Massive quote dump

[Cain]

FREEDOM



"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

— Justice Louis D. Brandeis



"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."

— A. J. Liebling



"A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history."

— Peter Smith, from Ways of Seeing (p. 33)



"Warriors never tolerate enslavement to anyone or anything."

— Forrest E. Morgan



"All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury are laughed at."

— Spinoza



"Men may be without restraints upon their liberty; they may pass to and fro at pleasure; but if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators — who should say that they are free?"

— Sir Thomas May



"Being socially proper is more important than possessing a fresh, uncompromised soul. Being acceptable to our neighbors is often more important than being acceptable to ourselves. The price of freedom is often rejection, even banishment."

— Gerry Spence



"A man without privacy is a man without dignity."

— Sir Zelman Cowen



"The Internet watches you while you're sleeping."

— From Mad TV's "Reading Railroad"



"If science produces no better fruits than tyranny . . . I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest, and estimable as our neighboring savages are."

— Thomas Jefferson, 1812



"A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police . . . such a state of society cannot long endure."

— Winston Churchill



"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?"

— Patrick Henry



"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

— George Bernard Shaw



"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

— Benjamin Franklin



"Anyone who surrenders his arms because of a cry for public safety does not deserve freedom . . . No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms . . . Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes."

— Thomas Jefferson



"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. To ensure peace, security, and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."

— George Washington



"Prohibition . . . goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes . . . A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

— Abraham Lincoln



"When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."

— anonymous



"Assassination: the extreme form of censorship."

— George Bernard Shaw



"The rights of man, that Thomas Paine defended, were being assailed on every hand by selfishness, ambition, and tyranny."

— Manly P. Hall



"200 years ago, a gentleman carried a pistol with him wherever he went, and many respectable folks carried big knives as well. Our founding fathers grew vast fields of hemp, and cannabis was widely used for medicinal purposes. Carrying arms and smoking weed were socially acceptable activities. Nowadays, if you are 'stopped and frisked' and an unlicenced derringer or a well-packed bowl is found, you'll be branded as a criminal deviant and locked in a cage. Our rights of self-defense and self-medication have been stripped from us, and these unjust 'laws' will be enforced with physical violence."

— anonymous (RWT)



"The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."

— St. George Tucker, from Blackstone's Commentaries (1803)



"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

— Wendell Phillips (1852)



"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? . . . I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

— Patrick Henry



"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack . . . The U.S. Constitution was written by men who had just been through a long, incredibly nasty war. They did not consider the Bill of Rights a frivolous luxury, to be in force only in times of peace and prosperity, put aside when the going gets tough."

— Molly Ivins



"The Swiss are most armed and most free."

— Machiavelli



"I don't agree with what you're saying — but I'll die for your right to say it."

— Bob Franks



"Today, those who enjoy the greatest freedom are those who have the wherewithal to buy it. At last, even freedom, has become a commodity, indeed, an item of luxury."

— Gerry Spense



"The great and direct end of government is liberty. Secure our liberties and privileges, and the end of government is answered. If this be not effectively done, government is an evil."

— Patrick Henry, speech against the U.S. Constitution, June 25, 1788



"We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never heard a real American talk in that manner."

— Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, January 12, 1938



"If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist."

— Hagbard Celine



"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature."

— Samuel Adams



"'Necessity' is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

— William Pitt (1783)



"In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere."

— Abraham Lincoln



"I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction."

— Ayn Rand, from Anthem



"Freedom is fragile and must be protected.   To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."

— Germaine Greer



"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds."

— Pearl Buck, from What America Means to Me



"There are only two kinds of freedom in the world: the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions."

— Anais Nin



"When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."

— Edith Hamilton, from The Greek Way



"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."

— Mary McCarthy



"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority."

— Ayn Rand, from The Virtue of Selfishness



"Despite the global nature of the World Wide Web, Washington is obsessed with finding ways to monitor and control it. Apparently the free flow of news, opinions and information makes politicians, bureaucrats and law enforcement officials nervous. . . . The purpose of this propaganda campaign is obvious — to create public support for government regulation of the Internet, including the power to monitor all transmissions and shut down those it deems offensive. . . . The corporate media has responded with lurid stories about online child molesters trolling for young victims, pedophiles swapping digital kiddie porn, and international criminals using encrypted e-mails to plot worldwide reigns of terror."

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (p. 161)



"It was the spirit of liberty which made our American civilization. That spirit made the Constitution. If that spirit is gone the Constitution is gone, even though its words remain. . . . Whatever that change may be, it must be clear of those confusions which impair the great safeguards of human liberty. There must never be confusion in the Bill of Rights, the balance of power, local government, and a government of laws, not of men."

— Herbert Hoover



"We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books anymore, though we are literate."

— Neal Stephenson, from In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (p. 53)



"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

— John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty



"When liberty is gone,

Life grows insipid and has lost its relish."

— Joseph Addison



"You have plenty of rights in this country, provided you don't get caught exercising them."

— Terry Mitchell, from The Revolutionary Toker



"He that has gone so far as to cut the claws of the lion will not feel himself quite secure until he has also drawn his teeth."

— Charles Caleb Colton (1825)



"To make one's own rules is the highest freedom."

— Martin Heidigger



"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery . . ."

— Bob Marley

[Cain]

PATRIOTISM:



"All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country."

— Hermann Goering



"We must guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism, especially that patriotism which is the last refuge of scoundrels and which is so prevalent, so professional, and so well paid nowadays."

— George Seldes (1938)



"America's become a place where they wave a flag at you and expect your brains to go out the window."

— from an old copy of Whisper



"No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach."

— W. C. Brann, The Iconoclast



"How can a man be said to have a country when he has no right to a square inch of it?"

— Henry George, Social Problems



"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

— Johnson (Boswell's Life for the year 1775)



"A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.

A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.

So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote."

— William Butler Yeats



"Here's a good example of how the meaning of a word can change drastically over time. Fifty years ago, a 'patriotic' individual was perceived as someone, usually a former serviceman, who loved their country, flew the flag on national holidays, and was proud to sing the National Anthem. Nowadays, however, the word 'patriot' implies that someone is a violently deranged, ultra-right-wing fanatic with a stockpile of illegal weapons and a seething hatred for minorities, foreigners, liberals, teenagers, and the Federal Government. It has become an accusation rather than a compliment."

— anonymous (RWT)



"The budget should be balanced. Public debt should be curtailed. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt."

— Cicero (110 B.C.)



"The great fear in the hearts of these men of all nationalities was the same — the dread of awakening to the Individual Spirit within them through which they would see that all their cherished patriotic ideals were no more than a deadly tissue of dreams."

— Trevor Ravenscroft, from The Spear of Destiny (p. 137)



"To some people, not only was my book out of order, my whole life was out of order — there was something unpatriotic, subversive, dangerous, in my criticism of so much that went on in this society."

— Howard Zinn, from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (p. 3)



"We should behave toward our country as women behave toward the men they love. A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing and trying to improve him. We should cast the same affectionate but sharp glance at our country."

— J. B. Priestley



"It's kinda difficult to be patriotic when our 'elected officials' keep pissing on our heads and tell us it's raining."

— anonymous (RWT)



"American patriotism is generally something that amuses Europeans, I suppose because children look idiotic saluting the flag and because the constitution contains so many cracks through which the lawyers may creep."

— Katharine Whitehorn



"It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches."

— George Sand (1863)



"I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness."

— Paule Marshall



"When fascism comes to this country, it's going to be wrapped in an American flag."

— Huey Long (early 1930's)



"A machine organization took charge of the fountains of public information, supervised the molding of mass psychology, and saw that the people were permitted to read only such statements as would inflame their minds with warlike frenzy and kindle their hatred of the foe."

— Stanton A. Coblentz, from From Arrow to Atom Bomb (p. 394)



"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 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."

— from the Declaration of Independence, 1776



"It's an obscene comparison, but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of patriotism put around your neck."

— Dan Rather



"We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will."

— George Orwell, from 1984



"A free people must have a government that embodies the ideals of that people. . . . A suicidal national government, a government that seems bent on devouring its people rather than nurturing them, forfeits our allegiance."

— Ernest Callenbach, from Ecotopia Emerging (pg. 252)



"As for the Pledge of Allegiance, I choose not to say it. I salute the flag each morning as a symbol of what this country is supposed to be, but I can't say the Pledge. I am sorry to say that I don't believe this country offers liberty and justice for all. I will continue to work toward that end, but until I see it happening, I will not say the Pledge."

— "Ms. Finney," from The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, by Paula Danzinger (p. 111)



"While you may be pledging allegiance to some noble idea, don't let that blind you to the fact that your cherished group, organization, or country may also have a questionable and immoral history as well."

— Wallace Wang, from Steal This Computer Book 3 (p. 60)



"The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor — to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable. And we should forever forget that old phrase — 'my country, right or wrong, my country!'"

— Mark Twain

[Cain]

PARANOIA



"The problem with any group is that if you do not belong, it becomes a 'they.' The word itself has power, a collective authority: for some mysterious reason, 'they say' carries more weight than 'we say.' 'They' provokes unease, if not paranoia ('They're out to get me.')."

— Christine Andreae, from Grizzly (p. 108)



"We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptions are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance — and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yey to bring such piece in — in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck."

— Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, June 16th, 1858



"It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you."

— unknown



"It's not paranoia, that's not it. But I watch people."

— anonymous, from Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know (p. 167)



"Every friend can be a potential enemy, and every enemy a potential friend."

— unknown



"I learned long ago that the only person I could count on was myself."

— unknown



"Offer not your right hand easily to anyone."

— Pythagoras



"Paranoia is a state of heightened awareness. Most people are persecuted beyond their wildest delusions."

— Claude Steiner



"Don't trust, don't beg, don't fear."

— Spetsnaz credo (originated in Soviet prisons centuries ago



"Everyone and everything was feared. The neighbors in your building, the caretaker in your building, your own children. People lived in fear of their co-workers, those above them, those beneath them, and those on the same level. They feared oversights or mistakes on the job, but even more they feared being too successful, standing out."

— Ovesyenko, on Stalin's Great Purge



"I say it has gone too far. We are dividing into the hunted and the hunters. There is loose in the United States today the same evil that once split Salem Village between the bewitched and the accused and stole men's reason quite away. We are informers to the secret police. Honest men are spying on their neighbors for patriotism's sake. We may be sure that for every honest man two dishonest ones are spying for personal advancement today and ten will be spying for pay next year."

— Bernard De Voto (1949)



"Drink nothing without seeing it; sign nothing without reading it."

— Spanish proverb



"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

— Arthur Bloch



"If They want to take you out discretely, They likely won't shoot you with a sniper rifle or plant a bomb under your car — not when it's so much simpler just to either run you over or bump you off the road. If you live in the city, perhaps you'll be fatally 'mugged.' Maybe your bedroom will fill up with ether one night — it'll knock you right out, and the fire will eliminate any evidence. If They want to discredit you, a syringe full of cocaine hydrochloride solution squirted up your nostril will make your heart explode within minutes — or They could substitute a massive dose of LSD to fry your brains and land you in an institution. If They really want to get nasty, They've been known to contaminate cushions and mattresses with plutonium dust and spray the contents of refrigerators with concentrated pesticide — this can result in liver failure or rare forms of cancer, and an overworked medical examiner will likely attribute your untimely death to natural causes."

— Jake Bishop



"Project Coast included the development of a bizarre range of biological agents and delivery systems for individual murders that would have been the envy of the Borgias. There were cholera organisms by the millions and anthrax planted in the gum of envelopes, into the filters of cigarettes, and inside chocolates. There was thallium and ricin and organo-phosphates; there was snake venom, paratyphoid, Plague, Hepatitis A, HIV, and the terrible Ebola and Marburg viruses. There was botulinum toxin secreted inside beer bottles and Salmonella germs hidden in sugar. Most of the 'bugs' were freeze-dried, where possible, for more effective use."

— Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, from Plague Wars (p, 255)



"The toxic information is spreading. There's no way to contain it. Your only choice is to destroy the credibility of that person. You have to put a stain on his character. And what's the worst stain a guy can have right now? Being linked to terrorism. So you blow up the guy's house and say it was a bomb factory. . . . Even if the guy survives, no one will ever believe him."

— Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac (p, 219)



"The informants changed the entire culture of the movement, it started out very open and trusting, but, after we realized we had been infiltrated, people became paranoid, fearful, and distrustful. Before too long, the movement became just like the society it was protesting."

— Stew Albert, in reference to the peace movement of the 60s



"Particularly significant has been the high-level penetration we have achieved of Klan organizations. At the present time, there are 14 Klan groups in existence. We have penetrated every one of them through informants (and) currently are operating informants in top-level positions of leadership in seven of them."

— excerpted from a letter from the FBI to a White House assistant, dated September 2. 1965



". . . according to criminal justice experts, many of the people who have been convicted on drug charges are innocent. The pressure to snitch is so great that a large number of informants simply make up accusations against friends, associates — even family members — to escape the long mandatory minimum sentences."

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (pp. 195-196)



"There is no War on Crime. There is no War on Drugs. There is no War on Terrorism. There is no War on Youth Violence. There is only the ongoing effort by the federal government to collect as much information on as many people as possible. Domestic law enforcement initiatives are merely excuses to increase the amount of spying on the American people."

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (p. 60)



"By the end of the school year which included the Columbine shootings, over 3 million students had been suspended or expelled, many for doing or saying things which had never been considered a problem before. . . . During the last few weeks of the school year, American Civil Liberties Union offices across the nation were swamped with complaints from students and their parents. . . . many schools across the country spent the summer months developing new snitch programs. . . . A category called 'Early Warning Signs of Violence' urges parents and students to turn in students for such normal adolescent behavior as 'social withdrawal' and 'low interest in school.'. . . Students who express 'intolerance for difference or prejudicial attitudes' are also supposed to be reported, along with any who have 'inappropriate access to, possession of and use of firearms.'"

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (pp. 135-137)



"Once an entry is made into official computer files, nothing can dislodge it."

— from the San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1993



"Even if you use a file-shredding program consistently, law enforcement officials can always use a variety of computer forensic tools to pry out any secrets your deleted files may be hiding. So how can you protect your computer from their prying eyes? Basically, you can't. While you can make recovering data harder by periodically purging your cache directory and only storing files on removable disks (such as floppy or ZIP disks) and physically destroying them afterwards, just remember that everything you do on your computer can be recovered and examined later."

— Wallace Wang, from Steal This Computer Book 3 (p. 260)



"Observe the street prior to leaving home to see if your house is being watched. . . . When checking to determine if you are being followed, do not turn around in a conspicuous manner. Instead, casually glance to the rear while crossing the street, lighting a cigarette, unfolding a newspaper, entering or leaving a shop."

— from Total Resistance by Major H. Von Dach (p. 113)



"The material to be passes would be placed in a magnetic key box, the kind you can buy at any auto parts store. To load the drop, you just stuck the magnetic box to the underside of the pay phone's shelf while making a call or looking up a number. The box is always stuck in a predetermined spot on the shelf. . . . The 'loader' makes his 'load' signal as he departs. . . . No one needs to know the identity of anyone else, especially between cells, and in the event of capture and interrogation, it helps minimize the knowledge any one operator can give up."

— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (p. 132)



"If you find a listening device or something you think might be, first of all, leave it alone for now. Don't say anything to alert the listener that you have found it. . . . never assume that it is the only one. Always assume that there are others. . . . Look for surveillance vans. Is there always a van parked near you? Or a panel truck or a pickup with a camper? . . . If you see a van pull up and stop, watch it for a while. If the driver doesn't get out and go somewhere, then someone is probably watching someone. Use binoculars to watch them, but don't let them see you. See if they seem to be there in shifts."

— M. L. Shannon, from Don't Bug Me (pp. 44-45, 69)



"You should be wary of unanticipated, odd-shaped, or odd-colored packages mailed to you. These may be devices used by someone who is trying to identify you — you would be easy to spot walking out of the building with this unusual package."

— anonymous, from New I.D. in America (p. 55)



"The tactics by law enforcement agencies in the past have been to arrest these high profile artists on gun violations. Leaving them in a 'Catch-22' situation to violate parole by defending themselves. Or leaving them defenseless, making them easy prey . . ."

— Mutulu Shakur



". . . this heightened vigilance can become paranoia. In this state a man's perceptions are amplified like an overloaded electronic system. We start to short-circuit. We experience danger where there is none, or exaggerate present dangers."

— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (p. 111)



"On Monday, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a terrorism warning asking all Americans to be on high alert this week. Then on Friday, he announced that the period of high alert would be extended indefinitely. I think I speak for all Americans when I say, 'Bitch, I can't be any more alert than I already am, okay?' I'm opening my mail with salad tongs; I take my passport in the shower with me; I am watching so much CNN I am having sex dreams about Wolf Blitzer."

— Tina Fey, on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update"



"Every family in Amerika should prepare themselves for terrorist attack."

— Tom Ridge, extolling the virtues of plastic wrap and duct tape (as well as promoting hysteria) on a recent Department of Heimland Defense television commercial



". . . she was terribly frightened, already depressed, acutely conscious of all her physiological processes, and imagining all sorts of things. That's the way it always begins. If you become acutely conscious of your visceral organs and functions — heart, kidneys, respiration — no matter how sound they are, they'll soon begin to bother you. Add ordinary fear, and you'll be ill. Add superstitious terror, and you'll crack up completely."

— William Seabrook, from Witchcraft (p. 93)



"My own information is that the IMF and World Bank were taken over by a space alien named Larry. It's obvious that 'Larry' Summers, once World Bank chief economist, later US Treasury Secretary, is in reality a platoon of extraterrestrials sent here to turn much of the human race into a source of cheap protein."

— Greg Palast, from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (p. 48)



"I love my country, but I fear my government."

— seen on a bumpersticker



"Evil beings can create an aura of peace around themselves and their homes. It is not a real peace, but a projection, done intentionally so as to encourage others to relax in their presence and trust them. Other evil ones have no charisma at all. They may be so dull, so lifeless, as to be remarkable only for their drabness. This keeps them hidden. . . . Religion is often a cover for evil. What safer disguise for evil than to present itself as a nun, a missionary? . . . Anyone can be evil, and no-one and nothing is beyond evil's reach. Our naive attitude regarding particular religions and certain professions, such as counselors, those who give free meals to the homeless, and other apparently blameless endeavors, gets us into trouble all the time."

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (pp. 72-74)



"Man is engaged all his life in bitter warfare with a million energies that conspire to kill him. Let him rest upon his weapons, let him relax his vigilance, let him commit his defense to the Power that has organized the attacking forces, and he is gone."

— Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil's Advocate



"Everyone is a killer

I look at all of them now

I search out their eyes

I let them know that I'll kill them back

They take one look and they know I mean it

I lock the door behind me

Everything that moves begs me to attack it . . .

Now I walk the streets like a secret animal . . .

The one who fucks with me

Will lose his throat

He'll have no idea what he's fucking with

I live on the outskirts of humanity

I am scarred for the rest of my time here

That's all it is to me

Time left here

Time spent walking the city filth

Breathing in and out and keeping my teeth sharp

Waiting for something horrible to happen again."

— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (pp. 147-148)

[Cain]

DEFIANCE



"A rebel is simply someone who says "no.""

— Camus



"One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

— Bertrand Russell



"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson



"What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; th' unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield."

— Milton, from Paradise Lost



"They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards."

— General Creighton W. Abrams



"I've got 'em right where I want 'em — surrounded from the inside."

— Sgt 1at Class Jerry "Mad Dog" Shriver



"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."

— Noah Webster (1888)



"We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt



"I'd rather die,

Than give you control!"

— Trent Reznor, from "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails



"You'll never take me alive, coppers!"

— paraphrased from innumerable low-budget gangster movies



"More than 2,000 heavily armed German soldiers and police were backed by tanks and artillery. The 700 to 750 ghetto fighters had a few dozen pistols and hand grenades. Yet in three days of street battles, the Germans were unable to defeat the Jewish combatants."

— from a plaque at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum



"Whenever the 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 (1690)



"Don't believe the Church and State, and everything they tell you;

Believe in Me, I'm with the High Command . . ."

— from "Silent Running," by Mike and the Mechanics



"A poet will even face death when he sees his people oppressed."

— Carolina Maria de Jesus



"I always slept in my clothes, for I never knew what might happen. Not even my incarceration in a damp underground dungeon will make me give up the fight in which I am engaged for liberty and for the rights of the working people. To be shut from the sunlight is not pleasant but . . . I shall stand firm. To be in prison is no disgrace."

— Mother Jones



"There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive."

— Harriet Tubman



"No-one attacks me with impunity."

— motto of Scotland, as well as the "Order of the Thistle"



"Go ahead! Send your ninjas against me! I got sumpthin' for 'em . . ."

— Jazzman, into a phone he believed was tapped, on a really bad day



"There are approximately 20,000 high-speed pursuits each year — of these, 40% terminate when the fleeing suspect crashes his vehicle. Every day, an average of one fleeing suspect dies as a result of his vehicle crashing."

— statistics provided by The Learning Channel (paraphrased)



"Mandatory gun registration would make instant criminals out of millions of law-abiding citizens. Confiscation laws could lead to civil war. The American people own more than 250 million handguns and rifles of all kinds, including hundreds of thousands of fully automatic machine guns. Firearms can be found in nearly half of all households, with a large share in rural areas. Many gun owners would undoubtedly refuse to go along with such laws."

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (p. 231)



"Whoever lays their hand on me is a usurper and a tyrant; I declare them to be my enemy . . . government is slavery. Its laws are cobwebs for the rich and chains of steel for the poor. To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is in every action and transaction to be registered, stamped, taxed, patented, licensed, assessed, measured, reprimanded, corrected, frustrated. Under pretext of the public good it is to be exploited, monopolized, embezzled, robbed, and then, at the least protest or word of complaint, to be fined, harassed, vilified, beaten up, bludgeoned, disarmed, judged, condemned, imprisoned, shot garroted, deported, sold, betrayed, swindled, deceived, outraged dishonoured, that's government, that's its justice, that's its morality!"

— Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1848, Paris)



"If their assaults be verbal, their defense must be likewise verbal; if the sword be drawn against them, they may also take up arms and fight either with tongue or hand, as occasion is: yea, if they be assailed by surprisals, they may also make use both of ambuscades and countermines . . ."

— "Junius Brutus" (Duplessis Mornay), from Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579)



"There are two chief motives which induce men to attack tyrannies — hatred and contempt. Hatred of tyrants is inevitable, and contempt is also a frequent cause of their destruction. . . . Even the friends of a tyrant will sometimes attack him out of contempt; for the confidence which he reposes in them breeds contempt . . ."

— Aristotle, from Politics Book V



"NEVER AGAIN!"

— J.D.L. Motto



"When you say, 'Jump!', we say, 'Go fuck yourself.'"

— seen on a button worn by a disgruntled employee



"With self-awareness emerging you can perceive the quality of sensory deadness television induces, the one-dimensionality of its narrowed information field, and arrive at an awareness of boredom. This leads ti channel switching at first and eventually to turning off the set. Any act that breaks immersion in the fantastic world of television is subversive to the medium, because without the immersion and addiction, its power is gone. Brainwashing ceases. As you watch advertising, you become enraged."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 311)



"Why are the people rebellious?—

Because those above them meddle in their lives

That's why they're rebellious"

— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 75



"QUESTION AUTHORITY"

— seen on a bumper sticker

[Cain]

"DIPLOMACY"



"Words are powerful tools for a warrior, for they literally shape our world. We therefore learn how a warrior approaches the correct use of words."

— Theun Mares



"Sometimes being responsible means pissing people off."

— Gen. Colin Powell



"Sit your punk ass down."

— good advice for incorrigible dipshits (often followed with the disparaging phrase, "you ain't shit")



"Why don't you step the fuck over here and say that to my face?"

— overheard prior to numerous punchouts



"I piss on your whole family from a very great height!"

— To feud, or not to feud?



"Fuck you, fuck your mother, and fuck your grandmother."

— overheard in an Irish pub, just prior to a full blown melee



"What is your major malfunction? Didn't your mommy pay enough attention to you when you were little?"

— the USMC DI from Full Metal Jacket (paraphrased).



"Awwww . . . I'm sorry! Did I hurt your widdle feelings?"

— attributed to a USN Chief Petty Officer



"Boy, I'd just soon kill you as not . . ."

— unknown Alabama State Trooper, with drawn sidearm, addressing a young man who'd just wrecked a stolen car and was contemplating fleeing into a swamp



"The only graceful way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved."

— Russell Lynes



"When you have nothing to say, say nothing; a weak defense strengthens your opponent, and silence is less injurious than a weak reply."

— Charles Caleb Colton



"Never forget the power of silence, the massively disconcerting pause that goes on and on may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously."

— Lance Morrow



"You start by saying no to requests. Then if you have to go to yes, OK. But if you start with yes, you can't go to no."

— Mildred Perlman



"Grasp the possibility that a truly tough and worthy competitor knows not only how to fight but also when to quit."

— Jeffery Z. Rubin



"If people wish for peace, they should cease the pin-pricks that precede cannon-shots."

— Napoleon Bonaparte



"You can avoid a lot of fights by realizing that the other guy isn't intentionally being an asshole by not seeing things your way. A sizable hunk of the time the guy literally can't understand what your point is. It's not that he's stupid, it's just that his brain operates along totally different lines."

— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Fists, Wits, and a Wicked Right (p. 57)



"Their eyes briefly met, then The Man smiled real fucking cool-like. He knew, and he knew that the boys knew that he knew. Real cool vibrations were in the air."

— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin' High, Livin' Free (p. 30)



"Matters of great concern should be treated lightly."

— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)



"At times of great trouble or disaster, one word will suffice. At times of happiness, too, one word will be enough. And when meeting or talking with others, one word will do. One should think well and then speak."

— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)



"He who overcomes men understands them."

— Lao Tse, from The Book of Tao, LXVIII (6th c. B.C.)



"You can't reason with a drunk. You can lie, bullshit, con, and trick one, but you can't reason with one."

— Marc MacYoung, from A Professional's Guide to Ending Violence Quickly (p. 205)



"To subdue an enemy without fighting is the greatest of skills."

— Sun Tzu, from Art of War



"Your greatest weapon is in your enemy's mind."

— Buddha



"If you want to hurt them . . .

Tell them the truth always

When you meet them

Stare deep into their eyes

Take those who wish to dominate you

Turn the game around and play it on them

Don't spare them a thing

Make sure you tell them about the blood and the pain

They can day what they want

You will trigger all their responses

It's all blood and death from here

You won't be kept waiting long."

— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (p. 141)

[Cain]

INCARCERATION



"We live in a society of laws. Break them and you face the consequences. Use force when you shouldn't, or use excessive force, and you may find yourself living with the very people you were trying to defend against."

— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 13)



"Record number of 6 million Americans incarcerated during 2001. 1 out of every 32 Americans is currently either incarcerated or under court mandated supervision."

— from CNN news ticker



"U.S. violent crime (excluding murder) at lowest rate since first tracked in 1973."

— from CNN news ticker



"Why, sho' I got probable cause to lock you up, Boy! Y'alls PROBABLE guilty CAUSE I sez you is."

— Sheriff Buford T. Justis



"I hereby sentence you to a term of no fewer than four years, to be served at a Federal pound-you-in-the-ass Prison."

— archetypical judge from a dream sequence near the end of Office Space



"When you take everything away from a human being, including his personal dignity, then he has nothing left to lose. He becomes extremely dangerous."

— Dr. John Salazar



". . . it is well known that there is an extraordinarily high death rate (even suicide rate) among all confined animals. This is especially true of the more intelligent ones, such as dolphins and monkeys. There is an even higher lethargy rate, as a visit to any zoo reveals."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 121)



"Unfortunately, the rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the right to imprison — or otherwise intimidate — anyone who violates any of the state's often new-minted crimes. . . . In the name of correctness, of good health, or even of God — a great harassment of the people-at-large is now going on. Although our state has not the power to intimidate any but small, weak countries, we can certainly throw most Americans in prison for violating the ever-increasing list of prohibitions."

— Gore Vidal, from Dreaming War (p. 175)



"Even if you come in with a real good charge on you, if you don't have friends Inside, you'll probably have to fight a couple of times. The charge doesn't always tell the story, so people test you. You don't have to win when you fight, but you have to keep fighting until somebody stops it. And if you come in without any friends, everybody watches you. They want to see what kind of a person you are. After they find out, different things happen, depending."

— Andrew Vachss, from The Getaway Man (p. 14)



"Jail is nothing more than a pain in the ass. The threat of being sent to jail is like threatening to send someone to his room. Often it is the cost of doing business. Many prefer staying in jail to facing the complexities of life in the world."

—Marc "Animal" MacYoung



"How would you like to be forced all the days of your life to sit beside a stinking, stupid wino every morning at breakfast? Or for some loud fool in his infinite ignorance to be at any moment able to say (slur), "Gimme a cigarette, man!" And I just look into his sleazy eyes and want to kill his ass there in front of God and everyone."

— Jack Henry Abbott



"Everyone has this badass attitude that made it very uncomfortable. Every single confrontation led to a fight. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide — you had to back up your words with violence."

— "Reymundo Sanchez," from My Bloody Life (p. 271)



"Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupies the cells."

— Bernard Shaw



"The most difficult part of prison to accept is that no-one in the system or out on the streets could care less what is happening to the human beings that are living in these places. No-one cares how you feel, no-one cares about your health or your state of mind."

— Harold S. Long



"One thing about prison labor: there is no shop steward or Labor Department to take a grievance to. If the foreman is pissed off at you and wants to spit at you or slap you or destroy your output, there's no a lot you can do about it."

— Sara Paretsky, from Hard Time (p. 396)



"When we were in jail, I met a lot of my enemies. And when they didn't have a gun, boy they were quiet . . . They can't hide in jail. You can't run and hide, let me tell you, you can't. There ain't no way."

— anonymous, from Wallbangin' (p. 159)



"Prison is so much more dangerous than the street that inmates must be ready at all times."

— Susan A. Phillips



"I was twenty when I went in, thirty-one when I come out. You don't count months and years — you don't do time that way. You gotta forget time; you gotta not give a fuck if you live or die. You gotta get to where nothin' means nothin'."

— James Caan, in Thief, Screenplay by Michael Mann



"It is unnatural and degrading to cage a man like a beast. It serves no purpose but to strip a man of his dignity, twisting him in an attempt to make him conform to the whims of a sick and blatently corrupt system. No good ever comes of this. Either the inmate assumes the identity of a beaten dog — afraid of his own shadow — or he is forced to protect his dignity with the threat of violence. Either way, the inmate becomes resentful, not respectful, of authority, and loses whatever respect he might've had for it as a direct result of his incarceration."

— anonymous (RWT)



"Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things."

— John Lame Deer



"They kept us blindfolded and would not allow us to speak. If we tried to speak they would hit us with the butt of a gun . . . We had our hands tied; escape was virtually impossible because we were so well guarded. We disrobed right down to our skivvies and we were barefoot . . ."

— William Lawrence, USN (POW 1967-1973)



"If punishment has no effect to diminish or prevent crime, then no danger would be incurred to dismiss our jailers and jurors and close our prison doors."

— Clarence S. Darrow



"Through a year or more of sensory and psychological deprivation, prisoners are stripped of their individual identities in order that compliant behavior patterns can be implanted, a process of mortification and depersonalization."

— Report on the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, John Howard Association Report, October 1987, (p. 1)



(The purpose of a HSU (High Security Unit) style facility is to)". . . reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient, self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves."

— from the ACLU sponsored report, Effects of Confinement in HSU, by Dr. Richard Korn



"Hitler instituted slave labor, which often was equivalent to execution. Laborers were routinely beaten to death or died of cold, untreated illness, or starvation. The penalty for 'loafing' or any refusal of work was hanging."

— Hershman & Lieb, from A Brotherhood of Tyrants (p. 186)



"Anybody out on the yard at night alone was shot. If you ran in the yard, you were shot. If you fought in the yard, both of you were shot, no warning. When shit happened in Folsom, they'd kill you on the spot, then sort things out later."

— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, on Folsom Federal Penitentiary's questionable policies during the early 70s, from Hell's Angel (p. 194)



"I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions — poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed — which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished."

— Howard Zinn, from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (p. 150)



"And remember, if 'Big Luther' tells you to 'touch yer toes,' just say NO . . ."

— Jazzman, just prior to a brother's sentencing



"The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught."

— Rachel Field, from All This and Heaven Too



"You have put me in here as a cub, but I will come out roaring like a lion, and I will make all hell howl!"

— Carry Nation (1901)



"Jail and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo — obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other."

— Angela Davis



"The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance than the character and mentality of the kept."

— Jessica Mitford, from Kind and Unusual Punishment



"Inmates live in fear. The informal organization of prison is a pecking order, with the stronger and better organized inmates preying on the weaker ones. This preying takes many forms, such as expropriation of food, tobacco, and other personal property. It can also involve sex . . ."

— Jack Luger, from Improvised Weapons in American Prisons (p. 20)



"With the passing of time, the criminal will forget the reason for his crime; it is best to execute him on the spot."

— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)



"You can get raped and killed here. Addicted and imprisoned. Saturated and intimidated. Isolated and condemned. You might not get what you deserve but you'll get something that hurts."

— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (p. 205)



"Stay out of jail."

— Alfred Hitchcock (advice to young writers)

[Cain]

POLICE STATE:



"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."

— Max Stirner



"We can't allow a locked-down surveillance society to be institutionalized by media-incited people or career-building politicians. We can't let the land of the free become 'Fortress America,' where what's left of liberty is frisked, x-rayed, fingerprinted, digitized, thermal-imaged, retina-scanned and strip-searched."

— Wayne LaPierre



"If its purpose is to create one of the highest crime rates in the world — and thus to provide permanent fodder for demagogues who decry crime and promise to do something about it — it is achieving that end. If its purpose is de facto repeal of the Bill of Rights, victory is in sight."

— Steven Duke, referring to the "War on Drugs" in an article submitted to National Review



"If an enemy were to call the local ATF office from a payphone and make an 'anonymous tip' falsely accusing you of having, say, a contraband MAC-10 locked in a hidden wall safe, do you really think that the armored ninja-commandos will politely ring your doorbell and ask if it is true? Highly doubtful. As similar cases have clearly shown, they'll probably wait until you're out of the house before busting down the door, shooting your dog, and demolishing the place with sledgehammers and prybars. Think you can sue for damages? Expect your grievance to be in the courts for years."

— Tony D.



"Simply put, the government's 'war on drugs' hysteria is a thinly disguised campaign to invade private homes, steal property and assert control over private citizens."

— Kenn Thomas



"If you (smoke marijuana) in this country you cease to have any human rights. They can manhandle you, imprison you, take your car, your home, your children . . ."

— Vlad the Inhaler



"The people who cut down the ganja are devils! Devils! If you dance, you are a dancer. If you pick up the garbage, you are a garbage man. If you do the devil's work, you are the devil."

— Rasta Tex



"Protective Custody is an act of care."

— the despicable Heinrich Himmler, attempting to veil the true nature of the Concentration Camps through propaganda



"CIA officials wanted the (Stinger) missiles to fall into the hands of terrorists. The downing of one or more commercial aircraft would justify their existence and expansion, as well as 'justifying' imposing draconian security measures upon the American people."

— Rodney Stich, from Defrauding America (p. 267)



"A frequent charge for sentencing innocent people to prison is charging them with the federal crime, misprision of felony. Anyone who knows of a federal crime and who does not promptly report it to a federal judge or other federal tribunal is guilty of this crime."

— Rodney Stich, from Defrauding America (p. 487)



"The federal government now has the audacity to say that members of a family are members of a conspiracy, little children are members of a conspiracy."

— Gerry Spense (in reference to the Weaver trial)



"The inescapable message of much of the material we have covered is that the FBI jeopardizes the whole system of freedom of expression which is the cornerstone of an open society . . . At worst it raises the specter of a police state . . . in essence the FBI conceives of itself as an instrument to prevent radical social change in America . . . the Bureau's view of its function leads it beyond data collection and into political warfare."

— Thomas I. Emerson, Yale Law Professor (1971)



"The constitution and all citizen's rights were immediately abolished. . . . Labor unions were outlawed and replaced by a fraudulent national union. Censorship and the total extinction of free speech were celebrated with great bonfires of books. Germany's prisons filled with those who had openly opposed Hitler; concentration camps would soon swallow the overflow."

— Hershman & Lieb, from A Brotherhood of Tyrants (p. 69)



"Comrades, we are not uncovering conspiracies, we are fabricating them. We are persecuting and killing people on the basis of unfounded and slanderous charges."

— Drovyanikov of the Leningrad NKVD (who was shortly thereafter executed for "treason"as a result of this statement)



"Very few people knew the real dimensions of what was happening. Most trials were secret and it was illegal to seek any information about them. The NKVD kept many imprisonments and executions hidden even from surviving family members, either by saying the arrested had been transferred or by claiming that the missing had been exiled without the right to send letters. Deaths due to torture were officially attributed to natural causes: murders were disguised as accidents or suicides."

— Hershman & Lieb, from A Brotherhood of Tyrants (pp. 113-114)



"I'd do as I please, act high-handed and regal,

'Cause when you're a G-Man there's nothing illegal."

— Harold Rome, from "The G-Man Song" (1937)



"Police, I learned over the years, are like soldiers, normally good-natured people, but part of a culture of obedience to orders and capable of brutal acts against anyone designated as 'the enemy."

— Howard Zinn, from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train



"Man's dominance is pathological. His control is compulsive and ill . . . Power is an unfortunate palliative for the insecure."

— Gerry Spense



"They would take you to a secret sub-basement of a military or government building, where they would methodically savage your body and brain with the latest 'advances' in torture methods, designed to inflict the maximum pain a human can tolerate without losing consciousness or dying, until you named all the other 'leftists' you knew. You would then be 'disappeared' from the face of the earth, and these men would pay a visit to everyone you had named."

— Michael Levine, on the estimated 25,000 desaparecidos of Argentina, from The Big White Lie (p. 29)



"The main enemies of the revolution were union leaders, student leaders, journalists, progressive clergy, political activists, and just ordinary Bolivians who happened to be in someone's gunsight. Thousands were herded into sports stadiums in a style reminiscent of the 1973 Chilean coup, from where special groups were selected for torture and execution."

— Michael Levine, on the "Cocaine Coup" masterminded by fugitive Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, from The Big White Lie (p. 59)



"If a skilled polygraph examiner wants you to fail, you fail. I don't care how truthful you think you are. One of the things you've got to be wary of is if they try to change questions at the last minute — if they try to make them so general in scope that you have to fail. They might say, for instance, 'Have you ever taken anything that doesn't belong to you since you've been (employed here)? You could fail if you once took home some paper clips or a pen. If . . . you already suspect that you're being set up, why even agree to a test that can only hurt you?"

— "Ken," a former government polygraph examiner



"So the inhabitants of Thessalonica were invited to games in the circus — seven thousand of them — and then the doors were closed and the soldiers were given the signal for a massacre. It took three hours, and at the end of that time all the citizens were dead."

— Colin Wilson, from A Criminal History of Mankind (p. 234)



"If science produces no better fruits than tyranny . . . I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighboring savages are."

— Thomas Jefferson (1812)



"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

— Henry L. Stimson



"The dream of every leader, whether a tyrannical despot or a benign prophet, is to regulate the behavior of his people."

— Colin Blakemore



"Yes, we can successfully overthrow the governments of Third World countries by means of covert operations, but we always replace those governments with repressive regimes. Their collective record of murder, torture, theft, and abuse is a disgrace to this country and everything we want it to stand for."

— Molly Ivins



"There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak."

— Edna Ferber, from A Kind of Magic



"But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power — they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it."

— Mary Stewart, from The Crystal Cave



"The war on crime has gotten to the point that all these offices are stuffed to the gills with resources. They have to justify their existence. They go out and make things crimes that weren't even crimes 10 years ago."

— Thomas Dillard



"The deal Tredwell cut with the government is typical of professional informants. He was not only paid a regular salary, but received bonuses for every bust he helped set up. In addition, as long as he was informing, the government allowed Tredwell to continue dealing drugs, and to break a number of other state and federal laws, too."

— United States of America v. Rance Preston, CR 92-155 RE, USDC Oregon



"Children will be instructed to report any unfriendly remarks made about the regime. The final goal is to have an informer (the child) in each family so that parents and sisters and brothers will be watched. . . . Attempts will be made to misrepresent and change history. Efforts will be made to degrade and neutralize all former democratic institutions and principles. . . . Such words as peace, freedom, democracy will be so twisted and distorted that the younger generation will no longer know what they really mean."

— Major H. von Dach, from Total Resistance (p. 135)



"Nothing is more offensive to the average citizen than the notion of children informing the authorities on their parents. Child-snitches are a tool of totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union. Americans generally regard the idea of the state using children to monitor their parents as morally repugnant, even though it happens all the time."

— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (p. 20)



"Arguing that criminals and terrorists were infesting the information superhighway, the government wants to wiretap every phone, computer, and fax machine."

— Jim Redden, in reference to Projects ECHELON and CARNIVORE, from Snitch Culture (p. 42)



"Putting surveillance cameras everywhere, monitoring random conversations, and turning local law-enforcement into black-armored tactical teams would be a lot more acceptable if the laws were just and government officials were trustworthy."

— Jake Bishop



"When we deny something, we create it — or at least, we create the conditions in which it can grow and flourish, precisely because there is no resistance. In Nazi Germany, it was not the resistance to fascism that allowed the spread of Anti-Semitism and led to the death camps, it was the widespread denial, the refusal to admit that such things could happen."

— Starhawk, from Dreaming the Dark (p. 98)



"One reason America has been moving so effortlessly into a post-constitutional, post-democratic era has been the willingness of the mass media to terrorize the public with stories and images of a country out of control. The work that more primitive societies once did with government ministries and state broadcasting is now done voluntarily, primarily by television networks. Programs glorifying extreme police actions are daily fare, sending the subliminal message that control by cop is a normal form of government and anesthetizing viewers against violence, much as is done with troops to ready them for battle."

— Sam Smith, from Progressive Review, September 21, 1999



"It's the militarization of Mayberry. This is unprecedented in American policing, and you have to ask yourself, what are the unintended consequences?"

— Peter Kraska



"The more a police officer thinks of himself as a soldier, the more likely he views the citizen as the enemy."

— James Fyfe



"The line between a free society and a police state is usually broached in small steps."

— Roger Pilon



". . . it has been proven beyond contradiction that the CIA were principal importers of Crack Cocaine and Cocaine period into the hood, initiating the newly created drug laws that were blatantly racially motivated to set into motion tactics of genocide to destroy and lock away our brothers and sisters for the rest of their lives."

— Mutulu Shakur



"COINTELPRO was out to do more than prevent a Communist menace from overtaking the United States, or keep the Black Power movement from burning down cities. COINTELPRO was out to obliterate its opposition and ruin the reputations of the people involved in the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the rock revolution."

— John Holmstrom



"Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting.. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death."

— leaked intelligence memorandum submitted for the record before the Senate Intelligence Committee on 26APR76



"He discovered that by boring into an individual's skull with a surgical pick and severing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain he could make the most troublesome patients docile. . . . In the 1950s the procedure's popularity continued and it became a tool, like the McCarthy hearings, to stamp out cultural undesirables. So accepted was its use for this purpose that the surgeon Walter Freeman, the most outspoken advocate for the procedure in the United States, wrote unashamedly that lobotomies 'made good American citizens' out of society's misfits, 'schizophrenics, homosexuals, and radicals.'"

— Michael Talbot, from The Holographic Universe (p. 4)



"The principal type of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation of a portion of the prefrontal lobe of the cortex. It recently has been having a certain vouge, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

— Norbert Wiener, from Cybernetics



"Don't resist an illegitimate arrest. You'll beat it in court if the arrest is improper, but you'll make it legitimate if you resist."

— E. X. Boozhie, from The Outlaw's Bible (p. 303)



"The golden rule of police interrogation is: absolutely nothing said by police interrogators will be the truth."

— Ragnar Benson, from Ragnar's Guide to Interviews, Investigations, and Interrogations (p. 56 — paraphrased)



"If you are scared, you are powerless. If you are always wondering when they are going to come and get you, your soul will wither away and your life of freedom will be meaningless."

— Sheldon Charrett, from The Modern Identity Changer (p. 124)



"There's a wonderful sense of duty and responsibility on the part of most people. Otherwise, the whole system fails. You can't do it by having a policeman at the door or having a truant officer check up on every employee to make sure they really are sick. You work on the basis of trust. That's how the world runs. And, when you don't have that trust, then the world comes apart."

— Richard DeVos



"The SS order was a state within a state, not subject to national law, with its own laws, courts, and judges. A curtain separated Himmler's empire from the outside world; other Germans, no matter how lofty their position, could not penetrate it. SS men were discouraged from contact with others. Concentration-camp guards could not be stationed near home, were shifted to new locations every three months, and could never be transferred to street duty."

— Dusty Sklar, from Gods and Men (p. 98)



"They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already got their police state."

— Gore Vidal, from Dreaming War (p. 192)



"They say that the people who listen to bugs for a living are all thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their mothers. That was the image I kept in my own mind. Some kind of balding, spare-tired paleface in wirerims, sitting at a desk, monitoring my life and worrying about the carburetor on his Chevette. I didn't care what he heard, because if he didn't know by now that I wasn't a terrorist, he'd never figure it out."

— Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac (pp. 125-126)



"While it appeared, in all of the pogroms, that decent people were tracking down bad ones in order to save the world from evil, precisely the opposite happened. In the tortures and murders, primary evil was the instigator because it was the beneficiary. The men and women who were jailed, ostracized, tortured and murdered for being witches were not the evil ones; the evil ones were behind these persecutions. . . . It was a banquet for evil, arranged by evil, and served up by the human race in a frenzy of fear and ignorance."

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (pp. 66-67)



"The final, and the desperate effort of any reactionary regime to preserve the economic-financial status-quo, can be called Fascism provided it acts according to the Fascist pattern — and that means, that to be Fascist it must employ violence, it must use armed force, it must if necessary impose itself through armed seizure of power and armed maintenance of power. This has been proved true elsewhere; it is the pattern for Fascism in America. . . . It is always money and power that control Fascism. The backers of Fascism everywhere are the industrialists, manufacturers, big businessmen, the bankers."

— George Seldes (1938)



"Nothing was so frequently discoursed of as the propriety of employing, for a good purpose, the means which the wicked employed for evil purposes; and it was taught, that the preponderancy of good in the ultimate result consecrated every mean employed . . ."

— John Robison, from Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Edinburgh, 1797)



"They will close their eyes to everything because we will promise them to return all the liberties taken away, after the enemies of peace have been subjugated and all the parties pacified. Is it worth while to speak of how long they will have to wait?"

— Protocols



"Assassination: the extreme form of censorship."

— George Bernard Shaw

[Cain]

LESS THAN LETHAL



"Radio-frequency weapons that impair the nervous system might have uses in commando operations, anti-terrorist actions, and what the Pentagon calls 'low level conflicts' when more deadly weapons are being held back."

— Dr. Robert Beck



"These frequencies fall precisely within the psychoactive range of neuronal synchronization or brainwave entrainment, where subjects experience states from increased anxiety to extreme disorientation and even unconsciousness."

— Robert C. Beck



"Several 'disabling technologies' employ high-intensity strobe lights that flash at or near human brain-wave frequency, causing disorientation and nausea."

— Paul Evancoe



"A thermal gun would have the operational effect of heating the body to 105 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit, thereby incapacitating any threat, based on the fact that even a slight fever can affect the ability of a person to perform even simple tasks. This approach is built on four decades of research relating radio frequency exposure to body heating. A seizure gun would use electromagnetic energy to induce epileptic-like seizures in persons within the range of a particular electromagnetic field. The magnetophosphene gun is designed around a biophysical mechanism which evokes a visual response and is thought to be centered in the retina . . ."

— John Alexander



". . . microwave radiation has frequently been cited as being responsible for non-thermal effects in integrated central nervous system activity. The behavioral consequences most frequently reported have been disability, listlessness and increased irritability."

— National Bureau of Standards, Law Enforcement Standards Laboratory



"When a part of your brain receives a tiny electrical impulse from outside sources, such as vision, hearing, etc., an emotion is produced — anger at the sight of a gang of boys beating an old woman, for example. The same emotion of anger can be created by artificial radio signals sent to your brain by a controller. You could instantly feel the same white hot anger without any apparent reason."

— Walter Bowart, from Operation Mind Control (pp. 261-264)



"Hoffman-La Roche, a pharmaceutical company in Nutley, New Jersey, was the Army's source for a new psychoactive compound, quinuclidinyl benzilate: BZ. This is a drug with even more profound effects than LSD, effects that last for abot three days — but that have been known to last for six weeks. One Army doctor noted of BZ that, 'During the period of acute effects the person is completely out of touch with his environment.'"

— Alex Constantine



"I saw some very frightening films of soldiers who had been given BZ. The guys were reduced to catatonics. They would just sit there, drooling, with no control over their bodily functions unless they were given commands, like 'get up,' or 'put your helmet on.'"

— Arnold Rothman



"The capability of communicating directly with humans by pulsed microwaves is obviously not limited to the field of therapeutic medicine."

— Dr. James Lin, from Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications



"A 1976 DIA report mentions 'anti-personnel applications' of pulsed microwaves that carry 'sounds and possibly even words which appear to be originating intercranially.'"

— Paul Brodeur, from The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Cover-Up (p. 295)



"Experiments had produced some communications equipment that far exceeded the ability to broadcast defeat into the minds of the enemy. It is not only capable of producing auditory hallucinations, but visual hallucinations as well."

— Harlan Girard, in a 1991 NATO address on emergent technologies



". . . potential uses include dealing with terrorist groups, crowd control, controlling breaches of security at military installations, and antipersonnel techniques in tactical warfare. In all of these cases the EM systems would be used to produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation. In addition, the ability of individuals to function could be degraded to such a point that they would be combat ineffective. Another advantage of electromagnetic systems is that they can provide coverage over large areas with a single system. They are silent and countermeasures to them may be difficult to develop . . ."

— Lt Col. David J. Dean, from Low-Intensity Conflict and Modern Technology (pp. 249-251)



"External stimulation of the brain by electromagnetic means can cause the brain to be entrained or locked into phase with an external signal generator. Predominate brain waves can be driven or pushed into new frequency patterns . . . which then cause changes in brain outputs in the form of thoughts, emotions or physical condition."

— Dr. Nick Begich, from Angels Don't Play This HAARP (p. 137)



". . . advanced infrasound generators designed for crowd control have been tested by France and other nations. The devices emit very low-frequency sound waves that can be tuned to cause disorientation, nausea, and loss of bowel control."

— from War and Anti-War, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (p. 129)



"Fascinated by the phenomenon, Gavraud decided to build machines to produce infrasound so that he could investigate it further. In casting around for likely designs, he discovered that the whistle with a pea in it issued to all French gendarmes produced a whole range of low-frequency sounds. So he built a police whistle six feet long and powered it with compressed air. The technician who gave the giant whistle its first trial blast fell down dead on the spot. A post-mortem revealed that all his internal organs had been mashed into an amorphous jelly by the vibrations."

— Lyall Watson, from Supernature (p. 93)



"Laser rifles are no fantasy. They can damage enemy optical and infrared equipment. Used against people, they can flash blind them temporarily. They can also do permanent harm, depending on the power used and whether the targeted person is using optical equipment like night vision goggles, which might amplify the light."

— from War and Anti-War, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (pp. 130-131)



"When we must incapacitate people as well as equipment, calmatives or sleep agents mixed with DMSO can curb violence and limit casualties wherever full NBC gear is not worn. In anti-terrorist actions, counterinsurgency, ethnic violence, riot control, or even in select hostage situations, calmative agents offer an underrated tactic whose effectiveness depends only on modern precision and area delivery systems."

— U.S. Global Strategy Council



"(There allegedly was) a United States government study into the feasibility of using holographs as weapons. . . . The simplest way to describe a holograph is that cris-crossing laser beams create a 3-D image capable of being seen from all angles. This technology opens the possibility of projecting images into the sky in order to affect the minds of anyone seeing the images."

— from The Black Science, by Lung & Prowant (pp. 159-160)



"With the right electromagnetic field, for example, you might be able to produce the same effects as psychoactive drugs."

— Capt. Paul Tyler



"Nikolai Kokolov, an ex-KGB agent, reported a case in which the spinal column of a human subject, in a laboratory in southern Russia, was fractured psychotronically from a distance."

— NBC Magazine with David Brinkley, 13MAR81



"U.S. agents were able to destroy any person's reputation by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional responses, temporary or permanent insanity, suggest or encourage suicide, erase memory, invent double or triple personalities inside one mind . . ."

— Mae Brussell



"This agency [DARPA] is not aware of any research projections, classified or unclassified, conducted under the auspices of the Defense Department, now ongoing, or in the past, which would have probed possibilities of utilizing microwave radiation in a form of what is popularly known as 'mind control.' We do not foresee the development by DARPA of weapons utilizing microwaves and actively being directed toward altering nervous system functions or behavior. Neither are we aware of any of our own forces . . . developing such weapons."

— George H. Heilmeier, director of Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, in response to a 1977 Congressional inquiry

[Cain]

"KILL YOUR TELEVISION!":



"Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure."

— Herbert Krugman



"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely that the celebrated Marxian formula of 'monopoly on the means of production.' Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain."

— Hagbard Celine



"Look at the way most of us relax. We come home after work, exhausted. We turn on the TV — a reflex. We sit there passively hour after hour, barely moving except to eat. We receive but we do not transmit. Identical images flow into our brains, homogenizing our perspectives, knowledge, tastes, and desires."

— Kalle Lasn, from Culture Jam (p. 11)



"The images enter you and are recorded in memory whether you think about them or not. They pour into you like fluid into a container. You are the container. The television is the pourer. . . . It is total involvement on the one hand — complete immersion in the image stream — and total unconscious detachment on the other hand — no cognition, no discernment, no notations upon the experience one is having."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 204)



"The images seem to pass right through me, they go way inside, past my consciousness into a deeper level of mind, as if they were dreams."

— Jack Edelson



"Corporate America determines what electronic primary experiences our children shall have, where, on any given evening, we shall travel and what we shall see, and from what perspective. It decides what news we shall hear, what blood on what streets, what deaths, what crimes, what scandals. It is frightening to realize that corporations with mind-altering electronics possess the power to control 250 million mostly unsuspecting subjects."

— Gerry Spence, in From Freedom to Slavery (p. 146)



"The immensely rich and powerful corporations of this country can buy access to the public mind, can form public taste, and can create public opinion. These corporations can invade our minds and change our likes or dislikes, our ideas, our values, and even our personalities."

— Gerry Spence, in From Freedom to Slavery (p. 147)



"In modern parlance to become the subject of hypnosis is to become spell-bound, and because all human beings are both affectible and suggestible, all are subject, more or less, to hypnotic influence."

— Julian Franklyn, from Death by Enchantment (p. 14)



"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation. Television induces a trance state in the viewer that is the necessary precondition for brainwashing."

— Terrence McKenna, from Food of the Gods



"Television can synchronize the mental processes of hundreds of millions of people simultaneously."

— Dr. Chris Gross



". . . television is a medium that tends to portray the world as left and right, good and bad, black and white. There is little time for the all-important grays where real life exists."

— Catherine Crier, from The Case Against Lawyers (p. 219)



"That televised commercials influence the food choices, preferences, and demands of children — particularly younger children — has been well understood since the early 1970s. Researchers consistently have linked snack choices and food requests to televised commercials, especially to those repeated frequently. The conclusion from such studies seems inescapable: television advertising works well and is especially effective for the most frequently aired commercials such as those for sugared cereals, candy bars, and soft drinks."

— Marion Nestle, from Food Politics (p. 182)



"But a hypnotic state is harmful to those often subjected to it; a negative psychological effect ensues that in time deranges the brain cells. Hypnotism is trespass into the territory of another's consciousness."

— Paramahansa Yogananda, from Autobiography of a Yogi (p. 57)



"If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 45)



"With an evil magic, the brainwashing transforms our children from the bright, the inquiring and the creative to mindless consumers, to empty-headed shoppers concerned chiefly with things, and the means by which to acquire things."

— Gerry Spense



"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

— Stephen Leacock



"When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images. As distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental images are not yours. They are someone else's. Because the rest of your capacities have been subdued, and the rest of the world dimmed, these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence. Am I saying this is brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or something like it? Well, there is no question that someone is speaking into your mind and wants you to do something."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 169)



"A meme (rhymes with "dream") is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power,"

— Kalle Lasn, from Culture Jam (p. 123)



"And shall we just carelessly allow children to . . . receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they grown up?"

— Plato, The Republic, Book II

[Cain]

EMPIRE:



"You can either have Republic or Empire, but you cannot have both."

— James Madison



"Their dogma holds that it is moral to take first and most from the weakest and the poorest, and that it is laudable to create classes of people based on wealth, not virtue."

— Gerry Spense



"POVERTY IS VIOLENCE!"

— seen on an anarchist's sign at the 2001 anti-IMF/World Bank demonstration in Washington DC



"Their concern for the rights and needs of others shrank to the vanishing point while their egos expanded to infinity. Everything and everyone belonged to them, existing only to satisfy their desires, which increased exponentially."

— Hershman & Lieb, from A Brotherhood of Tyrants (pp. 198-199)



"Of all the contrivances of the aristocracy, next to the usurpation of the judiciary, and thus turning the most potent engine of the people's government against themselves, their unions in the shape of incorporate monopolies are the most subtle, and the best calculated to promote the ends of the few, the ignorance, degradation, and slavery of the many."

— Frederick Robinson (1834)



"I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of this was that if you were poor you hadn't worked hard enough."

— Howard Zinn, from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (p. 165)



"The corporation cannot be ethical. Its only responsibility is to turn a profit."

— economist Milton Friedman



"Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn."

— Andrew Jackson



"When punished, the corporation never repents. Nor is it jailed, for, as we have observed, these corporations do not exist in any physical sense so they cannot, in fact, be punished. As concerns justice, those invisible entities are, for reasons not at all clear, in most ways above the law and remain immune to the operation of justice."

— Gerry Spense



"The idea that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and that the rich are rich because they are not, is part of the dogma of free enterprise and leaves half the world famished and in rags."

— Gerry Spense



"The Chinese (role) exchanges have been brutal: scholars sent away from their books to do manual labor, peasants called to the city to run computers, and the like. . . . For the sake of freeing people from the toils of bureaucracy, the Cultural Revolution treated people with contempt for their differences in ability and interest. To be free was to make no discriminations."

— Richard Sennett, from Authority (p. 184)



"If one is guided by profit in one's actions, one will incur much ill will."

— Confucius



"Galton derived the word eugenics from the Greek 'eugenes' meaning 'well born.' This aggrandizement of the privileged class was one of the reasons why eugenics research found ready support from the monied in both America and Europe; it justified their disdain for and parasitism of 'the masses.'"

— Jim Keith, paraphrasing Stefan Kuhl



"Ambition breeds competition and therefore destroys people. A society based on greed and acquisition has always within it the spectre of war, conflict, suffering."

— J. Krishnamurti



"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subject to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death."

— Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring



"Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society."

— Ayn Rand, from For the New Intellectual



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

— Benito Mussolini



"Workers are treated like criminal fifth graders."

— anonymous, from Going Postal by Don Lasseter (p. 300)



"A man who wants money, power, position, is perpetually occupied with it."

— Krishnamurti, from The Network of Thought



"Might makes right."

— Ragnar Redbeard



"He who has the gold makes the rules."

— The Golden Rule, author unknown



"In one sense, McWorld itself is a theme park — a park called Marketland where everything is for sale and someone else is always responsible and there are no common goods or public interests and where everyone is equal as long as they can afford the price of admission and are content to watch and to consume. . . . Infantilism is a state of mind dear to McWorld, for it is defined by 'I want, I want, I want' and 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' favorites from the Consumer's Book of Nursery Rhymes."

— Benjamin R. Barber, from Jihad vs. McWorld (pp. 136 & 93)



"During what's been called the 'Mexican economic miracle' of the last decade, their wages have dropped 60%. Union organizers get killed. If the Ford Motor Company wants to toss out its work force and hire super cheap labor, they just do it. Nobody stops them. Pollution goes on unregulated. It's a great place for investors."

— Noam Chomsky, on NAFTA



"A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out."

— Noam Chomsky



"What they oughta do is drag all these corporate executives outta their multi-million dollar homes and shoot 'em!"

— unnamed "man on the street" interviewed on a recent episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (this statement resulted in a round of applause by the studio audience)



"What makes work alienating is the hierarchical structure in which our efforts, our pace, our needs, our sense of timing, our connection with our own bodies' rhythms and with our friends and co-workers, are all shaped to serve somebody else's ends. When we are valued only as objects, for the most mechanical of our abilities, when our work serves the ends that seem meaningless or even harmful to us, we are alienated."

— Starhawk, from Dreaming the Dark (p. 145)



"For the peasant-laboring classes, however, discipline and hard work led, at best, to bare survival. The work ethic was used by the monied classes to impose discipline on the laborers and the poor. Idleness was sinful . . . Charges of idleness also justified low wages. . ."

— Starhawk, from Dreaming the Dark (p. 211)



"Now let us consider . . . a drug capable of making people happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. . . . a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing . . . a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies."

— Aldous Huxley



"Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."

— Peter Smith, from Ways of Seeing (p. 154)



"The Devil no doubt has some interest in cultural despair, Satan chic, and demonic rock groups, but he must be much more enthusiastic about nuclear armament, gulags, and exploitive imperialism . . ."

— Jeffery Burton Russell, from Mephistopheles (p. 257)



"The leaflet says that workers in the burger chains are paid low wages and accuses you of tempting your customers with food too high in fat, sugar and salt and too low in vitamins to be healthy. Do you: (a) ignore your critics . . .: (b) hire private detectives to infiltrate their meetings and spy on their private lives; or (c) sue for libel, spending $15 million trying to silence two people with a combined income of $12,000 a year? In McLibel, the legal farce that just closed in London, the correct answers are (b) and (c)."

— New York Times, June 20, 1997: A1, A9.



"A man in debt is so far a slave."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson



"Like everything else bureaucrats desire to keep track of, human beings have been serialized. Once established, your Social Security Number is the serial number that stays with you for the rest of your life. . . . Though it may be true that the SSN was not designed as a general identifier (I have my doubts), it is certainly erroneous to state that it has not become one. . . . Identity documents are the tools of tyranny. Big Brother's ability to control our movements, track our whereabouts, and mold our habits allows for the production of die-cast citizens and the destruction of the individual."

— Sheldon Charrett, from The Modern Identity Changer (pp. 36-37, 133)



"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist."

— Thomas Friedman



"To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money. . . . A forest of uncut trees is nonproductive. A piece of land which has not been built upon is nonproductive. Animals living wildly are nonproductive."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (p. 117)



"Since corporations have no souls and no commitment to the human race, corporations will always commit wrongs in their unquenchable quest for profit. The corporate structure may be a necessary evil to gather the capital required to carry on business, but the corporate structure, itself, is inherently evil. It is evil in the same way that a person without a conscience is evil. Psychologists call such persons 'sociopaths.'"

— Gerry Spence, in From Freedom to Slavery (p. 71)



"My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism."

— Barbara Ehrenreich, from Nickel and Dimed (p. 211)



"You are asking me to believe in a world that does not recognize merit, or striving, or a heroic ideal, but instead rewards duplicity and sneakery and whoever is fastest to watch out for their own self-interest. A world where there is no justice! What sort of world is that?"

— Peter David, from Sir Apropos of Nothing (p. 378)

[Cain]

C.O.G. (Corporate Occupation Government):



"They've eliminated the middleman. The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government."

— Jim Hightower



"There is something profoundly undemocratic about a 'corporate' state run by only a few without the informed consent and participation of the many."

— Ralph Nader (1976)



"The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State."

— Hegel



"Everyone is mentally, physically, and genetically programmed to serve the World State. It exists to control the mind and feelings of the individual and impart an artificial sense of achieving his full potential."

— Cyberpunk manifesto



"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

— Woodrow Wilson, from The New Freedom



"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministry, too plainly prove a deliberate systematical plan of reducing us to slavery."

— Alexander Hamilton



"We shall have a world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or by consent."

— James Warburg, Testimony to Senate sub-committee, February 17, 1950



"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. 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 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."

— Abraham Lincoln



"Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction. I am convinced that coincidence and conspiracy have produced more heroes than genius and virtue."

— Maximilien Robespierre, 1792



"The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies."

— Ishmael Reed



"What is History but a fable agreed upon?"

— Napoleon Bonaparte



". . . we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds and, unhampered by tradition, we work our will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk."

— Frederick T. Gates, chairman of Rockefeller's GEB (1904)



"I had always assumed that textbooks were based on careful research and designed to help children learn something valuable. I thought that tests were designed to assess whether they had learned it. What I did not realize is that educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school."

— Diane Ravitch, from The Language Police (pg. 3)



"And somehow or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who coordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence."

— George Orwell, from 1984



"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

— Mary McCarthy



"Its specific nature . . . develops the more perfectly the more the bureaucracy is 'dehumanized,' the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business, love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation."

— Max Weber



"Everywhere the weak loathe the powerful before whom they cower and the powerful treat them like flocks of sheep whose wool and flesh are to be sold."

— from Candide, by Voltaire



"There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government.  And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production."

— Ayn Rand, from Philosophy: Who Needs It?



"Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth."

— Louise Erdrich, from Tracks



"If you got the sayso you want to keep it, whether you are right or wrong. That's why they have to keep changing the laws — so they don't unbenefit any of these big white men."

— Ruth Shays



"Keynesianism is the highest form of phoney economics yet developed to our benefit. The highly centralized, mixed economy resulting from the policies advocated by Lord Keynes for promoting 'prosperity' has all the characteristics required to make our rule invulnerable . . . Keynesianism rationalizes this omnipotent state which we require, while retaining the privileges of private property on which our power ultimately rests."

— anonymous, from The Occult Technology of Power (pg. 18)



"When it comes to imperialism, there is much that left and right can agree on. Imperialism means government repression at home, violations of international law abroad, the exploitation of the weak by the strong and the destruction of different national cultures and traditions."

— George Szamuely



"He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich that they in turn may care for the laboring poor."

— Grover Cleveland



"The elite are an insular, clannish clique, given to raging idiosyncracies and immense deposits of superstition. Their insulation from the rest of the world which we inhabit, has rendered them emotionally undeveloped, incapable of loving, of caring, of giving . . ."

— anonymous, from Secret & Suppressed (p. 234)



"The world is divided into three kinds of people — a very small group that makes things happen, a somewhat larger group that watches things happen, and a great multitude that never knows what has happened."

— Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler



"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise their power from behind the scenes."

— Justice Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court



"So you see . . . that the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scenes."

— Benjamin Disraeli



"The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by ones and zeros — little bits of data — it's all about electrons. . . . There's a war out there, a world war. It's not about who has the most bullets; it's about who controls the information — what we see and what we hear, how we work and what we think. It's all about information."

— Cosmo, from the movie Sneakers



"Everything is politics . . ."

— Talib Kweli, from "Sharp Shooters"



"Bow down before the One you serve,

You're going to get what you deserve. . ."

— Trent Reznor, from "Head Like a Hole"



"Again, wealth is power, and to power it belongs more or less to be unfeeling, arrogant, tyrannical. To many people the privilege of oppressing the weak, and next to that, the privilege of being indifferent to their oppressions, is one of the most comfortable luxuries of a condition of ease. The cry of Mr. Pickwick's assailants, 'Hit him again, he's got no friends,' is apt to be the cry alike of the rich and of the rowdy vulgar."

— John Gorham Palfrey (1851)



"Though rank-and-file members were not individually evil, they were blinded and corrupted by a persuasive ideology that justified treason and gross immorality in the interest of the subversive group. Trapped in the meshes of a machine-like organization, deluded by a false sense of loyalty and moral obligation, these dupes followed orders like professional soldiers and labored unknowingly to abolish free society, to enslave their fellow men, and to overthrow divine principals of law and justice."

— David Brion Davis, from "Some Themes of Countersubversion"



". . . as so many governments before it, it will become despotic as the people become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."

— Benjamin Franklin, speaking in favor of the Constitution (1787)



"In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich."

— Gore Vidal, from Dreaming War (p. 129)



". . . war encourages debt and taxes, the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended . . . and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people."

— James Madison



"See how magnificent the courts have become

The women are dressed in colorful gowns

The men carry well-crafted swords

Food and drink overflow

Wealth and finery abound

Yet in the shadow of all this splendor

the fields grow barren

the granaries are empty

I say this pomp at the expense of others

is like the boasting of thieves after a looting"

— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 53



"The Black Lodge uses weak men, destructive men, selfish and greedy men as puppets to be their tools and instruments. Often such human beings have no idea of the vastness of the evil ways in which they are involved."

— Viola Neal, from Through the Curtain (p. 289)



"Bush is a tool."

— Rachel Corrie



"You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies."

— John 8:44



"The Devil's best trick is to persuade us that he does not exist."

— Baudelaire

[Cain]

CURRENT EVENTS:



"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



"Fortunate is the man who knows how to read the signs of the times, for that man shall escape many misfortunes, or at least be prepared to understand the blow."

— Hermes Trismegistus (c. 1st century A.D.)



"Don't listen to our enemies or the weak sisters in our own ranks who accuse us of all sorts of purposeful atrocities around the world. If we were what our enemies said we were, Afghanistan would be a smouldering and uninhabited moonscape. Iraq would be the same, and quite possibly several other places on the map would be in similar shape."

— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (p. 323)



"The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering weapon caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the 'intelligence' it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth 'intelligence' to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this 'intelligence' to the media to deceive us all and gain our support."

— from the introduction of Deadly Deceits (p. xi), by 25 year Agency veteran and Intelligence Medal recipient, Ralph W. McGehee



"Central Intelligence Agency operatives . . . had been feeding totally fictitious stories to 200 newspapers, 30 news services, 20 radio and television outlets and 25 publishers, all foreign owned. These stories, sometimes concerning fictitious guerrilla movements, would be reported as real in these countries and then would be picked up by the American media. . . . The purpose of the false stories was to manipulate information so that foreign governments and our government would think some event was happening when it wasn't or vice versa. Policy decisions would be made based on this information. Public understanding would be distorted. The course of world politics would be altered."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (pp. 293-294)



"The discrepancies between official representations and official realities in the conduct of foreign affairs . . . stand out starkly in documents already available. Other documents that bear on the subject, running into the thousands, are known to exist, but they are still under the seal of secrecy. What they will reveal, if all of them are ever unsealed, can only be a matter of conjecture for the general public and students of history."

— Charles A. Beard (1948)



". . . genuine conspiracies have seldom been as dangerous or as powerful as have movements of countersubversion. The exposer of conspiracies necessarily adopts a victimized, self-righteous tone which masks his own meaner interests as well as his share of responsibility for a given conflict. Accusations of conspiracy conceal or justify one's own provocative acts and thus contribute to individual or national self-deception. Still worse, they lead to overreactions, particularly to degrees of suppressive violence which normally would not be tolerated."

— David Brion Davis, from The Fear of Conspiracy (p. 361)



"The Constitution does give the right to privacy, but not the right to anonymity."

— Sen. Roy Goodman, in reference to a proposed mandatory national ID "smart card" system



"We have to find a way to tell the public we're not taking anything away, we're just using a different method (of justice) . . . Our friends on the civil liberties side of the fence are so worried that we are bypassing the courts entirely — as if our enemies have any right to be in court."

— George Terwilliger, an "informal advisor" to the White House who was deputy attorney general in the former President Bush's administration.



"College and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to the attack."

— excerpted from a report on "unpatriotic conduct" released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group founded by the wife of Vice President Cheney. The group claims to be "dedicated to academic freedom, quality, and accountability."



". . . the nation's leaders have increasingly come to feel that certain decisions must be made by them alone without popular consent, and in secret, if the nation is to survive."

— Wise & Ross, from The Invisible Government (p. 6)



"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open republic, and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it."

— John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961



"So the system is in trouble. Economists and bankers have been pointing out openly for some time that one of the main reasons why the current recovery is so sluggish is that the government hasn't been able to resort to increased military spending with all of its multiplier effects — the traditional pump-priming mechanism of economic stimulation. . . . What's needed now, desperately needed, is some way to prevent the Pentagon budget from declining."

— Noam Chomsky, from The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (pp. 11-12, 31)



"The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized."

— Alva Myrdal



"We have no quarrel with the _______ people."

— A well known presidential code-phrase, used many times in the past, which roughly translates as, "We're about to bomb your monkey asses into the Stone Age."



"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."

— H. L. Mencken



"Fear is what makes the field fertile for the 'planting' of hypnotic suggestions . . ."

— from Monsters and Magical Sticks, by Heller & Steele (p. 21)



"The problem with defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."

— Dwight D. Eisenhower



"The administration we've got in power now are essentially warmongers and corporate thugs — and they are not to be trusted!"

— Michael Ratner



"It does not seem as if the current administration is serving the wishes of the people it supposedly represents (as per its binding contractual agreement). Most people are in favor of: less pollution, safer food products, free health care, and less governmental intrusion into their personal lives — not unreasonable requests. However, those in power seem to have a much different agenda — personal profit and world domination."

— Razor



"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. . ."

— L. Frank Baum, from The Wizard of Oz



"Y'know, I think that the majority of apocalyptic religious 'prophesies' are utter bullshit, but it really does seem to appear as if we're now heading towards the 'End Times.' The world's ecosystem is being disrupted, deadly plagues are being utilized as weapons of war, grinding poverty is evident even within the most 'advanced' civilizations, and the leadership of the world's greatest superpower seems to be composed of psychotic fundamentalist scofflaws dead set upon instigating World War III! Ladies and gentlemen, it does seem to appear as if we're all fucked — and there's nothing we can do about it except kick back, crack open a beer, and watch the world burn on the TV news. According to about a half-dozen ancient prophecies, the Shit is about ready to hit the Fan, and 'life as we know it' is scheduled to end sometime between 2012 and 2013 — I don't necessarily agree with these predictions, but I'm not making any long-term plans."

— Scribe 27 (RWT)



"The age of virtuous politics is past,

And we are deep in that of cold pretence.

Patriots are grown too shrewd to be sincere;

And we too wise to trust them."

— William Cowper, from The Task



"War is just to those to whom war is necessary."

— Titus Livius, from History



"Sometimes the minority cannot prevail except by force; then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the price of using force."

— William F. Buckley, Jr.



"Fascism is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social and cultural life of the state. . . . They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas . . . by skillful manipulation of fear and hate and by false promise of security."

— U.S. War Department (1945)



"In the councils 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 process."

— from Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech in 1961



"George W. Bush ascended to the presidency propelled by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. His cabinet is composed mostly of corporate executives. Among them are Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton Oil; Andrew Card, chief of staff — General Motors vice president; Paul O'Neill, treasury secretary — chair of Alcoa; Don Evans, secretary of commerce — former CEO of Tom Brown Inc. Oil Company; Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense — former CEO of G. W. Searle and General Instrument; Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor — Chevron board of directors."

— Dr. Helen Caldicott, from The New Nuclear Danger (p. 162)



"When the realistic freedom of dialogue and public discourse is restricted in any society, the quality of satire increases. . . . When the culture decays and the communications media decay, then something (like "Weekend Update") on Saturday Night Live shines."

— Ralph Nader



"Armchair warriors often fail,

And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales . . ."

— from "The End of the Innocence" by Don Henley



"Curs'd is the man, and void of law and right,

Unworthy property, unworthy light,

Unfit for public rule, or private care,

That wretch, that monster, that delights in war:

Whose lust is murder, and whose horrid joy

To tear his country, and his kind destroy! . . ."

— Homer, "The Iliad," Nestor's speech from Book IX, translated by Alexander Pope



"At times some governments do, in fact, want war even in the absence of external threat. Many leaders are not risk-aversive but thrive politically on high risk. For them, nothing succeeds like crisis."

— from War and Anti-War, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (p. 250)



". . . someone who 'has to win' will habitually go to extremes that would make all but the most fanatical flinch away . . . In extreme cases, this fixation exists in spite of how much damage the person causes or even what it might cost him to do it! . . . You need to realize that he is totally committed, and all the normal safety checks we rely on other people having are off line."

— Marc MacYoung, from A Professional's Guide to Ending Violence Quickly (p. 12)



"There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other, a political order, containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to moneymaking. There is a political economy numerously linked with military order and decision. This triangle of power is now a structural fact, and it is the key to any understanding of the higher circles in America today."

— C. Wright Mills



"War is peace."

— from 1984, by George Orwell



"Hearing that was like the government had taken a shit on my chest."

— Jon Stewart, in reference to the recent Halliburton contract (for an undisclosed sum) to repair and maintain Iraqi oilfields. Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton until 2000, and this administration has consistently shown them preferential treatment.



"(This has the potential to be) a war without end. This President has an open-ended war on terrorism."

— Stephen Colbert, from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"



". . . constant injustice, plundering, and atrocious corrupt practice on the part of the tyrant form the surest and most speedy remedy against tyrannic government. The more guilty and villainous the ruler is and the further he goes in open abuse of his unlimited wrongful authority, the more he will leave room for hope that the people will at last resent it, will listen and understand, and becoming inflamed with a passion for the truth will solemnly put an end forever to so violent and irrational a form of government."

— Vittorio Alfieri, from Della Tirannide, Vol. II, Chap. 7



"The President of the United States is a nimrod. I hear him talking about the potential threat of 'evil-doers' with 'nuke-u-ler weapons' in his official speeches, and how France has somehow betrayed us by insisting upon a peaceful resolution so now we are expected to change our vernacular to include such non-French food items as 'freedom fries' and 'freedom toast!' George W. Bush has so degraded the Presidency as to make it the subject of international ridicule. It is a disgusting spectacle."

— Jake Bishop



"I could never be President. I've abused cocaine, I've been arrested, I'm not a very smart guy. I wouldn't think that people would want someone like me, just because my father was President."

— Charlie Sheen, responding to a question during his monologue on "Saturday Night Live," when asked if he would ever want to play the part of the President like his father



"Either you are with us — or you are with the terrorists."

— George W. Bush, in a televised public address on 20SEP01



"It was always a mistake for cities to integrate their responses to nuclear/chemical attacks with biological terrorist attacks. You have got to separate the biological side. The disciplines involved are completely different. . . . There's going to be a lot of panic, there will be civil unrest, people will break into pharmacies to get medicines, there will be problems burying the dead, we've looked at scenarios, and yes, they include, in extremis, the possible use of lime pits and crematoria."

— Jerome Hauer, Director of NYC Office of Emergency Management



"The huge populations of the industrial countries were living in a fool's paradise, refusing to face facts though the facts were obvious to anyone. A crash was inevitable. We were running out of everything: fossil fuels, metals, forests, arable land. . . Our huge extravagant American agriculture was nothing but a factory for turning oil into food. Stop the oil and you stop the tractors. Stop the tractors and you stop the food production. Stop the food production and people starve. They will not starve quietly. The chaos could be as bad as that created by the Mongol invasions. We were facing a period of destruction and grave danger. It made sense to prepare."

— Robert S. de Ropp, from Warrior's Way (p. 323)



"In the false belief that industrial growth will provide benefits to the poor and unemployed, we provide tax breaks to aid industrial growth. Meanwhile, with our own taxes, we feed the growing number of hungry and poor, who are blamed for the rising taxes. We pay for what is being taken away from us."

— Jerry Mander, from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (pp. 144-145)



"Now the rulers are filled with clever ideas

and the lives of the people are filled with hardship

So the nation is cursed"

— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 65



"If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities."

— Voltaire



"If voting could change the system, it would be illegal."

— unknown

[e]

"When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."

— anonymous

I misread this like so

When piracy is outlawed, only outlaws will have piracy. 

[Micro Ice]

"I remember when i was really into nostalgia"

I saw this recently somewhere, i have no idea who said it but it made me smile a little.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Boom boom, b-bump the post.