"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Thoreau
September 11, 1973
"My words do not have bitterness but disappointment." He refused to resign. "I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever." - Salvador Allende
Allende asked Chile's workers to grasp the lesson: "foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their traditionThe people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated eitherThese are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason."
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson
For what is the crime of burglarizing a bank, compared with the crime of building one? --Bertolt Brecht
"I could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould, Wall Street financier, 1886
"After the first death, there is no other." - Dylan Thomas
"The US response to 9/11 has ushered in an epidemic of global terrorism that has claimed an estimated 72,265 lives since 2001."
There is a story about Henry David Thoreau who, as you may know, was jailed for civil disobedience for refusing to pay his federal taxes as a protest against slavery and the U.S. invasion of Mexico. While in prison, he was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson walked into the jail, approached Thoreau’s cell, and called out: “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau, without skipping a beat, retorted, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
“Our goal is to provide the workers the skills to self-organize and manage their workplace. While this takes time, we do our best to explain and educate workers on every part of the organizing process”.
Santayana said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret." ? - Thoreau.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. —James Baldwin
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” - Thomas Pynchon
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings".
"There's an old saw in the military that goes, 'Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.' And when it comes down to the essential elements of the Iraq war, the fight is about logistics." Robert Bryce
"A true friend stabs you in the front" --Oscar Wilde
“Almost anything you do [to help humanity] will seem insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it.” Mahatma Gandhi
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" --Mario Savio, the steps of Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, December 2, 1964
The organized effort of American industry to usurp government surpasses anything in modern history.From the use of psychology to spread truth has come the use of organized gathering of news to guide public opinion, then to deliberately mislead it by scientific advertising and propaganda. Mass capitalistic control of books and periodicals, news gathering and distribution, radio, cinema, and television has made the throttling of democracy possible and the distortion of education and failure of justice widespread. -W.E.B. DuBois 1953
H L Mencken wrote, "The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."
"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Oscar Wilde, An Ideal husband, 1893
"Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all." -- Maximilien Robespierre
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." - June Jordan
If we are always guided by other people’s thoughts, what’s the good of having our own? -- Oscar Wilde from “A Good Woman”
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” - Helen Keller
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"What is capital punishment if not the most premeditated of murders to which no criminal act, no matter how calculated, can be compared."-- Albert Camus
"We need to acknowledge, if we are thoughtful people, that terror is everywhere, and has been with us always, and involves all kind of people who later get called men of peace.'"- P. Sabin Willett
EVERY EXPERIENCED politician knows the axiom: He who chooses the members of a commission determines its conclusions in advance.
"It is easy to see that the rich have a great distaste for their country's democratic institutions," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic 19th century treatise, Democracy in America. "The people are a power whom they fear and scorn."
Molly Ivins writing in January 2006, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation.”
"I turned down the OBE because it's not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who've got it. It's all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest." - Ken Loach
Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all. Maximilien Robespierre
In what turned out to be his final performances, Bruce took to reciting (with a thick German accent) lines from a poem by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton — a meditation on the high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. “My defense? I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distances with missiles? Without ever seeing what you’d done to them?” - Lenny Bruce
"We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognises justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with...the other nations of the world. The first step to this end is to develop peace and goodwill within our borders, by training our youth of both sexes to its practice as their habit of life, so that the jealousies of town against town, class against class and sect against sect no longer exist; and then to extend this good feeling beyond our frontiers towards our neighbours." Lord Baden-Powell
"In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the population into concentration camps and turn the country into a wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do that. Let ME do it.'"
Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost Authority."
"it takes two to speak the truth, one to speak and another to hear"
- henry david thoreau
“. . . the ever memorable and blessed Revolution…A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” -- Mark Twain
Human Rights
It has been said, "if you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are." Let us understand that to live is a human right. We have a right not to be killed; others have also have a right not to be killed.
