:: WISDOM ::
[ A ]Society is like a stew, if you don't keep it stirred all the scum settles on the top.
A child can ask a thousand questions that the wisest man cannot answer.
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
... nature's God commands the slave to rise, and on th' oppressor's head to break his chain.
Smooth seas do not make for a skillful sailor.
The full-bellied child says to the hungry child, "Keep good cheer."
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.
Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
It is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog! When you do not listen to your conscience it's because you do not want advice from a stranger. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic. He who has no fire in himself cannot warm others. Find a niche and scratch it.
Let men be on their guard against those who flatter and mislead the multitude: their actions prove what sort of men they are. Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principle instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary as their leader. A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
If voting could change the system, it would be illegal.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
An unjust law is no law at all. [ B ]Action is the antidote to despair. You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live now.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
Your brain has a mind of its own.
It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
A single decision by the chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell has a greater impact on the health of the planet than all the coffee-ground-composting, organic-cotton-wearing eco-freaks gathering in Washington D.C., for Earth Day festivities this weekend.
In addition, our nuclear adventurism over 57 years has saturated the planet with nuclear garbage from testing, from explosions in high altitudes (four of these), from 103 nuclear power plants, from nuclear weapons factories that can't be cleaned up - and so on. Because of myopic leadership, of greed for possessions, a public chained to corporate media, there has been virtually no response to these realities ...
Corporation, n. An ingeneous device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made.
There are two ways of meeting difficulties. You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them.
Politicians are swine. You cannot reason with swine. You must hit them on the nose with a stick.
The reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself.
Adulthood was invented to repair the wounds of childhood.
All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
War is not nice.
I never apologize for the United States of America, I don't care what the facts are.
There ought to be limits to freedom.
I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long. - Smedley D. Butler (Major General - U.S. Marines) [ C ]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.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
A committee takes hours to put into minutes what can be done in seconds.
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that was going on inside himself.
A man grows most tired while standing still.
But, that's the whole point of corporatization -- to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run -- which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything -- are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Democracy can and must be about more than voting every four years on which gang of pirates you want to be robbed by.
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then you will find that money cannot be eaten.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. [ D ]The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder. Why are they destroying their homes? (Attica Prison Uprising)
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Old age is no place for sissies.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Republicans and Democrates are simply two adjoining cheeks of the same ass. They need each other.
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [ E ]Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.
The world cannot get out of its current state of crisis with the same thinking that got it there in the first place. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
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.
People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.
To the fervent proponents of ruthless corporate capitalism I say: make a millionaire CEO live as a poor sweatshop worker in Indonesia for one month and then ask him about the merits of the world economic system ... [ F ]They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
You are not what you own. [ G ]It is necessary to say no to the identification of reality with fate, to this fatalistic idea, which is being disseminated universally now like poison gas, which identifies what is with what will be. One must claim the right and the duty of imagining the future, instead of accepting it.
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy?
Why of course the people don't want war ... 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 to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during the war. A thousand times rather would I die calling to the people of America to refuse to be obedient ... than I should ever give my voice in justification of war, except the one war of all the peoples against their despots and exploiters - the Social Revolution.
Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love ... Above all, always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world. [ H ]Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
The person who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.
What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it. It keeps him upright.
If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
The question is not 'Can you make a difference?' You already do make a difference. It's just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make, during your life on this planet.
Help thy brother's boat across, and lo! Thine own has reached the shore.
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.
It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it. [ J ]There is absolutely no good or evil in the world. There is only self interest, and in some cases, enlightened self interest ...
We must crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to bid defiance to the laws of our country. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. The patronage of public office should no longer be confided to one who uses it for active opposition to the National Will. I fear for my country when I consider that God is just.
I guess, in some ways, one could say that we have a free press. It's free from any accuracy, journalistic integrity and investigative talent.
And if the blind guide the blind, both will fall into a pit.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Educate yourself for the coming conflicts. [ K ]I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!
Fighting crime by building more jails is like fighting cancer by building more cemeteries.
Don't agonize. Organize.
It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The definition of a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.
It's important to watch what you put in your mind. [ L ]The more laws and order are made prominent,
Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. [ M ]The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
The only possible alternative to being the oppressed or the oppressor is voluntary cooperation for the greatest good of all.
I slip away to a corner of the dawn, and I light my pipe and uncertainty. Then I hear myself, clearly, saying to myself: "Perhaps not. ... but perhaps yes ..."
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose.
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.
No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
People just need brains.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud. What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
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.
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.
Canadians are the house slaves of the American empire and Latin Americans are the field slaves.
You reach a certain point that, when you've been through enough crap, you know what you want when you see it.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. [ N ]We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge and wisdom.
The immense hold which ignorance, indifference and inertia have over men's lives is not due in the main to any deficiency in human nature, but to the deliberate, determined efforts of ruling minorities to maintain their authority and perpetuate their power.
"First They Came For ..." "In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. [ O ]Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. [ P ]It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. The world would ferment with revolution.
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?
Government began in tyranny and force, began in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest, and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way, like a thunderstorm, against the organized selfishness of human nature.
You see, without real dissent - that is, dissent that makes us sceptical of what governments say, dissent that exposes cultural conformity - we lose freedom: not all at once, but bit by bit, so that we barely notice it slipping away.
Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.
Just because everything's different doesn't mean anything's changed.
Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up, because they're looking for ideas.
You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again. [ R ]You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Facts are stupid things.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. [ S ]Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The proverb warns that “You should not bite the hand that feeds you.” But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
A lot of what children go through is because you adults don't carry the burden yourself. A lot of what children's hurt feelings are about is how the parents react.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.
O, it is excellent
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since. I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.
Sanity is a cozy lie.
If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race.
The way to stop war is to stop going to war; stop supporting it and it will fall, just as slavery did, just as the Inquisition did.
The people who vote decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
The amount of superstition is not much changed, but it now attaches to politics, not to religion.
He whom many fear, has himself many to fear. [ T ]For in [the Romans] is an arrogance which no submission or good behaviour can escape. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of `government'; they create a desolation and call it peace.
The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up.
When the ice on the razor wire starts to look pretty, you’ve been in prison too long.
Policemen and politicians ... are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum ... everywhere in America. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The most important thing schools teach children today is: You can be anything you want as long as it isn’t different. [ U ]Don’t be what you isn’t, just be what you is, because if you is what you isn’t, then you isn’t what you is. [ V ]The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crime. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. [ W ]No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've obviously never been in bed with a mosquito.
Years ago fairy tales all began with "Once upon a time...", now we know they all begin with, "If I am elected ..."
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
Power is always insolent and despotic.
We praise soldiers for doing by deceit and treachery what would meet with capital punishment among civilians.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
Often the best thing about not saying anything is that it can't be repeated.
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
On democracy versus dictatorship: "I don't find gang rape any better than individual rape."
Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?
You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. [ X ]If we don't stand for something, we may fall for anything. [ Y ]If age imparted wisdom, there wouldn't be any old fools. [ Z ]I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. |
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