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Quotes "The fascists cannot argue, so they kill" - Unknown
"If
Fascism ever comes in the United States it will come in something like that
way. No one will set himself up as an avowed dictator, but if he can succeed
in dictating everything, the name does not matter. Laws and Constitutions
guaranteeing liberty and individual rights may remain on the statute books,
but the life will have gone out of them. Institutions may be designated as
before, but they will have become only empty shells. We thus have an
indication of the points at which American vigilance must be eternal if it
desires to withstand the subtle inroads of the Fascist spirit. There is no
need to be on the watch for a revolutionary leader to rise up and call upon
his followers to march on Washington. No such sinister figure is likely to
appear. The danger is, as Senator Long demonstrated in Louisiana, that
freedom may be done away with in the name of efficiency and a strong
paternal government." "Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. 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, or a parliament, or a communist 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 denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - - Hermann Goering, Hitler's #2 man, before being sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials. "Peace is not a boon our ancestors bought and paid for once and for all. It must be purchased in the installment plan and each generation has to pay its quota of the price." Rachel Davis Dubois
"A world
in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a
thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me
wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some
other planet." "Only when the last tree is cut; only when the last river is polluted; only when the last fish is caught: Only then will they realize that you cannot eat money." -- Cree Indian Prophecy
"The
abolition of war is no longer an ethical question to be pondered solely by
learned philosophers and ecclesiastics, but a hard core one for the decision
of the masses whose survival is the issue. Many will tell you with mockery
and ridicule that the abolition of war can only be a dream - that it is the
vague imagining of a visionary. But we must go on or we will go under ... We
must have new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts. We must break out of the
straightjacket of the past. We must sufficient imagination and courage to
translate the universal wish for peace - which is rapidly becoming a
necessity - into actuality." "The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" --Pablo Casals "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" Benito Mussolini (Italian dictator, 1883-1945)
"Unless we establish some form of world government, it will not be possible for us to avert a World War III in the future." --Winston Churchill "hatred bounces." --e.e. cummings "No man is an island entire of itself... Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." --John Donne "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." --Albert Einstein "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." --Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." --Anne Frank "I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity." --Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) "I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson: to conserve my anger, and, as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power which can move the world." --Mohandas Gandhi "Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?" --Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet" "The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined non-conformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been non-conformists." --Martin Luther King Jr. "We must in strength and humility meet hate with love. Maybe in some distant Utopia, you say, that idea will work, but not in the hard cold world in which we live. My friends, we have followed the so called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory." --Martin Luther King Jr. "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land." --Martin Luther King Jr. --- Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964 "Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men and women." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "...we must realize that a vast majority of believers are still searching and will continue to search for the being who is the "source of human good." Those who seek with clear heads and sincere hearts will in some measure find. Of course the true seeker will realize that there is no one way to find God. To be sure, there are many possible ways of finding God." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed." --Kothe Kollwitz "When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." --J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known "I think we're in a new era where the advancing tide is towards human unity, where people all around the world want to come together. The United States is in a position where it can lead the way towards that and it can do it in practical ways by affirming the power of the United Nations so that the international process makes decisions on international security." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman "Our vision of interconnectedness resonates with new networks of world citizens in nongovernmental organizations linking from numberless centers of energy, expressing the emergence of a new organic whole, seeking unity within and across national lines... If governments and their leaders, bound by hierarchy and patriarchy, wedded to military might for legitimacy, fail to grasp the implications of an emerging world consciousness for cooperation, for peace and for sustainability, they may become irrelevant." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman, "Spirit and Stardust" "[T]here is a deeper truth expressed in the unity of the United States. [I]mplicate in the union of our country is the union of all people. [A]ll people are essentially one. [T]he world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but innerconnected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world, through the simply expressed impulse and yearning to be and to breathe free." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman, "A Prayer for America" "There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom." --Andrew B. Law "If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?" --Rose Macaulay "The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion." --Thomas Paine "If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too." --Katherine Anne Porter "People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead." --Arundhati Roy "You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"" --George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950 "If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "Every explicit duality is an implicit unity." --Alan Watts "In this age of wonders no one will say that a thing or idea is worthless because it is new. To say it is impossible because it is difficult, is again not in consonance with the spirit of this age. Things undreamt of are daily being seen, the impossible is ever becoming possible. We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence." -- M.K. Gandhi [ posted 24 Mar 2004 ] "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." -- Thomas Jefferson
"I object
to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary;
the evil it does is permanent."
"Fascism
should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and
corporate power"
"The best
way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend."
"An eye
for an eye makes the whole world blind."
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted;
the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the
voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil
to triumph." "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government. ...For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." Martin Luther King
"I see in
the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to
tremble for the safety of my country... Corporations have been enthroned, 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 the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is
destroyed." "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 "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubt. " Bertrand Russell I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war. Albert Einstein "The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti
Peace is
not something you wish for, it's something you make, something you do,
something you are, something you give away.
We are
ready to kill to keep our automobiles running. We're ready to kill to keep
up our materialistic, wasteful economy...I am sick and tired of 18-year-olds
being coerced into bearing the burden of the failure of politicians to face
the tough economic choices needed to end our dependency on foreign oil.
Each time
a person stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or
strikes out against injustice, he or she 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. Few are willing to brave the disapproval
of their fellows, the censure of their 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.
Patriots
always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their
country.
Show me
who makes a profit from war, and I'll show you how to stop the war.
Enlighten
the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will
vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Great
spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
We will
never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely
have the strength to be uncommon...
Whoever
would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness
of speech.
They that
can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety.
You need
only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a
dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which
our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
The two
greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the
widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the
chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
The
ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and
convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Man is
the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own
flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed
assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's
countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals
between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the
universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.
If
democracy is so good, why do we have to go to other countries and try to jam
it down their throats with a gun? Stay here and make democracy work. If it's
good you don't have to force it on others, they'll steal it.
The
simplest meaning of the nuclear arms race is that the world's most powerful
nations are prepared to commit mass murder.
We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on
such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness...than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed...it is
their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide
new guards for their future security.
We must
dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the
options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing
world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We
must dare to think about 'unthinkable' things because when things become
unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
The
beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with
ourselves.
Men never
do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction.
One has a
moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
An
environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to
have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than
a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living
together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continually
use and reuse the same molecules of the soil and air, cannot be improved by
aimless and uninformed tinkering.
The
ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting
the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it
multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder
hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for
violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already
devoid of starts. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do
that.
Only one
individual is necessary to spread the leavening influence of [non-violence]
in an office, school, institution or country.
When the
power of love overcomes the love of power, then there will be true peace.
In
nonviolence, the masses have a weapon which enables a child, a woman, or
even a decrepit old man to resist the mightiest government successfully. If
your spirit is strong, mere lack of physical strength ceases to be a
handicap.
I have
often wondered what I would have done if I were a German in the '40s
watching the boxcars of people pass through my town. Would I have left it to
someone else to step forward, to raise the question, to try to stop the
trains?
It may
well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition is not
the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the appalling silence
of the so- called good people.
We know
what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run
over.
The evils
of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.
I will
act as if what I do makes a difference.
He who
stands for nothing will fall for anything.
These are
the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our
lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly.
Everyone of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits
his convictions, but we all must protest.
I know of
no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we
think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from
them, but to inform them by education.
I
wondered why somebody didn't do something for peace...Then I realized that I
am somebody.
The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is
curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities
of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring
deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never
again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of
violence and militarism.
If you
are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the
oppressor.
"Beware
the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a
patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both
emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind...And when the drums of war
have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has
closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry.
Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will
offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know?
For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar"
"In two
weeks time the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the
newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on
uniforms and kill and be killed for the sake of the sordid ends of a few
interested parties."
Those who
love peace must learn to organize as well as those who love war.
-This Page last updated on
Friday, 24. December 2004 03:32 AM -0800 -
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