Sage Observations

Sage Observations
PG's quotes
posted 07-24-07
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"Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which  makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"
 -- *Alexander Hamilton* - (1757-1804) Source: at the US Constitutional Convention
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"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
 -- *Fredrich August von Hayek* - (1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
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"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-- *Justice Louis D. Brandeis*  (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice 1928 Source: Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)
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"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.":
-- *Aesop* - (c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
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"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."
 -- *Henry Steele Commager*  -(1902-1998) Historian and author Source: Freedom and Order, 1966
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"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most  ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."
-- *Thomas Paine* - (1737-1809)
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"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation."
-- *Justice William O. Douglas* - (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: We, The Judges, 1956
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The Second Treatise of Civil Government 1690 :

"That the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with  another, and unjustly invades another man's right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over the conquered, will be easily agreed by all men, who will not think that robbers and pirates have a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them."
 
"Should a robber break into my house, and, with a dagger at my throat, make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his sword has an unjust conqueror who forces me into submission. The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain."
 
"The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference in the offense, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders."
 -- *John Locke* - 1632-1704 -
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"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'"
 
"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall"
 
"like rain in summer."
-- *Bertolt Brecht*
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"How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary,commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?: "
-- *Adin Ballou*, The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845
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"There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... "

"Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed: "
-- *Gil Bailie*
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" ... No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found...
 
"Surely they, and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere: "
--*Ouch Borith* - : Permanent Representative Of The Kingdom Of Cambodia To The UN: 10/03/2001
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"American preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or Christians under Communism.We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose, and confront, the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people, and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them. This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good, but it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all."
--*Peter Storey*, former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa
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"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny:"
--*Barry Goldwater*
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"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity:"
--*George Bernard Shaw*
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"The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim".                                                                 
--*Gustave Le Bon*; - "The Crowd"
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"An evil exists that threatens every man,woman, and child of this great country. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our Homeland"
-- *Adolf Hitler* (1933)
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"I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged:"
-- *Anne Frank*
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"An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me...It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority."

"The other wolf stands for  joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too." 

"They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

"The old Cherokee simply replied..."The one I feed."
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Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 08-18-07

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"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
-- *Sir Francis Bacon*
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"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason"
 -- *Sir John Harrington*, 1561-1612
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"When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty"
 -- *George Mason*
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"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men"
 -- *Plato*
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"Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots"
 -- *H.L. Mencken*
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"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
 -- *John Kenneth Galbraith*
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"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace"
-- *James Madison*
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"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 civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."[and discovering that their oil wells are tapping our oil which somehow was misplaced under their land]
 -- *John Flynn*, 1944
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"We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy."
 -- *Ramsey Clark*, former U.S. Attorney General
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"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy"
 -- *John Pierpont Morgan*
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"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society."
 -- *Rocco Galati*, lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress October, 2001
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"Fear is the foundation of most governments."
 -- *John Adams*
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"...the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
 -- *Benjamin Franklin*, 1787
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"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it"
 -- *U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson*, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945
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"Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."
 --*Robert Louis Stevenson*
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"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity."
 
"Patriotism" is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by "patriotism" I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare-never with its power over other nations."
 
"Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship".
 -- *Erich Fromm* - (1900-1980), U.S. psychologist.
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"It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations."
 -- *Ambrose Bierce*, Warlike America
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"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."
 -- *Thomas Bailey Aldrich* - (1836-1907) Source: Ponkapog Papers, 1903
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"We no longer live in a society, we live in an economy, where right and wrong is determined not by fairness, but by profitability -- and where the law no longer dictates corporate behavior, but corporate behavior dictates the law"
 -- *Kelly Overton*, Executive Director of People Protecting Animals & Their Habitats
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"Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected "radicals" without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity..."
 -- *Robert M. Lafollette, Sr.* - (1855-1925) U.S. Senator - Source: The Progressive, March 1920
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"Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units."
 -- *Carl Gustav Jung* - (1875-1961) Source: The Undiscovered Self, 1957
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"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"
 -- *Adolf Hitler* - (1889-1945) Source: quoted in Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74.
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"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience... therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."
  --  *Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal*, 1950
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"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime."
 -- *Olavo de Cavarlho*
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"And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war."
 -- *Aristotle*, Politics
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"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*
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"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
 -- *William O. Douglas* - (1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source" An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
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"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
 -- *Dwight D. Eisenhower* - (1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General Source: Speech, Columbia University, 1954
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"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."
 -- *Abbie Hoffman* - (1936-1989) Activist
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"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty"
 -- *George Washington*
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"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our [1787] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us"
 -- *Abraham Lincoln* - Source: in an 1848 letter to William Herndon
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"Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs"
 -- *Arundhati Roy*
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"[Concerning] the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments ...  I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side for the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people; the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered"
 -- *Martin Luther King*
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"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."
 -- *Aldous Huxley*, Brave New World
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"We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that".
 -- *Desmond Tutu*
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"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
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"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies."
 -- *Salvador de Madariaga* - (1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
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"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*
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"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."
 -- *Marshall McLuhan* - (1911-1980)
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"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe."

"But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe."
 -- *Janice Fine* - Dollars and Sense magazine
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Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 08-25-07

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"The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us."
 -- *Butler Shaffer*
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"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride"
 -- *William James*
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"My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?"
 -- *Paul Robeson* - (1898-1976) - from testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956
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"We are the ruling race of the world... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world... He has marked us as his chosen people...  He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples."
 -- *Sen. Alfred Beveridge*
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"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.
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"Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times," Washington has intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times."
 -- *Unknown*
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"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 marshalled 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 Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950
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"When the cow stumbles, the knives come out."
  -- *Arab proverb*
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 "They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
 -- *Eugene Victor Debs* 
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"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own"
  -- *Aldous Huxley* - English novelist and critic, 1894-1963
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"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
 -- *Arthur Miller* playwright
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 "....if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal
 -- *John F. Kennedy*
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"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
 -- *Edward Gibbon* - (1737-1794) Source: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1909
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"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?"
 --  *Herbert Spencer* - (1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher 1884
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"It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity."
 -- *Benjamin Tucker*, Liberty, May 22, 1886
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"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses."
  --  *Edward Abbey*
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"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.....Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.....Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty"
  --  *Howard Zinn*
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"The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience."
  -- *Leo Tolstoy*, Patriotism and Government
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"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson* - (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
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"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."
  -- *James Madison* - (1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President Source: Speech, Virginia State Convention, 2 December 1829
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"Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given."
 -- *Lysander Spooner* - (1808-1887) - Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
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"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it."
 -- *Judge Learned Hand* (1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
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Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 10-08-07

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"It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world....."
 
"These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people..."
 
"Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red- handed robbers and murderers, these "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight."
 -- *Eugene V. Debs* - The Canton, Ohio, Anti-War Speech. June 16, 1918
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.
 -- *Thucydides*
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"The principal architects of State policy, the merchants and the manufacturers, make sure that their own interests are most particularly attended to, however grievous the consequences for others, including their own countrymen."
 -- *Adam Smith*
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"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
 -- *Louis Kronenberger* - (1904-1980)
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
 -- *Samuel Johnson*
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"Take, say, the Congressional elections. Every seat in the House of Representatives is coming up for a vote. But how many seats are being seriously contested? Maybe 5 or 10 percent. Incumbents almost always win, because they have the most funding. In fact, you can pretty well predict the outcome of elections with quite high probability just by looking at the relative amount of funding available to the candidates, which primarily means how much business support they are getting."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*
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"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
 -- *Niccolo Machiavelli* - (1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher - Source: Discourses, 1513-1517
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"A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one!"
-- *Alexander Hamilton*
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"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
 -- *Charles-Louis De Secondat* - (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu - Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
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"A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited."
 -- *Herbert Spencer* - (1820-1903)british author, economist, philosopher - Source: The Principles of Ethics Bd. II, ed. T. Machan, Indianapolis 1978, S. 242-43
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"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes."
 -- *Thomas Paine*
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"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
 -- *Mark Twain*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys--and is bent on perpetuating--has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for."
 -- *Andrew Bacevich* - in The New American Militarism
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"The revulsion against war ... will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy."
 -- *Charles E. Wilson* - (1886-1972) President of General Electric (1940-42, 1945-50), head of the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951, US Secretary of Defense (1953-57) - Source: internal memo, 1944
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"American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy."
 -- *Colin Gray* - U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Source: "Victory is Possible," Foreign Policy, Summer 1980
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"The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States."
 -- *US Agency for International Development* - Source: "Direct Economic Benefits of U.S. Assistance Programs," 1999
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"If for decency, progress, order and liberty in the community and nation we cannot rely upon the character, sentiments, allegiances, and moral habits of the people, upon what, in heaven's name, can we rely?"
 -- *Charles Beard* 1874-1948
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". . government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men. . the origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community. .."
 -- *Mercy Otis Warren* 1728-1814, poet, historian, patriot, and advocate of the Bill of Rights
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"I would be better to trust the many than the few, who are infected with the plague of self-interest and selfishness."
 -- *Tom Paine*, 1737-1809, from "The Rights of Man".
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"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
 -- *General David M. Shoup* - Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor - Source: May 14, 1966
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"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."
 -- *Aldous Huxley* (1894-1963) Author Source: Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932
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"Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history."
 -- *Mark Alexander* Editor/Publisher of Patriot Post Source: Patriot Post, No. 06-07; Published 17 February 2006
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"The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word."
  -- *Clarence Darrow*, Resist Not Evil
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"Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson* to I. Tiffany, 1819
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"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
 -- *William O Douglas*
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"The United States must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana."
 -- *U.S. Department of State* - Source: Minutes S-3 of the Security Subcommittee, Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, 6 May, 1942, Notter File, Box 77, Record Group 59, Records of the Department of State, National Archives, DC.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was .. there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them."
 -- *William McKinley* - (1843-1901) 25th US President - Source: 1899, on the Filipinos, following the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898. During the invasion and occupation, U.S. forces killed an estimated 200,000 Filipino civilians. Address to the Methodist Episcopal Church; cited in Olcott, The Life of William McKinley (1916), v. 2, p. 110; estimate of civilian casualties from U.S. Library of Congress, "The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War," 1998.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"This country is not pro-American. It is United States property."
 -- *Juan Bosch* - President of the Dominican Republic Source: In 1965, the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent the displacement of Donald Reid Cabral by Bosch's constitutionally-elected government. New York Times, 6 June 1975
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"You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal."
 -- *John De Armond*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
 -- *Voltaire* - [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
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"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. "
 -- *U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson*, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"
 -- *Nuremburg War Tribunal* -- regarding wars of aggression
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"A Society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of "success" to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal. Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed."
 -- *C. Wright Mills* - The Power Elite
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"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of the colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
 -- *Robert F. Kennedy*
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"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise"
 -- *Adolf Hitler* - German Chancellor, leader of the Nazi party
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
 -- *George W. Bush* - 43rd US President
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*Laws just or unjust may govern men's actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life."
 -- *Sir Winston Churchill*
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"We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: "Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
 -- *Julia Ward Howe*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"In the general course of human nature, a power over man's substance amounts to a power over his will."
 -- *Alexander Hamilton*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right."
 -- *Joseph Sobran* (1946- ) Columnist
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
 -- *John Stuart Mill* - (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
 -- *Richard Rumbold* - (?-1626) British Colonel - Source: His final words on the scaffold before he was hanged in 1685.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice”
 -- *Confucius*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

“Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice”
 -- *George Bernard Shaw*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”
 -- *Abraham Lincoln*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow."
 -- "Jim Hightower"
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"Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them."
 -- *H.L. Mencken*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."
 -- *George Orwell* - [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author Source: Inside the Whale, 1940
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 10-13-07

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"After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism."
 -- *Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez*, - the retired former top commander of American forces in Iraq.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*, Interventions
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."
-- *Thomas Jefferson*
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"To offer an honorable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right of self-determination: that is the solution to the problem of terrorism. When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitos."
 -- *Yehoshaphat Harkabi*, former head of Israeli military intelligence
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"There is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq; [it is] Osama bin Laden's gift from America."
 -- *Michael Scheuer*, senior intelligence analyst in charge of tracking Bin Laden from 1996, in his book Imperial Hubris
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Right now, Washington is teaching the world a very ugly and dangerous lesson: if you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat. Otherwise we will demolish you."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*, Interventions
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."
 -- *Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank*, Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2007
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"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)
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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, 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 the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
 -- *U.S. President Abraham Lincoln* -  in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
 -- *U.S. President Abraham Lincoln*, speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837. See Vol. 1, p. 24 of Lincoln's Complete Works, ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 1905)
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"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.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
 -- *Ramsey Clark* - U. S. Attorney General: Source: New York Times, 2 October 1977
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"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
 -- *Dorothy Thompson* (1894-1961) -Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958
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Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 11-02-07

========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency."
 -- *Theodore Roosevelt* : (1858-1919) 26th US President
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"Do not expect justice where might is right."
 -- *Plato* (429-347 BC) - Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
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"A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent."
 -- *William Blake* : (1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
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"When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires."
 -- *Eric Schaub* - Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
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"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
 -- *Voltaire* - [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
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"I don’t think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads."
 -- *Deborah Pryce*, a United States representative from Ohio who is retiring.
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"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time. In World War I it was the munitions industrialists; in World War II it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty. This is passing the buck."
 
"The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else. To stress this guilt on the part of the masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom fighters; the latter that attitude held by power-thirsty politicians."
 -- *Wilhelm Reich*, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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"Running around like a madman with a razor blade, waving it around, is not the best way to resolve the [Iran] situation,"
  -- *Putin*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The founders knew about tyranny. The monarch of the time, King George III, routinely denied colonists basic liberties, spied on them and entered their homes at will, seized their property, jailed anyone he wanted without charges, rounded up and killed dissidents, and generally ruled with an iron fist. He was both the law and above the law, operating on the twin doctrines of "the divine rule of kings" and "the king can do no wrong."
 -- *Jim Hightower*, 10/23/2007
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."
 -- *Barbara Johnson*, Congresswoman, 07/05/1974, during the Nixon impeachment debate.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The Constitution is being trampled and nothing less than American democracy itself is endangered -- a presidential coup is taking place. Where is Congress?"
 -- *Jim Hightower*, 10/23/2007
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"Should we wander [from the essential principles of our government] in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson*, repealing the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts (which were an executive overreach by Pres. Adams).
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 “I’m the commander, see? I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president."
 -- *George W Bush*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."
 -- *Anthony Quainton*, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984: Anthony Quainton - Source: Off the record response of the Ambassador to a group of concerned U.S. citizens when asked to explain the difference between U.S. government actions in Nicaragua and the violence it condemns as terrorism elsewhere in the world.
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know--or care--about circumstances in the colonies."
 -- *Bertrand Russell*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====
 
"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*
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"The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it."
 -- *Louis Simpson*
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"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory but let me say war is all hell."
 -- *William Tecumseh Sherman*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"The greatest spiritual practise is to transform love into service"
 -- *Sai Baba*
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

Sage Observations  --  PG's Quotes  --  Posted 11-27-07

========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men."
 -- *Gerald W. Johnson* - (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak."
 -- *James Russell Lowell*:  - (1819-1891) Poet and author Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths."
-- *Simon Heffer* Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment."
 -- *Justice Hugo L. Black*: (1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice Source: New York Times Company vs. Sullivan, 1964
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
 -- *James Monroe* - 1758-1831), 5th US President Source: First Inaugural Address, 1817
========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====

"Who ordained that the few should have the land (of Britain) as a prerequisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?"
 -- *David Lloyd George* (1863-1945) British statesman, and Prime Minister
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"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."
-- *Benjamin Franklin* - (1706-1790) US founding Father Source: letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783, Ref: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1082
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"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
-- *Major General Smedley Darling Butler* - (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
 -- *Herbert Sebastien Agar* - (1897-1980) Source: The Time for greatness, 1942
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"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth."
 -- *Peter Abelard* (1099-1142) Source: Sic et non, c. 1120
 
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
 -- *Aldous Huxley* - (1894-1963) Author
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"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."
 -- *Major General Smedley Darling Butler* (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", the most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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"Whenever a people... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens."
 -- A Framer *Anonymous* 'framer' of the US Constitution  - Source: Independent Gazetteer, January 29, 1791
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"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-- *William Edgar Borah*
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"Cheer up, Comrade, enjoy today; tomorrow will be much worse."
 -- *Russian proverb*
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"We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both."
 -- *Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis*
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"Our gains are not measured in the losses of others. They are counted in the conflicts we avert, the prosperity we share and the peace we extend."
  -- *George W. Bush*
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“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
  -- *George W. Bush*  [cited here:  http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml ]
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"War itself requires no special motive but appears to be engrafted on human nature; it passes even for something noble, to which the love of glory impels men quite apart from any selfish urges. Thus among the "American savages", just as much as among those of Europe during the age of chivalry, military valor is held to be of great worth in itself, not only during war (which is natural) but in order that there should be war. Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as a class of animals, to her own end."
 -- *Immanuel Kant* - (1724-1804) German philosopher Source: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795
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"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we  should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people!"
 -- *Patrick Henry* - (1736-1799) US Founding Father
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"There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland."
 -- *George W. Bush* - (1946- ) 43rd US President: Source: In a speech on August 7, 2002
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"The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."
 -- *Joseph Paul Goebbels* (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister - Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
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"All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state."
 -- *Jacques Ellul*
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"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson*
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"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence"
 -- *Henri Frederic Amiel*
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"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings
 -- *Helen Keller*
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"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
 -- *Ramsey Clark*
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"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*
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"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."
 -- *Charles Eliot Norton* - (1827-1908) American scholar
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"[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 benignant 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 individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."
 -- *John Quincy Adams* - (1767-1848) 6th US President - Source: Speech before the House of Representatives, July 4, 1821; quoted in William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux (Editors), The Idea of America (Les Belles Lettres, 2003), p. 237
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"To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true."
 -- *H. L. Mencken* (1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
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"They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people."
 -- *Eugene Debs*  - Socialist candidate for president, June 16, 1918 - The speech led to Debs's being stripped of his citizenship and sent to jail for 10 years.
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"One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic."
 -- *Josef Stalin* - (1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
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"It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?"
 -- *Melians* - Source: Melians to Athenians, Peloponnesian War, 431 BC
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"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign country.  would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money.  One year's military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.  That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House.  On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated."
 -- *William Blum*, author of "Killing Hope:  U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II," and "Rogue State:  A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"
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"After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism."
 -- *Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez*, the retired former top commander of American forces in Iraq.
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"Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*, Interventions
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"We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."
 -- *Thomas Jefferson*
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"To offer an honorable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right of self-determination: that is the solution to the problem of terrorism. When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitos."
 -- *Yehoshaphat Harkabi*, former head of Israeli military intelligence
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"There is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq; [it is] Osama bin Laden's gift from America."
 -- *Michael Scheuer*, senior intelligence analyst in charge of tracking Bin Laden from 1996, in his book Imperial Hubris
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"Right now, Washington is teaching the world a very ugly and dangerous lesson: if you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat. Otherwise we will demolish you."
 -- *Noam Chomsky*, Interventions
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"The Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."
-- *Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank*, Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2007
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"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) [recall, it took 10 Amendments to the original Constitution, together comprising the Bill of Rights, to muster enough popular votes to ratify this property-owners' Constitution ]
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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, 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 the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
 -- *U.S. President Abraham Lincoln* -  in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864 http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html
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"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
 -- *U.S. President Abraham Lincoln*, speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837. See Vol. 1, p. 24 of Lincoln's Complete Works, ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 1905)
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"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.
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"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
 -- *Ramsey Clark* - U. S. Attorney General: Source: New York Times, 2 October 1977
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"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
 -- *Dorothy Thompson* (1894-1961) -Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958