"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are his accomplices."
- Edward R. Murrow
* * *
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
- James Madison
***
"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or
pretended, from abroad."
James Madison
* * *
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ
of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the
known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the
Executive is extended. It's influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of
seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The malignant aspect in republicanism may be
traced in the inequality of fortunes, and opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war... and in the degeneracy
of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve it's freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
- James Madison
***
"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after
a time, give way to it's dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and
alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and
security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length
are willing to run the risk of being less free."
- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers #8
***
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
***
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."
- Edmund Burke
***
"People are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, denied the right to employ counsel,
or to communicate with their friends, or even to inform their families of their whereabouts,
subjected to unlawful search, threatened, intimidated. . . . The most sacred constitutional
rights guaranteed to every American citizen are violated in the name of democracy."
Robert M. La Follette, senator from Wisconsin, June 1917
* * *
"But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to
the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and then denounce the
peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Herman Goering
***
"Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is
in their interests to go to war."
- Thomas Jefferson
* * *
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."
- Abraham Lincoln
***
"Critical thinking is compatible with patriotism... Amnesia is not a requirement for patriotism... We must not confuse
dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think, the soul of America dies with it."
- Edward R. Murrow
***
"Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country."
- Calvin Coolidge
***
"Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as
particularly hostile to republican liberty."
- George Washington
***
"In the councils of government we must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We
must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address January 17, 1961
***
"Security gives way to conspiracy."
- William Shakespeare
***
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of
people. Only a small inside group know what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of
the masses.
"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.
"I wouldn't go to war, 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 Butler USMC, 1933
http://www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm
***
"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful
interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks."
- John Caldwell Calhoun, 1836
***
"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the
Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our
government and political system another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite."
- Senator William Jenner, 1954
***
"The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this - power without limit, resting directly upon force,
restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestrained by rules."
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
***
"Whatever needs to be maintained by force is doomed."
- Henry Miller
***
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
- President George W. Bush, December 18, 2000
***
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
- President George W. Bush, July 7, 2001
***
"He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft."
- James Russell Lowell, Among My Books, 1870
* * *
"Who cares what you think."
- President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001
***
"Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right... and a desire to know, but
besides this, they have a right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of
their rulers."
- John Adams
***
"[A]mericans need to watch what they say. Now is not the time for comments like that - there never is."
- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary
***
"We are not afraid to entrust the American People with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive
values. For a nation that is afraid to let it's people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is
afraid of it's people."
- John F. Kennedy, remarks prepared for delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas
***
"To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with
phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and
diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of
good will to remain silent in the face of evil. Our efforts have been crafted carefully to avoid infringing on
constitutional rights, while saving American lives"
- John Ashcroft December, 2001
***
"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
- Abraham Lincoln
***
"We recognize the new order in the world... But America, our America, the America built on the foundation laid by the
inspired fathers, can be party to no permanent alliance... Every commitment must be made in the exercise of our national
sovereignty. Since freedom impelled, and independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is
contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic. This is not selfishness, it is sanctity. It is
not aloofness, it is security. It is not suspicion of others, it is patriotic adherence to the things which made us what
we are... "
- President Warren Harding, March 4 1921
***
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New
World Order."
- David Rockefeller
***
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing
it with an endless series of hobgoblins - all of them imaginary."
- Henry Louis Mencken
***
"The challenge is clear. The enemies of society who are here in California and are willing to sacrifice a generation of
youth to obtain their objectives. They are not only willing, but desirous of losing an international conflict. They will
not stop at endangering life and indeed they have killed several and injured thousands. The solution: Maximum photography,
maximum evidence gathering by officers who are not involved in the actual [political demonstrations] control activity -
maximum spying, maximum keeping of secret files on private citizens."
- Edwin Meese III, 1970, state law enforcement conference
***
"The govenment has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when
those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power... Groups and individuals
have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles."
- The Church Committee Report, 1975
***
"Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations, the Constitution does
not permit federal interference with their activities except through the criminal justice system, armed with it's ancient
safeguards. There are no exceptions. No federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI, can be at the same time policeman,
prosecutor, judge and jury. That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes be
disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is the essence of freedom... I suggest that the philosophy supporting
COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public official, the President, or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent
power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest, or "national security" warrants it. That
notion is a postulate of tyranny."
- Congressman Don Edwards, 1975
***
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
- Milton Friedman
***
"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a
government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on earth."
- Ronald Reagan, 1964
***
"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
- Abba Eban
***
"People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not."
- Neil Postman
***
"In fact one thing that I have noticed... is that all of these conspiracy theories all depend on the perpetrators being
endlessly clever. I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid."
- Brian E. Moore
***
"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 paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil
wells or metal mines."
- John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching
* * *
"Americans hardly know what war is anymore. Our most recent excursions into what we call war ...
have helped us kid ourselves that war is only slightly messier than a traffic accident"
- Mary Schmich
* * *
"The federal government was established in the first place, not to remake the world, but to promote the
welfare of the people of the United States. For too long have our Presidents lost themselves in dubious
foreign pursuits. The delusion that we could act as the world's policeman, banker and judge, has distorted
federal spending beyond belief - and lead us far afield."
- Senator Frank Church, speech October 20, 1975
* * *
"...But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart.
Lust of conquest had long ago done its work;
trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home;
multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own
persons.
The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on;
the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose.
There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket."
- Mark Twain
* * *
"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are
being used by the owning elite's as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad"
- Smedley D. Butler, Major General (U.S. Marine Corps)
* * *
"To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding.
How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!
To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship,
if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they are unfavorable,
of persecuting a scapegoat."
- Aldous Huxley, in The Devils of Loudun, 1952
* * *
"They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, because your
strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what
was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder and men going at it blind - as is very proper for
those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a
different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What
redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea - something you can set up
and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to..."
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
* * *
"Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow - it has no substance of it's own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a
shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stomp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical
resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it."
- Shakti Gawain
* * *
"I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS."
Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
* * *
"Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual
terrorists are within our own government)."
Gore Vidal
* * *
"The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama
bin Laden."
Dennis Hastert, House Speaker
* * *
"The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana
and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels
terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt."
Ron Crickenberger, Libertarian Party Political Director 2/4/02
* * *
"Poverty is the greatest cause of terrorism."
Azmat Hassan, at the Conference on World Affairs, Boulder CO, 4/6/04
* * *
"To protect us from terrorists our government treats us like terrorists."
- Hal O'Boyle
* * *
"The price of empire is terrorism."
Greenbacks
* * *
"The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own
government? Thats easy: 100 per cent."
Joseph Sobran, 1/1/04
* * *
"The war on "terror" will never be over, it will just change locations. Like the war on drugs, prostitution, pornography,
and the many others that will follow, it is a war on humanity. These wars will never be won; the State will just keep
creating new boogiemen to frighten us with. The sheep will anxiously anticipate the next fall guy the State offers up as a
sacrifice for the war on whatever happens to be next. Be careful, the next pawn could be me or you."
Mike Wasdin
* * *
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