)
"(A corporation has) neither body to jail nor soul to damn." - Lord Edward Thurlow (1731-1806)
"Devil take the hindmost." - Colonial Record of Georgia (1742)
"The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." - Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) which can be used to explain away the foregoing.
"whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government" - Declaration of Independence
"Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind." -
John Adams
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." - Thomas Jefferson - "We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate."
"I go by the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom [to the offices of government]." - James Madison - "A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."* and "Equal laws protecting equal rights ... the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country." *A new knowledge we all must acquire is how to protect against a greedy but knowledgeable few manipulating the ignorant many for the benefit of those few.
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." - Patrick Henry
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." - Thomas Jefferson - "There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy." (...Dubya...)
"He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Thomas Paine
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." - Treaty with Tripoli, drafted by George Washington's administration with Thomas Jefferson's help, ratified in 1797, thus becoming with the Constitution "the supreme Law of the Land" -- as Article VI-2. of the US Constitution says it must.
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." and "Information [not money] is the currency of [true] democracy." and "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." and "If, in my retirement to the humble station of a private citizen, I am accompanied with the esteem and approbation of my fellow citizens, trophies obtained by the bloodstained steel, or the tattered flags of the tented field, will never be envied. The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." - Thomas Jefferson
"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress." and "Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." and "The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country." - John Adams
"Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." - Abigail Adams
"Prejudice is the child of ignorance." - William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
"I'm not talking to you! I'm speaking to Buncombe." - Felix Walker, Republican Congressman (1820) the origin of "bunk" or "bunkum", Buncombe County, NC, (Asheville) being his constituency, upon being hooted down by his colleagues for his drunken bombast on the Missouri issue.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner." and "You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well- wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benign' sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit." - John Quincy Adams, US House, 7/4/1821
"Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of the people, tempered by fear." - W.Gladstone
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently."
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid ..., it is true that most stupid people are conservative." - John Stewart Mill (1806-1873) "I never meant to say that the conservatives are ... stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." and "There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
"The nose of a mob is its [dimmed] imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." - Edgar Allen Poe
"You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - P. T. Barnum (1810-91)
"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation." - Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85)
"The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war." - Alexis de Tocqueville
"(Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition." Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, Savannah, March 21, 1861.
"Fear is the parent of cruelty." - James Anthony Froude (1818-94)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire - "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause." - Victor Hugo
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." and "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." - Abraham Lincoln - "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... 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." - attributed, letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." (but expensive TV ads, at just the right time, might fool enough people, long enough)
"The great mistake of my life was taking a military education." - Robert E Lee
"Let them eat grass." - Andrew Myrick, a white trader to the starving Sioux, at a meeting of US Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Indians and traders, in August 1862. Afterward Myrick was found dead with grass in his mouth.
"Come, come my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see that the world is moving." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The present condition of nations is a consequence of an accumulation of all discoveries, inventions, improvements, perfections and efforts of all generations which have lived before us; they form the capital of mind of living humanity, and each nation is only productive to the degree in which it assimilates these achievements of earlier generations and knows how to enhance them with its own achievements..." and "Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth." - Friedrich List (1789-1846) US Consul to Germany, describing the source of Britain's wealth in his book, The National System of Political Economy, 1841 (translated from German 1885) a model he'd earlier advocated to Congress which adopted it as Henry Clay's "American System" a plan to strengthen the national economy; later Germany adopted it, as did Japan after WWII (and now India & China).
"There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey." - John Ruskin (1819-1900)
"The Commission is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, while at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal." - William H. H. Miller, US Attorney General, circa 1889, re the first US regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission.
"No sport is wholesome in which ungenerous or mean acts which easily escape detection contribute to victory." - Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard (1869-1909) opposing football.
"To disagree with three-fourths of the public is one of the first requisites of sanity." - Oscar Wilde
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B Anthony - "I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.' "
"The radical invents the views; when he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." - Mark Twain (1835-1910) - "I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900.
"You can't hold a man down without staying down with him." - Booker T Washington (1856-1915) - "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."
"CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others(*)." - Ambrose Bierce (* which can only best be known after their realization)
"The chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual, among which are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness and the right to worship God according to the dictates of one's conscience." - 1915, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)
"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them." - Paul Valery (1871-1945)
"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 - "If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay." and "To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - (his) 1912 Platform of Progressive Party, and "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." 1917
"Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist and you will sweep war from the earth." - Henry Ford
"We will get everything out of her that you can squeeze out of a lemon and a bit more.... I will squeeze her until you can hear the pips squeak. My only doubt is not whether we can squeeze hard enough, but whether there is enough juice." - Sir Eric Geddes (1875-1937), British Conservative politician, speech on German war reparations, 12/10/1918
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" - Woodrow Wilson, 1919
"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes." - Winston Churchill, in a letter about the Iraqi and Kurdish rebellion against British occupation, 1920
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - attributed to Sinclair Lewis
"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization." - Sigmund Freud
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." - George Bernard Shaw "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
"Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country." - Calvin Coolidge
"There is always room at the top - after the investigation." - Oliver Herford (1863-1935) British born American writer
"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that." - Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, 1931
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." - Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler, simultaneously highest ranking and most decorated U.S. Marine, two Congressional Medals of Honor, for capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914, and for capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917, Distinguished Service Medal, 1919. Republican candidate for Senate, 1932. "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." "I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested." in 'Common Sense', Nov., 1935.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)
"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." - Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936, and "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." 1942
"The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.... To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober." - Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), U.S. essayist
"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles Beard (1874-1948), American historian.
"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice." - Mahatma Gandhi - "I think it would be a good idea." when asked by a reporter for his opinion of Western civilization.
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking." - A.A. Milne (1882-1956)
"Puritanism -- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) "Most people want security in this world, not liberty." and "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ...by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin
"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English Philosopher, Mathematician, Essayist - "The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress." (Corollary: Having little desire to reform the world, conservatives have fewer reasons than liberals, like Russell, to try to understand it further.)
"The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it." - Adolf Hitler - "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many... The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy (what they perceive to be) weakness wherever they see it." - Eric Hoffer - "It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil... attracts the weak."
"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." - E. B. White
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), US theologian, 1944
"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." - John T. Flynn (1882-1964, American writer), 1944
"The nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) in A Study of History, V.4, part B, p.6, 1948. - "Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity."
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." - Article 25, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing." - Dwight D. Eisenhower - "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time...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." 1953 press conference, about being presented with plans to wage preventive war to disarm Stalin's Soviet Union.
"If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens - and then everybody disagrees." - Boris Marshalov (1902-67) Russian observer, after visiting the House of Representatives in 1947.
"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate." - Victor Lebow, retail analyst, a few years after WWII
"Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history... It is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity - the law of thrift." J. Gordon Lippincott, industrial designer. 1947
"Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium." - Cyril Connolly, British critic, 1951
The American economy's "ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods." (not better health care, education, housing, transportation, or recreation or less poverty and hunger, but providing more stuff to consumers.) - Arthur F. Burns, Chairman of Pres. Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, 1953
"It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have." B. Earl Puckett, Allied Stores Corp. 1953
"Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers." - Learned Hand (1872-1961), noted federal judge (1909-1951).
"More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else. All our lauded technological progress - our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem - in my opinion - to characterize our age." out of My Later Years, ch. 14 (1950). and "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." and "He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." and "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness--each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked--each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity." - Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) in Christianity, Diplomacy and War, p. 43 (1953).
"What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime." - Adlai E Stevenson - "... a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland." 1956
"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." - Edward R. Murrow
"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based." - C. Wright Mills, Causes of world war 3, 1960.
"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." and "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
"The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, 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." - Erich Fromm
(A just society is the one in which a reasonable person would choose to live, without knowing, in advance, with what advantages he'd be born.) - John Rawls, Harvard philosophy professor
"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash." - Harper Lee
"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." - John F Kennedy - "Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security." and "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
"There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights." - Lyndon Johnson
"The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment." - Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), U.S. political philosopher. One-Dimensional Man, 1964
"We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." - George Steiner, 1967
"If you can't eat their (lobbyists') food, drink their booze, screw their women and still vote against them, you have no business being up here." - Jesse Unruh - "Money is the mother's milk of politics." 1966
"The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this." - Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, MD (1928-1967) "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man."
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." and "I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." and "The time is always right to do what is right." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." - Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus to those whom he'd just told of Martin Luther King's murder, at a rally in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968.
"If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide." - attributed to Aristotle by Robert Kennedy and others
"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.* They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.' " - Spiro T. Agnew, 9/11/70, felon and Republican VP. *(written by Wm. Safire, speechwriter for Pres. Nixon)
"The less care they give them, the more money they make." - John Ehrlichman, describing Kaiser Permanente to Pres. Nixon, who replied "Fine." 2/17/71.
"If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning." - Carl Rogers (1902-87) American psychologist
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
"In each cultural era, the medium in which information is recorded and transmitted is decisive in determining the character of that culture." - Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) - "Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - GHW Bush, in FREE INQUIRY magazine, Fall 1988.
"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." - Thurgood Marshall (1908-93) US lawyer and Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court (1967-91)
"It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril." - James William Fulbright (1905-95)
"I have seen the Octopus." - Danny Casolaro (1947-1991) to his family, 1991
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre." - Frank Zappa, 1977
"[T]he long-term political effects of a successful... health care bill will be even worse — much worse... It will revive the reputation of... Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class..." - William Kristol memo, "Defeating President Clinton's Healthcare Proposal" 12/93
"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." - Alex Carey, Australian social scientist, 1995
"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them (aggrieved or comfortable) to deceive themselves." - Eric Hoffer
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera
"The greatest threat to democracy is the increasing concentration of major electronic media in ever fewer hands." - Rep. David Price (D-NC)
"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." - Dick Cheney, 1998, when Hamid Karzai, working for Unocal, was negotiating with the Taliban for an oil pipeline from the Caspian through Afghanistan. Henry Kissinger also worked for Unocal. A.F.Sec. under GHW Bush, Donald Rice, was on Unocal's board of directors. Unocal has since merged with Chevron/Texaco.
"Here is a list of the countries that the U.S. has been at war with - and bombed - since the Second World War: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999), and now Afghanistan." - Arundhati Roy, Manchester Guardian, 10/23/01 (Extending this to the present, one sees our warring and bombing increased AFTER the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.)
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." - DoD advisor Ken Adelman, 2/02.
"We need to execute people like John Walker (Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." - Ann Coulter, 1/02, applauded by NSA Condoleeza Rice, HHS Sec. Tommy Thompson, and Lynne Cheney (wife of the VP), all of whom were present.
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky - "Corporations, which previously had been considered artificial entities with no rights, were accorded all the rights of persons, and far more, since they are 'immortal persons', and 'persons' of extraordinary wealth and power. Furthermore, they were no longer bound to the specific purposes designated by State charter, but could act as they choose, with few constraints."
(The Bible teaches and Christians believe) "...that government ...derives its moral authority from God. Government is the 'minister of God' with powers to 'revenge,' to 'execute wrath,' including even wrath by the sword..." - Justice Antonin Scalia, 5/02.
"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority." - Eric Hoffer - "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." - GW Bush, 9/13/01 - "I don't know where he is and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." - 9/13/02 - "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." - 10/02 - "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties" to Pat Robertson, 2/03.
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" - Barbara Bush, ABC's Good Morning America, March 18, 2003.
"America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive." - John W. Gardner
"The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks (2003) Republican candidate for Senate from Maine and corporate governance adviser in the film "The Corporation"
"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens." - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, HAMDI et al. v. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, et al., on writ of certiorari to the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, 6/28/04
"(Reagan) has the most fraudulent reputation of any who has ever served in public office. He was certainly genial, a decent guy, a 3rd rate actor that had his career revived by the advice by his new father-in-law, Dr. Davis (a supporter the John Birch Society) 'Go where the money is!' In other words flack for 20 Mule Team Borax and GE. This confused guy even voted for FDR four times by his own admission. He learned that it was 'good business' to give up a lifetime of supposed ideals. He was a quick study, but basically a 'dope' who was lost without a script. ... He even thought that the CO2 from a tree was equivalent to a car's emissions. He was a 'stiff' built up by his handlers. His last term was a disaster, and to cap it off, during the Poindexter and McFarlane Trials, he said under oath over 400 times that he did not remember! With a history of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Nixon I can understand easily that the 'flat-earth' luddites of the new GOP love to worship the memory of the 'Gipper' whose understanding of the problems of this country matched his inability to answer a question 'off the cuff.' Maybe that's why he ran out after every press conference yelling over his shoulder. They couldn't wait to get him away." - Richard J. Garfunkel, American Daily, Phoenix, AZ, 5/1/07
"... leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings." - Norman Lear
"Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them." - Alvin Toffler
(Iraq has the third largest reserves of conventional oil in the world.) - Country Analysis Briefs (2007) US Energy Information Administration, and Gal Luft (2003) "How Much Oil Does Iraq Have?" The Brookings Institution.
"I think that today's youth have a tendency to live in the present and work for the future--and to be totally ignorant of the past." - Steven Spielberg
46,000,000 people in the US went without health insurance in 2007. We spend 16.0% of US GDP, while Canadians spend only 10.1% of Canadian GDP, Britons spend only 8.4% of British GDP, and Taiwanese spend only 6% of Taiwan's GDP, and everyone's covered in those countries with overall health stats better than ours. - Health_care_compared, Health_care_in_the_United_States.
"Alan Greenspan has proclaimed himself "shocked" that "the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity" proved to be an illusion... The Reagan-Thatcher model, which favored finance over domestic manufacturing, has collapsed. ... The mutually reinforcing rise of financialization and globalization broke the bond between American capitalism and America's interests. ...we should take a cue from Scandinavia's social capitalism, which is less manufacturing-centered than the German model. The Scandinavians have upgraded the skills and wages of their workers in the retail and service sectors -- the sectors that employ the majority of our own workforce. In consequence, fully employed impoverished workers, of which there are millions in the United States, do not exist in Scandinavia." - Harold Meyerson, "Building a Better Capitalism", The Washington Post, March 12, 2009.
"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care reform), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." - Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R) 7/09
"Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly."- Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) summarizing the Republican health care plan, 10/6/09
"It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." - Warren Buffett
"I refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving." - Michael Moore