QUANTUM QUOTES

I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service... And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for Capitalism.

Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

General Smedley D. Butler
One of the Most Highly Decorated Marine Corps Generals in U.S. History
"War Is a Racket," Cited in Joyce Brabner's "Real War Stories," 1991

With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince people that we are here to help them.

Lt. Col. Nathan Sassman, whose unit oversees the Iraqi village of Abu Hishma

The CIA poses the ultimate threat to democracy and should be dismantled for the good of the United States and the world.

US Marine Colonel & CIA Commander John Stockwell

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States, did a study that showed
that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea
right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam.

International diplomacy had failed to secure any reliable foreign sources of oil
for the United States. Fear of oil shortages would become
the most important factor in international relations.

Ludwell Denny, from "We Fight for Oil"

That empire in Southeast Asia is the last major resource area outside the control of any one of the
major powers of the globe. I believe that the condition of the Vietnamese people and the
direction in which their future may be going, are at this stage secondary, not primary.

Senator McGee, D-Wyo., in the U.S. Senate, Feb. 17, 1965

US government officials have been and are now his biggest customers,
and have been for the last twenty years.

Lieutenant Colonel James 'Bo' Gritz, quoting, from May, 1987,
the late Khun Sa, the then world's heroin overlord

Afghanistan has been the main source of illicit opium: 70 percent of global illicit opium production in 2000
and up to 90 percent of heroin in European drug markets originated from Afghanistan.

The United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention

It is not possible to explain the dynamics of global security affairs without recognizing
the pivotal importance of resource competition. For almost every country in the world,
the pursuit or protection of essential materials has become a paramount feature
in national security planning... [and] figures in the organization, deployment
and actual use of many of the world's military forces.

Michael Klare, "Resource Wars:
The New Landscape of Global Conflict"

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people,
or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,
they put themselves into a state of war with the people,
who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

John Locke

We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest --
which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive.
If they once become inattentive to public affairs,
you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.
The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction,
is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

When the people fear the government you have tyranny...
when the government fears the people you have liberty.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility
against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind...

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

Thomas Jefferson

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected.
To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.

That there are men in all countries
who get their living by war,
and by keeping up the quarrels of nations,
is as shocking as it is true;
but when those who are concerned
in the government of a country,
make it their study to sow discord,
and cultivate prejudices between nations,
it becomes the more unpardonable.

My country is the world.
My countrymen are mankind.

Thomas Paine

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.
Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

George Washington

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. Its
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 same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced
in the inequality of fortunes, and the 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 its freedom
in the midst of continual warfare.

James Madison

America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise
their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.

It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but 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 the 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 on the prejudices of the people until all 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.

Abraham Lincoln

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong,
is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a
way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war,
it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition 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.

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 Eisenhower

The High Office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom.
And before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of his plight.

John F. Kennedy
ten days before his murder

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the life of others, or strikes out against injustice,
he sends a tiny ripple of hope. And those ripples, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy,
build a current, which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert F. Kennedy

If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability
to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.

The purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people.

Bill Clinton

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways
to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

If this were a dictatorship, things would be a lot simpler.
As long as I was the dictator. Heh heh heh.

Your enemy is not surrounding your country.
Your enemy is ruling your country.

George W. Bush

Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede
to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.

Rudolph Giuliani

I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas.
And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.
(Appearing on CNBC, 12/13/00)

Military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.
(In the presence of Alexander Haig)

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.

Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.

Henry Kissinger

The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in the government
is to live under the government of bad men.

Plato

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.

Edward Abbey

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there is a twilight.
And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight,
lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

William O. Douglas

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

Learned Hand

The world, our world at the end of the century, is blind to itself,
unable to take in the horror of the mutilations it suffers or the marvel of the plenitudes it conceals,
filled with colors we are not allowed to see and with voices we are not allowed to hear.
In the midst of this era of mandatory globalization, which is like an immense factory,
pumping out cultural clones or clowns for the market circus, these colors and voices
keep alive powerful evidence that the best of the world
lies in the quantity of worlds the world contains.

Eduardo Galeano

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood
of every one of its members.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

The love for all living creatures is the noblest attribute of man.

Charles Darwin

Love is the merchandise, which all the world demands.
If you store it in your heart, every soul will become your customer.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

The world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.

You may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience
to the highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.

Buckminster Fuller

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution,
we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the 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, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?

This call for a worldwide 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 mankind.
We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation.

We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it.
And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

A nation that continues year and year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

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.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany
was legal.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
about things that matter.

A time has come when silence is betrayal.
That time is now.

Human salvation lies in the hands
of the creatively maladjusted.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The media's the most powerful entity on Earth.
They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent.
And that's power, because they control the minds of the masses.

Malcolm X

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
We know more about war than we know about peace,
more about killing than we know about living.

General Omar Bradley

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting.
I have long advocated it's complete abolition...as a method of settling international disputes.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear,
kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor,
with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home
or some monstrous foreign power
that was going to gobble us up
if we did not blindly rally behind it.

General Douglas MacArthur

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life,
there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.
At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation
in our image or as we choose.

Robert McNamara

Human civilization becomes increasingly a race between education and catastrophe.

H.G. Wells

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.
Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda.
Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class.
The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.

Bertrand Russell

In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

If liberty means anything at all,
it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable.

George Orwell (Eric Blair)

Peace will not come out of a clash of arms
but out of justice lived and done
by unarmed nations in the face of odds.

If man will only realize that it is unmanly
to obey laws that are unjust,
no man's tyranny will enslave him.

First they ignore you then they laugh at you
then they fight you then you win.

Faith gains in strength only when people
are willing to lay down their lives for it.

Mohandas Gandhi

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience,
thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.

Norman Cousins

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals,
because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.
Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything,
I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't wat 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.

Herman Goering

Terrorism is the best political weapon,
for nothing drives people harder
than a fear of sudden death.

What luck for the rulers
that men do not think.

Adolf Hitler

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism,
as it is a merge of state and corporate power.

Benito Mussolini

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people
from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

It doesn't matter who casts the ballots.
What matters is who counts the ballots.

Joseph Stalin

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and thus clamorous to be led to safety), by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

The massed power of goodwill, the dynamic effect of intelligent and active understanding
and the potency of a trained and alive public opinion, which desires the greatest good
of the greatest number, are beyond belief. This dynamic power has never been employed.
It can today save the world.

Djwhal Khul

The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors,
that there will be no opposition from that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable
of comprehending the tremendous advantages, will bear its burden without complaint.

The Rothschild Brothers of London, 6/25/1863

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system,
for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Henry Ford

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system
of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy
of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks
of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at
in frequent private meetings and conferences.

Prof. Carroll Quigley, author of "Tragedy and Hope"

There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism
and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances,
and free from the law itself.

Daniel Inouye

We are on the verge of a global transformation.
All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.

David Rockefeller

If there was a class war, my class won.

Warren Buffett
World's 2nd Richest Man

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win the world
is for enough good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation
of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries.
In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states,
and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready
for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions
except rewarding the rich and waging war.

We are called to the fight of our lives.

Bill Moyers

Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants,
it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants.
A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop.
If such a government ever lets the fear subside
and rational thought return to the populace,
that government is finished.

Michael Rivero

The Mysteries of Life speak to those who are willing to listen.

Longwalker

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

A. J. Muste

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

Langston Hughes

Only the things the dreamers make live on. They are the eternal conquerors.

Herbert Kaufman

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once.
Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance,
how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is;
I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action!
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...
the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil,
but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what Light is.

Albert Einstein

Find out just what the people will submit to, and you have found out
the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
And these impositions will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed only by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglas

The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.'
We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording:
'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:
the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong.
We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.

Mark Twain

The illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others.

Marcus Tullius Cicero
#1 of his Six Mistakes of Man

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Galileo Galilei

Beware of the words 'internal security,'
for they are the eternal cry of the oppressor.

Voltaire

Insanity in individuals is something rare
but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

None are more hopelessly enslaved
than those who falsely believe they are free.

Johan von Goethe

The ultimate test of a moral society
is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When the rich make war it is the poor who die.

Jean Paul Sartre

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

There's a little Hitler in all of us.

Mother Teresa

If there is light in the soul,
There will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person,
There will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house,
There will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
There will be peace in the world.

Chinese Proverb

Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore,
thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust
upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because
it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the
sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy-hearted
maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here
for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and,
at eventide, they greet shadowy returning spirits.

Chief Seattle

Wrong means can never establish right action.

Geshi Rimpoche

We have a duty to look after each other.
If we lose control of our government, then we lose our ability
to dispense justice and human kindness. Our first priority today, then,
is to defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us and our self-governance.

Doris Haddock

At its core, war is impoverishment.
War's genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts.
If we can realize that the world's liberation begins within those troubled hearts,
then we may yet find peace.

Kathy Kelly

Another world is not only possible, she's on her way.
And on a quiet day, if you listen carefully, you can hear her breathe.

Arundahti Roy

We gain strength and courage and confidence by each experience
in which we really stop to look fear in the face.
We must do that which we think we cannot.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I say we had better look our nation searchingly in the face,
like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.

The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves
and horrify despots.

Walt Whitman

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy,
the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese,
the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of
arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most
powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon.'
Need I say more?

Chris Rock

Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won,
the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military
would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore,
he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!

James Carville

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears,
Say firmly:
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
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!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

Original Mother's Day Proclamation
1870, Julia Ward Howe

Will a nation of men appear upon the face of the earth living by the spirit and the truth?
Will a time come when man will sit in glory at the right hand of life,
delighting in the brilliance of the day and the calm of the night?
Kahlil Gibran

Each human being that is able to find their core and live from it does more for our world
and our species than all our institutions, governments and religions combined.

It is wrong to start a war.

There is so much love. Can you feel it?
There is so much grace. Can you let it in?
There is so much peace beyond the pain,
the fear and the grasp of greed and might.
Will you let them melt your heart?

Mark Landau