Warning: lots of writing upcoming. Also, the first few segments will be very...martially orientated, because of the source, but it will diversify further in.
WARRIORSHIP
"Wherever I go,
Everyone is a little bit safer,
Because I am there."
— from "The Warrior Creed" by Robert L. Humphrey
"New-Age America produces books and workshops on the 'New Warrior,' a man or woman who lives impeccably — austere, protecting the weak, willing, perhaps, to stand his or her ground and fight, but more important, calm and graceful — the warrior as metaphor. We imagine the warrior in bed, in the boardroom, in marriage, the warrior on the golf-course. But these writers seem to forget that the warrior's values, as admirable as they may be, are won at terrible cost. The warrior as metaphor often offends me, because the battlefield stinks of blood and shit, and sings of screams and flies. Certainly the values that writers such as Dan Millman extol are admirable, but I would hesitate to call anyone a warrior unless we are not talking about a fellow ubermenschen, but instead a deeply flawed and guilty human being, who strives at the risk of the loss of comfort, of home, of even his or her own soul to protect what must be protected, to maintain a moral sense in a place where no morality can conceivably exist."
— Ellis Amdur, from Dueling with O-sensei (p. 121)
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. . . . He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
— Raymond Chandler, from The Second Chandler Omnibus (pp. 14-15)
"Warriorship is a profession of courage, a calling to valor — not just on the battlefield, but in all of life's conflicts."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"The warrior preserves and protects but does not conquer, dominate, or subjugate. Only the enemy will have to fear a warrior's skills."
— Richard Heckler
"The warrior's role in society is to protect life and social order by placing himself between that which would endanger both."
— Greg Walker
"If there is any hope for the future, it surely must rest upon the ability to stare unflinchingly into the heart of darkness."
— unknown
"To practice Zen or the Martial Arts, you must live intensely, wholeheartedly, without reserve — as if you might die in the next instant."
— Taisen Deshimaru
"A complete warrior is one who can act appropriately. Such an individual can kill if that is necessary to preserve other's lives, or he can die for others. But such an individual also possesses the power to find a way through conflicts to a non-combative resolution. This power can create a real peace between people. Such a person's presence, rather than intimidating, calms and gives strength to others."
— Ellis Amdur, from Old School (p. 37)
"A warrior's strategy is designed to bring his commitment into action, develop his being, and enhance his knowledge. Living strategically requires the warrior to eliminate impulsive, whimsical actions and cease being a slave to his likes and dislikes. Actions and decisions are to be based on the warrior's strategy and have a well-considered quality to them, even when undertaken with lightning speed. To abandon one's strategy is to abandon the path itself."
— Robert L. Spencer, from The Craft of the Warrior (p. 33)
"The quest of a true martial artist, in any culture or society, is to preserve life — not destroy it."
— Dan Inosanto, from The Filipino Martial Arts (p. 170)
"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole body and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person."
— unknown
"Warriors use their intent and will to shape their lives. All of their actions are conscious, intentional, and complete."
— Kerr Cuhulain
"They don't join cliques — more times than not, they stand alone — but they recognize and gravitate towards one another. Only warriors understand other warriors."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"A kung fu man lives without being dependant on the opinions of others, and a master, unlike the beginner, holds himself in reserve. He is quiet and unassuming, with no desire to show off."
— Bruce Lee
"It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage."
— Ernst Junger
"Beholding them with pity there came an old soldier who asked me if there was any means of curing them. I told him no. At once he approached them and cut their throats gently and, seeing this great cruelty, I shouted at him that he was a villain. He answered me that he prayed to God that should he be in such a state he might find someone who would do the same for him, to the end that he might not languish miserably."
— Ambroise Pare', speaking of three badly-burnt soldiers, 1536
". . . he was placed in charge of a unit which had suffered extremely heavy casualties, during which time he felt compelled to shoot an American pilot who had been disemboweled in a crash. This act was necessary according to the code of the warrior (an honorable fighting man puts his comrades out of their misery) but resulted in his rejection by a primarily enlisted brotherhood who held a more 'civilian' concept of the warrior ethos."
— Joanna Bourke, from An Intimate History of Killing (p. 38)
"People who really study the arts of war are almost without exception nonviolent individuals. The achievement of real skill requires considerable discipline and self control, two traits which eradicate violent behavior."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 21)
"Every man is responsible for defending every woman and every child. When the male no longer takes this role, when he no longer has the courage or feels the moral responsibility, then that society will no longer be a society where honor and virtue are esteemed. Laws and government cannot replace this personal caring and commitment. In the absence of the Warrior protector, the only way that a government can protect a society is to remove the freedom of the people. And the sons and daughters of lions become sheep."
— James Williams
"Do every act of your life as if it were your last."
— Marcus Aurelis
"In ourselves our safety must be sought,
By our own right hand it must be wrought."
— William Wordsworth
"It is better to deserve honours and not have them, than to have them and not to deserve them."
— Mark Twain
"The strength of our beliefs and our loyalty to each other has transformed our ideals into the strongest of brotherhoods. We exist, we are the warrior in you, and our message is dangerous to the existing order."
— excerpted from the introduction of Hell's Angels Forever
"I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers."
— Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian (p. 331)
"Warriorship . . . does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. . . . Warriorship . . . is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness."
— Chogyam Trungpa
"Assurance, superior judgement, the ability to impose discipline, the capacity to inspire fear: these are the qualities of an authority."
— Richard Sennett, from Authority (pp. 17-18)
"The gentleman desires to be halting in speech but quick in action."
— Confucius
"The frightening nature of knowledge leaves one no alternative but to become a warrior."
— "don Juan," from Casteneda's A Separate Reality (p. 150)
". . .the development of a warrior rests upon stopping the internal dialogue. Unnecessary talking is related to other unnecessary physical movements and bodily tensions, twitches, fidgeting, finger drumming, foot tapping, grimacing, and so on, which serve to drain the daily ration of energy. . ."
— Kathleen Riordan Speeth, from The Gurdjieff Work (p. 44)
"He who has great power should use it lightly."
— Seneca
"Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face-to-face in a dark and lonely place."
— Louis L'Amour
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Nothing to laugh at in the ugliness of crime, the grimness of poverty, the tragedy of death; not a smile's worth of fun in the weeping wives and the sad and sometimes savage face of humanity? No, it isn't funny; and that is why laughter has to break through, probably more than in other jobs."
— Keith Simpson, from Forty Years of Murder (p. 10)
"The true spirit of the warrior is found in the desire to defend the weaker against the aggression of the stronger. In this way an essential balance is kept in the world. The warrior trains so that he will be prepared and will thus not fail in his role."
— Peyton Quinn, from A Bouncer's Guide to Barroom Brawling (p. 147)
"Evil has no physical reality, but it is still a force. . . . We cannot destroy it, but we can learn to keep ourselves safe from it."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (pp. 56-57)
"The warrior is not the master, he is not the sifu nor the sensei. These are just physical words that we put upon ourselves to make us seem important or better than those whom we guide. The warrior is a friend to his students, and so cannot be their master. He does not wish to gather students, as they will search him out. And those who need to have a master or a sensei will not stay; they will keep searching until they realize that what they seek is within them, and who they seek can only be their guide."
— Erle Montaigue
"With the conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man."
— Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage (p. 156)
"Act the way you'd like to be, and soon you'll be the way you act."
— Kerr Cuhulain, from Full Contact Magick (p. 107)
"Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
— Aristotle
"The White Knight uses his sword in innocence, unaware of the harm he causes. The Red Knight lifts his sword in outraged self-righteousness, uncaring about the damage he leaves in the trail behind him. The Black Knight wields his sword reluctantly and only when he has reached the sober realization that it is necessary."
— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (p. 165)
"When all peaceful means to resolve a crucial problem fail, it is justifiable to wield the sword."
— Guru Gobind Singh
"At a glance, every individual's own measure of dignity is manifested just as it is. There is dignity in personal appearance. There is dignity in a calm aspect. There is dignity in a paucity of words. There is dignity in flawlessness of manners. There is dignity in solemn behavior. And there is dignity in deep insight and a clear perspective. These are all reflected on the surface. But in the end, their foundation is simplicity of thought and tautness of spirit."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"They all had dignity, a certain serenity and pride that was theirs completely. . . . They knew where they had been and what they had seen and done, and were content. Something was theirs, something within themselves that neither time passing nor man nor hard times could take from them."
— Louis L'Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (p. 38)
"If there is one thing that always sticks in my mind about how Delta Force goes about a mission, it is the utterly businesslike attitude of the men. There is none of that Hollywood crap. No posturing, no sloganeering, no high fives, no posing, no bluster, and no bombast. Just a quiet determination to get on with the job."
— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (p. 191)
"In a critical situation, where even the slightest hesitation may prove fatal, the warrior counts on his readiness to improvise, survive, and win. The warrior shapes his own destiny. He defines the limits of his own possibilities. He creates his own luck."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 106)
"It's not our weaknesses that frighten us. It's our strengths."
— Nelson Mandela
HONOR
"Only honor separates the warriors from the thugs."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"You must work out your own honor system for yourself. For the warrior it becomes a code, a way of life, unbending and unaltered, often without ant verbal guidelines. When all of your possessions are far from you, you will still have your honor, your core. A handshake or simply saying, 'I will do this,' is your bond, more concrete than any signature on paper should be. Your actions demonstrate your code. To abuse your knowledge, betray a comrade, lie, things such as that, you will have broken your pact with yourself and have lost your honor. If you act in accordance with your beliefs as well as you can, you will retain your honor always."
— Lenox Cramer, from War with Empty Hands
"Once examined, fights for "honor" almost always turn out to be fights to save face . . . Face refers to one's reputation . . . it is, in essence, prestige . . . Face can be taken from you, so it's something you can fight to keep. On the other hand, honor depends solely on your commitment to meet your just obligations. Since only you can do that, no-one can take honor from you . . . You can have all the face in the world and still lose your honor. Conversely, you can remain honorable no matter what the world thinks of you. Forced to choose between these two conditions, the superior warrior will pick the latter."
— Forrest E. Morgan, from Living the Martial Way (pp. 151-152)
"Do right, fear no man."
— unknown
"Most of all, warriors are honorable because to be otherwise is cowardly!"
— Forrest E. Morgan
"Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?"
— Alfred de Vigny
"Warriors are dangerous people. Therefore, they have a solemn obligation to restrain themselves from tyrannizing and assaulting weaker members of society."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"If you don't want somebody to know something, just don't speak to them about it. Never lie."
— Sylvester L. Liddy
"Men whose acts are at variance with their words command no respect, and what they say has but little weight."
— Samuel Smiles
"The Samurai were an aristocracy of warriors, mighty touchy about their honor, with a fanatical reverence for exactitude in the spoken word — that is the tradition, anyway. They had one answer to questions — yes or no. A Samurai was supposed to tell the truth, and be quick to lay his two-handed sword across anybody who said he didn't."
— Ralph Townsend
"All you got in life is your honor, man, your own self-image, your own self-respect. If you lose that, or if you give it away or if you sell it, then you ain't got it no more."
— Lemmy Kilmister
"One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away until it is surrendered."
— Michael J. Fox
"Killing instincts can be tempered with good sense! The more competent a fighter becomes, the less he has to prove and the less likely he is to misuse his abilities. . . . Once they become competent and gain self-respect, they no longer have a reason to be a bully."
— Robert K. Spear, from Survival on the Battlefield (p. 153)
"Men who take up arms against one another in public war, do not cease on this account to be moral beings . . . Military necessity does not admit cruelty — that is the infliction of suffering for revenge. . ."
— Francis Lieber (1863)
"Never compromise your integrity; always respect yourself."
— Robert J. Ringer
"A man is only as good as his word."
— Grandfather
"It is scarcely a matter for wonder that dueling was a commonplace of those days. There are certain sorts of attack which, even today, may make the mildest man feel for a moment or two that the only suitable reply is a pistol-shot or a sword-thrust."
— John McConaughy
"You show us respect, we show you respect. If you don't show the Angels respect, the Angels don't show you respect. And we're very good at disrespecting people."
— Butch Garcia, HAMC
"It's nice to be nice."
— the personal motto of the most dangerous man my father ever knew
"If a man remembers what is right at the sight of profit, is ready to lay down his life in the face of danger, and does not forget sentiments he has repeated all his life even when he has been in straitened circumstances for a long time, he may be said to be a complete man."
— Confucius
"(seppuku) was used as a privileged alternative to execution, to atone for a misdeed or an unworthy act, and to avoid capture in battle — seen as a contemptible end for any warrior and a safeguard against likely torture."
— Richard Cohen, from By the Sword (p. 155)
"A Sikh is enjoined to raise the sword only when all other means of correcting an injustice have failed. Hence, when a weapon is lifted, it should be accompanied by a sense of righteousness. . . . if the true path is followed, then the whole combat will flow correctly, like a dance."
— Guru Gobind Singh Ji (paraphrased & revised)
"I advise you secondly, that you should never swear an oath,
Unless you will keep it,
Grim wyrd goes with oathbreaking,
Wretched is such a varg"
— from Sigrdrifumal, verse 23, Plowright translation
"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
— George Eliot, from Adam Bede
"Lying is done with words and also with silence."
— Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
"Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect."
— Marcus Aurelius Antonius (c. 121-180 A.D.)
"They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts."
— Sir Phillip Sidney, from Arcadia
"If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow."
— Chinese proverb
"Do what manhood bids the do,
From none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws."
— Sir Richard Francis Burton
LOYALTY
"A man does not extricate himself from difficulty at the expense of his associates."
— Sylvester L. Liddy
"It's kind of hard to put into words, but it's like having somebody that you love. If you served and you were willing to die, you wanted to have a person there you would not mind dying for or dying with. A lot of people don't understand that."
— Medal of Honor recipient Bob Howard
"It is important that group members openly and directly declare their willingness to protect one another. Psychologically, the act of swearing loyalty is of far greater value than the mere assumption of the same."
— Etta Place
"But there's another piece of me. The part that's with my family. The family I chose; the family that chose me. I feel everything that hurts them, or makes them sad. I wouldn't just kill for them; I'd die for them. They're all I have. They're everything I have. And what they give me is . . . that piece of myself that's clean."
— Burke, from Pain Management by Andrew Vachss
"Look at your brother standing next to you and ask yourself if you would give him half of what you have in your pocket. Or half of what you have to eat. If a citizen hits your Brother, will you be on him without asking why? There is no why. Your Brother isn't always right, but he is always your Brother!"
— from the creed of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club
"You haveta be a bro ta have a bro . . ."
— old biker aphorism
"Evildoers are generally a lot more fun to hang out with, but they have no concept of loyalty. Being self-centered egomaniacs, they are loyal to no-one but themselves. They are unreliable and are notorious for betraying their allies in the face of danger. At their core, they are nothing but selfish, immature cowards. Seeing them as they truly are made it easy for me to swear allegiance with the forces of Good. People who are unafraid to die for their principles at any moment can never be considered cowardly."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"Not much more than twenty-five members were in the Club at any given time. The Kid liked it that way, a tight, loyal group — only the guys he could absolutely count on; men who wouldn't run off when it came time to stand together."
— Richard "Gypsy" Anderson
VALOR
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear."
— Mark Twain
"Courage, like fear, is contagious, and allows individuals to do the impossible."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 68)
"He was insanely calm. He never showed fear. He was a professional soldier, an ideal leader of men in the field . . . He did not yearn for battle. But neither was he concerned about the prospect."
— Tim O' Brien (speaking of his platoon commander)
"I could never run away."
— unknown
"One of my biggest problems (although I used to think of it as one of my greatest strengths) is the fact that I am completely fearless. In short, I truly do not 'give a rat's ass' if I live or die, and will refuse to back down from any perceived threat, regardless of the odds against me."
— Scribe 27, from Arcane Lore (p. 266)
"Moral courage is the fortitude it takes to do what is right, no matter what the personal cost."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"In situations where you lack confidence, you must fill the void with courage."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"I'm not afraid of knives. I've been cut on the job. Unless there's meat hanging out, I just tape the cuts up with duct tape. . ."
— Duncan
"My knowledge of pain, learned with the saber, taught me not to be afraid of fear. And just as in dueling you must fix your mind on striking at the enemy's head, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in."
— Col. Otto Skorzeny
"Having heart meant a willingness to fight, regardless of the odds, and to withstand death or a beating instead of backing down. Even enemies could respect each other for having heart; no one respected a punk."
— Eric C. Schneider
"Such a stupid act. Sometimes, heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination; the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars."
— from Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks (p. 148)
"For a lot of the Latin gang kids I knew coming up, it wasn't whether you died that counted, it was how you died."
— Burke, from Pain Management by Andrew Vachss
"All True Warriors know that medals are bullshit. Heroism usually goes unrecognized. When a soldier distinguishes himself in battle and is recommended for a high decoration, invariably the medal awarded will be of much less significance (i.e., the Distinguished Service Cross is often reduced to a mere Bronze Star by government bureaucrats); yet if an officer with a West Point ring on his finger 'thinks he was shot at,' he can reasonably expect to be awarded the Silver Star with no questions asked! Unless an officer has a Ranger tab or a 'Budweiser' crest, his rows upon rows of colorful ribbons probably represent nothing except 'brownie points.'"
— C. R. Jahn
"Anne Boleyn, consort of the King, was ready to pay with her life for her involvement with royalty. She was calm to the last. Turning to a companion who was trembling violently, Anne said: 'Take courage. The executioner is an expert of many years' training — and my neck is very slender.'"
— Frank Edwards
"I am the best bodyguard, because I'll take a bullet, I'll take a stab wound, I'll take a hit upside the head; I'm like a kamikaze pilot."
— Mr. T
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt, from You Learn by Living
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
— Anais Nin
"Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in meeting it with the eyes open."
— Jean Paul Richter
"To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself."
— Simone Weil
"The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. . . . (if) one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
WILLPOWER
"Focus on your one purpose."
— Japanese motto
"Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender."
— Gerry Spence
"To face each of my fears and overcome them would require years of psychic and physical pain. But it had to be done. I had seen the fruits of fearlessness and the power of the will. I could no longer live without them."
— G. Gordon Liddy, from Will (p. 24)
"You must have complete determination. The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite your nose off no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are that he will succeed in doing it. He may be severely beaten up but that will not stop him carrying out his original objective. That is the real fighter."
— Bruce Lee
". . . concentrating 100 percent of your mental and physical power on one objective is far more effective than splitting your concentration by trying different moves."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 63)
"If you go into the fight resolved to destroy your opponent no matter what the cost — if you go into battle truly committed to die for the opportunity to kill your enemy — his spirit will read it in your eyes and he will be crushed."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"Ruthless determination will overshadow technique or choice of weapon every time. The will to win is more important than the skill to win . . . Determination is the only thing that will get you off the ground after being stabbed, shot, or punched."
— Don Pentecost
"Make sure you continue your attack so you can stop that man who shot you. If you are fortunate, your wound will not be serious. But if you stop, scream, moan, or cry, he might just finish you off because he won't want any witnesses."
— John M. La Tourrette
"Try? Try not. Do, or do not. There is no "try.""
— Yoda
"Where there's a will, there's a way."
— unknown
"Those who are patient in the trivial things in life and control themselves will one day have the same mastery in great and important things."
— Hapkido Master Bong Soo Han
"Control your emotion or it will control you."
— Chinese adage
"And the will lieth therein, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the Angels nor to death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."
— Joseph Glanvill (17 c.)
"'Old time' hypnotists knew that if you helped an individual to use their 'imaginins,' they could control, or eliminate pain."
— from Monsters and Magical Sticks, by Heller & Steele (p. 37)
"By the use of his Will, (the master) attains a degree of poise and mental firmness (nearly inconceivable to) those who allow themselves to be swung backward and forward by the mental pendulum of moods and feelings."
— The Kybalion
"Pure 'guts' have won many a gunfight. The man who has determination is hard to down. You can keep on fighting even if you are hit. If you make up your mind that you are going to get your bullet into the other man, you will probably do it. And maybe that hit you took will turn out not so bad as you thought, particularly if you stop him and keep him from hitting you again."
— William H. Jordan, from No Second Place Winner (pp. 111-112)
"Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination."
— Karl von Clausewitz, from Principles of War
"It has been conclusively proven that focused visualization can significantly increase body temperature. By visualizing one's hands being engulfed with flames, it is possible for an amateur to raise the surface temperature of his hands by approximately 3 degrees Fahrenheit (an adept can more than double this). Buddhists monks use a similar visualization technique to dry their wet robes during outdoor Winter meditations. With sufficient willpower, it is possible to completely transcend fear, hunger and pain."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"Initiates learn a complex set of breathing and meditational exercises and retire to a remote area to train. Each day they bathe in icy streams and sit naked in the snow thinking of internal fires. When the training is complete, a test is made on a windy winter night by wrapping the student in a sheet that has been dipped into the river through a hole in the ice and has to be completely dried just by body heat at least three times during the night."
— Lyall Watson, on the Tibetan practice of tumo, in Supernature (p. 226)
"Men with chest wounds — open, sucking wounds — have stuffed them with handkerchiefs or torn shirts and kept going. Men have broken their backs when they bailed out or hit the ground. After regaining consciousness, they have rolled around for a stick or board, strapped it to them in a fashion and moved on. Men with severe wounds have amputated a limb, whittled a crutch, and kept going. Many things are possible to those with will and determination."
— Dr. Gene N. Lam
"I tried to lift it, and it wouldn't move; I tried to lift it again, and it wouldn't move; then I tried to lift it really hard — and my left bicep snapped and rolled up in a bunch. It had to be surgically reattached."
— Bob Franks
"Singlemindedness is all-powerful."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"Don't eye the top of the ladder, eye the next rung."
— Gen. Colin Powell
"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."
— William Feather
"I saw a guy get hit in the thigh. . . . Five fucking minutes and the guy checks out. . . . and it wasn't even a serious wound. Wasn't even bleeding that bad. And then there was another guy that got hit in the guts, and for 72 hours, because we were in constant fire, he was literally at one point . . . stuffing his intestines back in his friggin body. All of us thought it was goodbye time. He kept saying, 'Don't fucking look at me like that, I'm not dying.' And the sonofabitch didn't die."
— Harley Swiftdeer
"An idea upon which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself."
— Charles Baudouin
"Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material realm."
— Paramahansa Yogananda, from Man's Eternal Quest (p. 238)
"Energy is not just what we do, but also what we think and feel. Intention is energy given direction. Desire is energy focused and magnified."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 61)
"Discard and forget, I beg you, the demons, dolls, and mumbo-jumbo. What you are actually doing is tearing out your own emotional guts at the same time you're trying to tear someone else's emotional guts to pieces. I have paid a heavy price for learning these things, and I shall never practice that sort of magic again, whether for good or evil."
— William Seabrook, from Witchcraft (pp. 99-100)
"Mind is the wielder of muscles. The force of a hammer blow depends on the energy applied; the power expressed by a man's bodily instrument depends on his aggressive will and courage. The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind. . . . Outward frailty has a mental origin; in a vicious circle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. . . . My earliest ambition was to fight tigers. My will was mighty, but my body was feeble. It was by indomitable persistency in thoughts of health and strength that I overcame my handicap. I have every reason to extol the compelling mental vigor which I found to be the real subduer of royal Bengals."
— Sohong, the "Tiger Swami," from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (p. 62)
"There is no weapon more deadly than the will."
— Bruce Lee
CHARACTER
"Iron is full of impurities that weaken it; through forging, it becomes steel and is transformed into a razor sharp sword. Human beings develop in the same fashion."
— Morihei Ueshiba, from The Art of Peace (p. 56)
"Personal power leads the warrior to absolute dignity. A man who (lives his life as if he may) die tomorrow doesn't act like a clown; he doesn't make a fool of himself in public. He chooses his words carefully; he doesn't want some trivial nonsense to be remembered as his last utterance. When men and women of power speak, others listen. They can feel the power in their words and they know these people will stand behind what they say."
— Forrest E. Morgan, from Living the Martial Way (p. 279)
"He gives but not to receive
He works but not for reward
He completes but not for results"
— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 2
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
— Albert Einstein
"Knowledge will give you power, but character will give you respect."
— unknown
"Sow an action and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Have character, but don't be a character."
— Richard Marcinko
"Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."
— Emerson
"Personality is to man what perfume is to a flower."
— Charles M. Schwab, Ten Commandments of Success
"Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"You might've been right, but you weren't righteous . . ."
— old biker aphorism
"A man is what he does. . ."
— the weird little mutant from Total Recall
"To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self."
— Hindustani proverb
"It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."
— Adlai Stevenson
"Use your wit as a shield, not as a dagger."
— American proverb
"Define yourself by what you do, by how you treat others, and how they see you."
— George F. Burns
"The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back."
— Abigail Van Buren
"Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands."
— Anne Frank, from Diary of a Young Girl
"The respect that is only bought with gold is not worth much."
— Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1859)
"By men's words we know them."
— Marie de France (12th c.)
"A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual — but its object is always exterior to the man. A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others."
— Peter Smith, from Ways of Seeing (pp. 45-46)
"Most people have certain weaknesses of character which must be considered in your dealings with them. You must ask yourself what this individual can be trusted with. Common weaknesses include: drink, gambling, compulsive spending, sex, a favorite illicit drug, a weak ego, and simple stupidity. Once you know an individual's weakness, you can take precautions against inadvertently tempting him to neglect his responsibilities; or, adversely, you could choose to exploit this weakness for reasons of your own (perhaps to teach him an important lesson). If you have weaknesses of your own, you must be honest with yourself and take steps to overcome them."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"It is difficult to deny one's vices altogether, but it's easy to cut back — this is achieved through the use of willpower, and by raising one's standards. If there are certain lines that you refuse to cross under any circumstances, then you'll be able to easily deny many forms of temptation. For example, you could make it a rule that you will never drink cheap booze, smoke inferior bud, or fuck ugly women. Become a connoisseur and you'll allow yourself far fewer opportunities to slip up."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Having something to fight significantly helps a person when coping with strong Neg problems. Once the cause is realized . . . Neg controls are significantly weakened. It's for this reason that Negs make great efforts to hide their existence. . . . If you cannot beat Neg influences, you can learn to work around them. Some people may never rid themselves entirely of Neg influences, but they can learn to control them, and in controlling them you will grow steadily stronger while Negs grow weaker. . . . Knowing that Negs can alter moods and cause spontaneous impulses, and recognizing the possibility of this when they occur, greatly improves the chances of weathering and surviving them intact."
— Robert Bruce, from Practical Psychic Self-Defense (p. 144, 162)
"From another's evil qualities a wise man corrects his own."
— Publicus Syrus
"You can't cheat an honest man."
— con man's saying
"Moderation in all things."
— Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, c. 190-159 B.C.)
"It is not our abilities that show what we truly are; it is our choices."
— "Aldus Dumbledore," from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."
— Buddha
"He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior."
— Confucius
ASSERTIVENESS
"Declining to hear 'no' is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it. With strangers, even those with the best intentions, never, ever relent on the issue of 'no,' because it sets the stage for more efforts to control. If you let someone talk you out of the word 'no,' you might as well wear a sign that reads, 'You are in charge.'"
— Gavin de Becker, from The Gift of Fear
"It is impossible to teach true self-defense to someone without them first overcoming fear and the critical voice. True self-defense is an awareness that can't be switched on instantaneously. It is automatic, in the sense that it is always switched on. Your spirit should automatically rise to defeat your opposition when it has been transgressed. You have your limits and your rights, and nobody has the right to be there unless you give them permission. You are the ruler of yourself, and right or wrong, these are the things that you hold sacred. You would rather die than see them defaced."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 11)
"Every decision you make stems from what you think you are, and represents the value that you put upon yourself."
— Anonymous
"Being assertive will avoid problems; being aggressive will bring them on. The danger of using verbal aggression is that, while it works under normal circumstances, it can lull you into assuming that it will work in all situations."
— from Safe in the City, by Marc MacYoung and Chris Pfouts (p. 281)
"The objective of the violent criminal is to control you, emotionally and physically. Everything he does — his threats and promises — is intended to terrify and control you. . . . For most crime victims, their temporary cooperation backfired into full control over them."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 50)
"The only way a (parasitic individual) could return after being got rid of was through pity. The same is true of any type of evil. Feeling sorry for people who are engaged in wrong action does nobody any good."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 41)
"To an aggressor, assertiveness is indistinguishable from rudeness, yet tact and diplomacy (or worse yet — an apology) is a sure sign of weakness, and an aggressor will show no mercy to a weakling — indeed, he may even become violently enraged upon any show of resistance from those he considers his rightful prey."
— anonymous (RWT)
"I am not arguing with you — I am telling you."
— J. McN. Whistler
"What you gonna do now, tough guy?"
— a query oft heard directed at belligerant lightweights
"You need to leave now . . ."
— the last thing numerous dipshits have heard (and chose to ignore) before later waking up with multiple contusions
"I don't like your attitude, and I don't like you."
— said with conviction, even the dimmest moron will realize that he's worn out his welcome.
"In the Korean village in which I grew up, there was a woman who was often beaten by her husband. One day she tired of the mistreatment. She told her husband, 'If you ever lay a hand on me again, I will stay awake all night if necessary until you are asleep. Then, when you are defenseless, I will beat you with a stick.' He understood her meaning and humbly begged her forgiveness. He never mistreated her again."
— Master Bong Soo Han
"When, against one's will, one is high-pressured into making a hurried decision, the best answer is always 'No,' because 'No' is more easily changed to 'Yes' than 'Yes' is changed to 'No.'"
— Charles E. Nielsen
"Always go before our enemies with confidence, otherwise our apparent uneasiness inspires them with greater boldness."
— Napoleon I
"Attacks must be answered. An assertion unanswered is an assertion agreed to."
— Geoff Garin
"A bully is not reasonable — he is persuaded only by threats."
— Marie de France (12th c.)
"It is impossible to teach true self-defense to someone without them first overcoming fear and the critical voice. True self-defense is an awareness that can't be switched on instantaneously. It is automatic, in the sense that it is always switched on. Your spirit should automatically rise to defeat your opposition when it has been transgressed. You have your limits and your rights, and nobody has the right to be there unless you give them permission. You are the ruler of yourself, and right or wrong, these are the things that you hold sacred. You would rather die than see them defaced."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 11)
"Declining to hear 'no' is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it. With strangers, even those with the best intentions, never, ever relent on the issue of 'no,' because it sets the stage for more efforts to control. If you let someone talk you out of the word 'no,' you might as well wear a sign that reads, 'You are in charge.'"
— Gavin de Becker, from The Gift of Fear
"We do not apologize for a damned thing."
— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin' High, Livin' Free (p. 184)
"The majority of the time, just prior to a mugging, stomping, or sexual assault, the perpetrator(s) will 'interview' the prospective victim. This may simply consist of bumming a cigarette or spare change, or it might be an inappropriately chummy street person suddenly trying to be your 'bestest pal.' Your reaction to this interview will let them know if you're a safe (soft and weak) target."
— Jake Bishop
"If a person has his sword out all the time, he is habitually swinging a naked blade; people will not approach him and he will have no allies. If a sword is always sheathed, it will become rusty, the blade will dull, and people will think as much of its owner."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"The direct, unwavering stare is a form of threat . . ."
— Flora Davis, from Inside Intuition (p. 63)
"Silence gives consent."
— Oliver Goldsmith
"Self-defense is nature's eldest law."
— John Dryden, from Absalom and Achitophel
"Better to be pissed off than pissed on."
— old hillbilly sayin'
WARFARE
"Junior Bush was a fighter pilot during the war in Vietnam, not in the United States Air Force, where one could get seriously hurt, but in the Texas air force, known as the Air Guard. Texas's toy army, an artefact of Civil War days, is a favorite club for warmongers a bit squeamish about actual combat. Membership excused these weekend warriors from the military draft and the real shoot 'm up in 'Nam. Young George W. tested at 25 out of 100, one point above 'too-dumb-to-fly' status, yet leaped ahead of hundreds of applicants to get the Guard slot."
— Greg Palast, from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (p. 147)
"I had other priorities."
— Dick Cheney, on why he refused to serve in the military during Vietnam
"The master-class has always made the wars, and the worker-class has always fought them."
— Eugene V. Debs
"The more lives the soldier succeeds in accounting for, the prouder he is likely to feel. To his people he is a genuine hero, and to himself, as well. For him, war is in no sense a game or a dirty mess. It is a mission, a holy cause, his chance to prove himself and gain a supreme purpose in living. His hatred of the enemy makes this soldier feel supremely real, and in combat his hatred finds its only appropriate appeasement."
— J. Glen Gray
"If I had time . . . to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the 'actualities of war'— the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather . . . The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually so neglected by historians."
— Field-Marshal Lord Wavell
"In the military, it is said that amateurs talk of battles and tactics while professionals talk of logistics."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 169)
"The distance at which all shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus sensation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man."
— Konrad Lorenz
"Palliation is as common on the battlefield as ants in an anthill. It includes a wide variety of 'inter-psychic modes' affecting the individual's subconscious, such as denial, in which he simply denies that a threat exists, displacement, when he 'escapes' from the battlefield in spirit although not in body; ritualisation; humor, and so on. The process of palliation may be assisted by the use of drugs or alcohol, which, similarly, make the situation no safer — they may actually make it more dangerous — but help the soldier to deal with stress by making his plight seem less threatening.
— Richard Holmes (paraphrasing R.S. Lazarus)
"If a person enlisting in the military is a criminal, he may find dangerous situations highly exciting and have few qualms about killing. Such a person could be an asset in combat. However, during peacetime service, he may prove hard to get along with. Bored and disgruntled, such an individual may fail to comply with rules and regulations and may commit crimes."
— Stanton E. Samenow, from Straight Talk about Criminals (p. 15)
"In military protocol, the warrior stands firm and speaks directly. When deployed in battle, the warrior focuses on his duty and acts accordingly. During battle, those wearing battle armor need not bow. Those in war chariots need not follow the rules of protocol. In times of war, one does not worry about seniority. One acts. The common patterns of human behavior, during times of war, are like inside and outside. The citizen and the warrior are like left and right, night and day."
— Su-ma Fu
"You get in the way of an M-14 or M-60 machine gun and there's no tellin' who's gonna get killed. And you get an angry 18-year-old kid behind the gun and he's just seen his buddy gettin' killed. And he's not gonna have no remorse for who's on the receiving end of that M-60 machine gun."
— Jack Hill, USMC
"Thousands of our men will be returning to you. They will have been gone a long time and done and felt things you cannot know. They will be changed. They will have to learn to adjust themselves to peace."
— Ernie Pyle
"There has seldom, if ever, been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort, and prejudices of their elders."
— unknown
"They rode into the city of Chihuahua to a hero's welcome, driving the harlequin horses before them through the dust of the streets in a pandemonium of teeth and whited eyes. Small boys ran among the hooves and the victors in their gory rags smiled through the filth and the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers."
— Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian (p. 165)
"Here, old men dazed with blows watched the dying agonies of their murdered wives who clutched their children to their bleeding breasts; there, disemboweled girls who had been made to satisfy the natural appetites of heroes gasped their last sighs; others, half-burned, begged to be put to death. Brains were scattered on the ground among dismembered arms and legs."
— from Candide, by Voltaire
"The enemy is whoever wants to get you killed, whichever side they're on."
— "Yossarian," from Joseph Heller's Catch-22
"You can't expect any kind of mercy,
On the battlefield. . ."
— Suzanne Vega, from "When Heroes Go Down"
"If you are going to fight a war and you intend to be the victor, you must have a clearly stated and totally understood military objective."
— Carl von Clausewitz, from On War
"That I so wish that we lost, somehow,
All our firearms, nukes, and bomber planes,
And fought, instead, as did the Warriors of old,
With sword, axe, longbow, and spear,
On horseback or on foot,
Close up to our enemies,
So that we would have to see their faces,
Before taking off their heads."
— Oliver Bingham
"Long have they pass'd,
Faces and trenches and fields,
Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure,
Or away from the fallen,
Onward I sped at the time —
But now of their forms at night,
I dream, I dream, I dream."
— Walt Whitman, from "Old War-Dreams"
"War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be justified."
— Lord Byron, from Don Juan
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire
"If officers desire to have control over their commands, they must remain habitually with them, industriously attend to their instruction and comfort, and in battle lead them well."
— General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
"I give orders only when they are necessary. I expect them to be executed at once and to the letter and that no unit under my command shall make changes, still less give orders to the contrary or delay execution through unnecessary red tape."
— Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
"The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need."
— John Keegan
"There is required for the composition of a great commander not only massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten."
— Winston Churchill
"In all forms of warfare the loser is beaten in spirit before he is beaten in fact."
— David J. Rogers
"I considered war to be an utter waste of my time and energy, since most wars involved people I did not know arguing about matters I did not care about in pursuit of goals that would not have any direct impact upon me."
— Peter David, from Sir Apropos of Nothing (p. 2)
"The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it."
— Ellen Glasgow
"Believe it or not, I ran into far more goddamn snitches in Basic Training than I did in jail! A buncha brown-nosin' toadies they were!"
— anonymous (RWT)
"One third, or 654 of 2054 American tanks used during Desert Storm, were equipped with (depleted) uranium armor plating, providing them with a tactical advantage, because the conventional Iraqi weapons would have no chance of penetrating them. But by their use, the American tank crews were exposed to whole-body gamma radiation, similar to X-rays emanating from the uranium armor. . . . (Furthermore,) external gamma radiation emitted from (depleted) uranium shells can be as high as 200 millirads per hour . . ."
— Dr. Helen Caldicott, from The New Nuclear Danger (pp. 151-152)
"Aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects. Under combat conditions, the MEIs (most exposed individuals) are probably the ground troops that reenter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing munitions, either on foot or motorized transport."
— an unnamed Army contractor in a report from July 1990
"Think of having your eyelid pierced with a pin or your sex organs split with a scalpel. Imagine the pain of having your teeth extracted — not by a dentist using an anesthetic, but by someone with a pocketknife and pliers. Now consider what your thoughts would be if you were exposed to those circumstances while you were unable to defend yourself; under supervision by enemy soldier."
— Dirk von Schrader, from Elementary Field Interrogation (p. 24)
"Lots of young soldiers these days put in a lot of time in the gym. All well and good, but physical fitness on its own is not enough. It's time to sweep away the action-movie stuff; fantastic muscle tone and fancy gear is not going to save you in a firefight."
— Peter McAleese, from McAleese's Fighting Manual (p. ix)
"A soldier's energies may be excited to the point of hysteria because he knows he may be killed at any moment. If he is killed, he may panic and enter the body of the first accommodating living person he can find. The most suitable being is usually a nearby soldier . . . this happens often. The living warrior goes home after the war and finds himself doing things not in keeping with his personality. Because he has been involved in a war, his loved ones and therapist attribute his changed behavior to stress. It is not stress. It is the daily influence of another person, living right alongside the warrior's body."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 117)
"That sense of power, of looking down the barrel of a rifle at somebody and saying, 'Wow, I can drill this guy.' Doing it is something else too. You don't necessarily feel bad; you feel proud, especially if it's one on one, he has a chance."
— James Hebron, USMC Scout/Sniper
"All you do is move that finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof! In a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust."
— William Broyles
"Killing itself could be seen as an act of carnival: combat gear, painted faces, and the endless refrain that men turn into 'animals' were the martial equivalent of the carnival mask. They enabled men to invert the moral order while still remaining innocent and committed to that order. . . . Carnivalesque rites of killing did not demand rejection of the law, but a reassertion of men's commitment to rules against extreme violence. Transgression could be enjoyable because the law was well-respected. . . . Carnivalesque rites and fantasies drawn from a wide range of combat literature and films enabled combatants to refashion themselves as heroic warriors."
— Joanna Bourke, from An Intimate History of Killing (pp. 25, 30-31)
"Frighteningly, psychiatrists recognized that more men broke down in war because they were not allowed to kill than under the strain of killing."
— Joanna Bourke, from An Intimate History of Killing (p. 237)
"It was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it."
— from A Rumor of War, by Phillip Caputo (pp. 229-230)
"The rules of war are like the rules of the road: any honest and realistic person will expect them to be broken, but some drivers will commit more frequent and more serious violations than others, and there may be other drivers who very rarely offend."
— Kenneth Maddock
"The best warrior
leads without haste
fights without anger
overcomes without confrontation
He puts himself below
and brings out the highest in his men"
— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 68
"When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
— from "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," by Randall Jarrell
"May you die with your boots on!"
— olde riflemen's toast
TRAINING
"You can't learn to shoot by reading a book. Physical skills that require hand-eye coordination must be tried, practiced, and experienced in a physical way in order to be learned. It's more a matter of developing good motor habits than of gaining mental knowledge."
— Bill Clede, from Police Handgun Manual (p.11)
"At the range he worked on his stance, breath control, eye focus. The idea was to build almost a second self. Someone smarter and more detached. Do this perfectly and you've developed a new standard for times of danger and stress."
— unknown
"I wanted to be the best gunfighter in the world. That, I knew, would take years of effort. I was willing . . . Soon, the inside flesh of my trigger finger was worn off, and I was wiping my blood from the trigger when I cleaned my revolver at the end of the day."
— G. Gordon Liddy, from Will (p. 88)
"Clear your mind with a black image . . . think black. That is the color of nothingness. If a man is just firing his handgun without thinking about it, he's just doing it. But the moment he thinks, "I might miss," he's lost his focus of concentration. He's listening to a little voice that's saying, 'Can I or can't I?' And the answer will be, 'I can't.'"
— Michael Echanis
"Every animal moves in a different way, (and) every man fights in a different way. Observe, but don't copy!"
— Master Bimba
"I was trying out my new sjambok on the heavy bag, and I put a fuckin' GASH in it!"
— Ollie the Dipshit
"Musashi, who trained himself, became a master swordsman who was never defeated."
— Kerr Cuhulain
"Using the suction tipped darts against a full length mirror, where the student can see his own mistakes and aim at the reflection of his own body, will help a great deal. The darts will stick on the mirror at the point of impact, showing where the bullets would've hit if a gun had been used. Basic errors are much more easily corrected with training of this type."
—Rex Applegate, from Kill or Be Killed (pp. 126-127)
"There is little to be gained by wasting time and resources maintaining a level of strength or fitness far beyond that which you may need. These levels can be adjusted to cope with increased needs as they arise. Excessive training can cause undue wear on joints which will be regretted later."
— Sweyn Plowright, from True Helm (p. 25)
"If you intend to carry a blade for defensive (as well as utilitarian) purposes, it is imperative that you learn how to make proper cuts. The only way one can perfect their cuts is to occasionally practice with a suitable training target. By far, the best target medium would be a fresh side of beef — but if such an item is not practical for you, a discarded exercise mat or carpet (rolled, taped, and stood vertically against the wall) works almost as well. If your cutting techniques are untested, it will be impossible for you ever to reach your full potential. Imaginary opponents can only get you so far."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Weapons, such as knives, eliminate most grappling techniques. Try wrestling with an opponent wielding a Magic Marker and see how long you can avoid being turned into a piece of graffiti."
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (p. 174)
"Another training technique is the puncturing of an orange. This may sound fairly simple, but pick up an orange and try sticking your finger into it. The flexibility of the orange gives it considerable strength. Now place two or three fingers closely together and, again, using psychokinesis or ki, project the fingers through the fruit. Strike very quickly, with the mind projecting force ahead of the strike."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 195)
"A knight cannot shine in war if he is has not prepared for it in tournaments. He must have seen his own blood flow, have had his teeth crackle under the blows of his adversary, have been dashed to the earth with such force as to feel the weight of his foe, and disarmed twenty times; he must twenty times have retrieved his failures, more set than ever upon the combat. Then he will be able to confront actual war with the hope of being victorious."
— Roger de Hovenden
"The exercising of weapons putteth away aches, griefs, and diseases, it increaseth strength and sharpenth the wits, it giveth a perfect judgement, it expelleth melancholy, choleric, and evil conceits, it keepeth a man in breath, perfect health, and long life."
— George Silver, from Paradoxes of Defence (1599)
"Wax on, wax off . . ."
— Mister Miyogi, from "The Karate Kid"
FIGHTING
"Fighting is not combat! A fight can be many things, and occasionally it can escalate into combat, but it isn't initially. Combat and fighting call for radically different mindsets. Often, a fight is used to settle disputes and to establish dominance. Combat has no rules. It is a fight to the death or the crippling of your opponent."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 12)
"The right to self-defense is the right to life itself."
— from the Loompanics catalog
"Only a warrior chooses pacifism; others are condemned to it."
— unknown
"Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. . . . (do) not think of victory or defeat."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"I dislike death, however, there are some things I dislike more than death. Therefore, there are times when I will not avoid danger."
— Mencius
"I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me."
— Archirocus, 650 BC
"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
— John Stuart Mill
When facing multiple opponents, you must attack first and keep attacking until the danger subdues."
— Miyomo Musashi, from The Book of Five Rings
"You know, a lot of guys wearing black sashes and teaching fighting have never had a real fight in their lives. They may be good at fighting by rules, even be called champions by some people. But I know a few guys whose only training is lifting a glass of sour mash to their lips; who could see these "champions" off and not even raise a sweat."
— Cacoy Hernandez
"In Hollywood action movies, the fight scenes are full of exaggerated, flashy moves. Stunt people go bouncing off of springboards doing soaring kicks. Serious martial artists and police officers will tell you that, in real life, the best moves are the most subtle ones. The best moves are quick, hard to see, and devastatingly effective."
— Kerr Cuhulain, from Full Contact Magick (p. 71)
"Do not underestimate your opponent. It is very possible that he is: more experienced at fighting, accustomed to being hit, highly motivated, physically strong, has knowledge of martial arts, incapable of backing down, or armed. Never assume he's just some wussy who'll fall down or run away."
— anonymous (RWT)
"In self-defense, there is one rule which you must obey: there are no rules! Always use a weapon as opposed to "fighting fair." Sometimes a deterrent is just as good, and don't threaten to do it — do it! If a guy calls you out, smack him down straight away and when he's down, make sure that he doesn't get up easily."
— Cacoy Hernandez
"I was small and anti-social, with a reputation for not winning, not quitting, and using a blade to avoid losing. I was tough-guy repellent. Bragging about pounding some bone-rack into the ground is not worth getting shanked over."
— James LaFond
"A small injustice can be drowned by a cup of wine; a great injustice can be drowned only by the sword."
— unknown
"Avoidance is the best possible defense. Avoid the criminal and you won't be obliged to risk your life to defend yourself."
— George Hunter
"WAKE THE FUCK UP, PAL! Avoiding the fight is a goddamn technique, and not just a self-defense technique, either. It is an absolutely essential survival technique."
— Peyton Quinn
"ANYTIME YOU STEP INTO THE ARENA A PHYSICAL VIOLENCE, YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT IT MAY NOT END UNTIL EITHER YOU OR YOUR OPPONENT, MAYBE BOTH, ARE DEAD. I don't care if it's just a warning slap to someone — it can escalate! Anytime you are tempted to resort to violence, this is the bottom line: if you ain't ready to die for it or kill for it, don't do it."
— Marc MacYoung, from A Professional's Guide to Ending Violence Quickly (p. 13)
"Do yourself a favor and don't bother hitting people in the mouth! The reason is two-fold. One, the mouth is backed up by bones. Bones are hard, and they hurt your hand. Second — and this is the real motive behind avoiding the mouth as a target — is that this is one of the dirtiest, most bacteria-riddled portions of the body. . . . If you hit someone in the mouth and cut your hand on his teeth, you can get seriously infected! I mean possibly hospital-time infected."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Fists, Wits, and a Wicked Right (p. 75)
"All-or-none, black-or-white perceptions and responses are a major problem in human life, of course. Someone makes a slighting remark to you and your adrenaline begins flowing, your muscles tighten, your body prepares for fight or flight, and you feel very threatened, angry, or anxious. Yet it was only a small verbal slight; no bodily response was called for. We overreact or underreact too often, whereas we need to react in correct proportion to the reality of the situation."
— Charles T. Tart, from Waking Up (p.28)
"Back when I was younger, if you got into a barfight the bartender would yell at you and say that you couldn't come back until you'd paid for the damages. Nowadays, you'd be arrested for felony assault and sent to prison — even if the guy you hurt refused to press charges! Things sure have changed a lot over the past 30 years."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Remember; if you harm someone, you will have to answer for it — and live with what you have done."
— Richard Chun
"Don't hit at all, if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"Never do an enemy a small injury."
— Machiavelli
"Violence should be exclusively reserved for use towards truly deserving individuals who possess the ability and means to adequately defend themselves."
— C. R. Jahn
"Approach the enemy with the attitude of defeating him without delay."
— Miyamoto Musashi
"Once (you) engage the opponent, emotion disappears. It is replaced by total concentration and dedication to a single ideal — victory."
— Hanho
"It is fundamental in all fighting that he who strikes first wins, unless his opponent is prepared."
— General John Ross Delafield
". . . never underestimate how fast someone can attack you. When motivated, people can explode on you in a fraction of a second. Never take your eyes off an attacker even for an instant. . . . A person standing within arms' reach of you (or closer) is in your kill zone. . . . At this distance, you have little or no time to react to an attack, especially if it is fast and non-telegraphic."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 17, 74)
"You should always conserve your energy, save a little in reserve in case a supreme effort is suddenly needed. Two essential aspects are inner calmness and a degree of self-awareness. Experienced martial artists learn to use economical movements. Often an experienced fighter in his 30s or 40s can hold his own against much younger, stronger opponents because of this factor."
— Robert K. Spear, from Survival on the Battlefield (p. 9)
"To generate great power you must first totally relax and gather your strength, and then concentrate your mind and all your strength on hitting your target."
— Bruce Lee
"Once going to the ground, never stop moving. Start rolling or try to get back on your feet as quickly as possible. If you can't get up and can't roll, pivot on your hips and shoulders so you can face your opponent and block with your feet any attempt to close with you."
—Rex Applegate, from Kill or Be Killed (p. 15)
"When a man's fight begins within himself, he is worth something."
— Robert Browning
"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning."
— General George S. Patton, Jr.
"Don't go looking for a fight — but if you're hit, deck the bastard."
— Roger Ailes
"Precision is of the utmost importance when engaged in any sort of conflict. A carefully aimed pistol shot is typically far more effective than emptying an entire magazine from the hip; an accurate strike with a properly formed hand weapon usually does far more damage than a flurry of undirected blows; and a short factual statement consisting of carefully chosen words delivered in an appropriate tone will most likely elicit the desired response, whereas a mere exchange of taunts delivered with a rapid high-pitched voice will often prove counter-productive."
— anonymous (RWT)
"When it looks like the shit is going to hit the fan, you don't want to be jacking your jaw. Keep your mouth shut and locked. Most broken jaws occur when the mouth is open."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Violence, Blunders, and Fractured Jaws (p. 238)
"A fight is a sociological function, in which there are rules and limits. Combat is a free-for-all, where victory is awarded to the survivor. There are no rules; in combat, you do what you have to do to win. These things are as different as night and day. If you can't differentiate between them, you can land in a heap of trouble. . . . Most situations are not combat; they are fights, and therefore less intense. So relax about it."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 6)
"Street fighters usually do not have any special stance or approach; they usually just come wading in. . . . Most street fighters have one or two special techniques which they have found from practical experience to be effective. They usually attempt one of these favored moves at the start of a fight, hoping to end it quickly and flashily. . . . A street fighter will rarely give up. If he does, he will probably attack again the moment you relax your vigilance."
— Joe Hyams, from Playboy's Book of Practical Self-Defense (p. 52)
"Don't be overconfident. There is always someone stronger or better than you, regardless of size or physical shape. . . . Some fat people have remarkably strong stomachs that can withstand the hardest blow you can throw. Some persons who appear frail are strong and supple as a willow. . . . It is foolhardy to think that because you are bigger and seem to be in better condition or have some fighting experience you can handle any situation or person. It is much wiser to assume that your opponent is more dangerous than you think. This is especially true when confronting a street fighter."
— Joe Hyams, from Playboy's Book of Practical Self-Defense (p. 52-53)
"Reality is not a movie. You can't withstand a barrage of blows like Clint Eastwood in an old western barroom brawl and remain standing. When an elbow is slammed into your neck, your neck breaks. When a fist is buried deep into your kidneys, you land in the hospital. Tightening your neck muscles won't stop a chop to your throat, nor will closing your eyelids stop an eye gouge. It's simply a joke to think the ability to do 500 sit-ups will protect your midsection. What muscles protect your ribcage?
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (p. 46)
"Getting hit with an elbow is like getting hit with a baseball bat."
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (p. 141)
"Three men can have a hard time fighting against one. They must train together or their rhythm is off, they get in one another's way, they have to be careful not to attack a friend. The lone man has no such problems. Everyone is an enemy. The thought and the action are one."
— James D. Macdonald, from The Apocalypse Door (p. 188)
"Back off as much as possible, and never square off as though you are planning to attack. You should take your opponent by surprise. If a fight is inevitable and he's within range, get off the first punch and make it effective."
— Bruce Lee
". . . as we know, the first rule of Unarmed Combat is to 'arm yourself' . . ."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 41)
"How people choose to defend themselves is as much a part of national character as literature, costumes or cooking."
— Richard F. Burton, from The Sentiment of the Sword (1911)
"Violence never settles anything."
— Genghis Khan
STREETFIGHTING
"Commit yourself violently and totally. Attack to destroy. Never fight anybody on equal terms."
— Lt.Col. Anthony B. Herbert
"The folowing actions are effective: Pulling hair, tearing a lip, grasping and twisting (or tearing) the nose. A grip with the point of thumb and forefinger, or bite, on the thick muscles that extend from the neck to the shoulder; a thumb and forefinger grip, or bite, across the breast muscles to the arm; kicking or biting the Achilles tendon back of the heel — all are effective."
—Rex Applegate, from Kill or Be Killed (p. 11)
"Rip using your hands to squeeze and tear at any soft tissue areas of the body. . . . Pull at the eyes, neck, throat, ears, groin, lips, hair, fingers, or any loose fold of skin, like around the underarms, waist, corners of the mouth, or the like."
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (pp. 21-22)
"With his right hand he grabbed at the re-bar man's face. His huge thumb slid into the man's mouth between cheek and gum. He clenched his grip tightly and pulled viciously down. One side of the man's face was torn open in a jagged, bloody line from ear to jaw."
— from Chain of Evidence by Michael Detroit (p. 230)
"Take a look at the way your ears are connected to the side of your head. They are glued on in an up and down direction. That's how you want to try to take them off. . . . Straight down or past his chest is the angle you want to go for."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Floor Fighting (pp. 159-160)
"If you succeed in hooking two fingertips into your opponent's nostrils, it is possible to peel his nose off his face by suddenly jerking it upwards, shearing the moorings. If you pull someone's nose off, you'll be able to see his tonsils."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 62)
"(He) taught me several tricks of waterfront fighting that were often useful. One was the so-called Liverpool Kiss, where you catch a man behind his neck and jerk his face down to meet your upcoming skull. Done properly it can obliterate, for the time being, a man's features and make him less than anxious to pursue the argument."
— Louis L'Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (p. 23)
"Kneeing him in the groin is okay, nothing wrong with biting, but gouging the eyes works best. . . . they are the most sensitive body part, requiring the least force from you. You don't even have to touch someone's eyes to produce a reflective movement."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 63)
"Bite a chunk out of his cheek, nose, or neck. I know these . . . pictures I am placing in your mind are ugly. Remember, you must be as uncivilized as he is for a few seconds in order to escape. . . . Pound for pound of square-inch power, nothing matches your jaw."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 65)
"Your teeth are a most effective natural weapon. If, for example, you are immobilized by a bear-hug, bite into your opponent's shoulder. If a hand is over your mouth, bite it. If any portion of your opponent's body is touching your face, bite hard."
— Joe Hyams, from Playboy's Book of Practical Self-Defense (p. 27)
"A friend of mine was telling me about a bad fight that happened at the club he was DJing. About a half-dozen guys were cutting each other up with knives in the front of the room . . . real bad situation. Know how they broke it up? About fifty people started throwing forties (40 oz beer bottles) at them until they stopped! That's some fucked up shit."
— The Chinaman (paraphrased)
"End the fight as rapidly as possible — give no quarter; be totally ruthless; do not stop short of total victory."
— Anthony B. Herbert, from Military Manual of Self Defense (p. 12)
"Put on your shitkickers and kick some shit!"
— House of Pain
KNIFEFIGHTING
"There is one unquestionable rule in knife fighting: never get into a knife fight. There are no winners in edged weapon contests — only losers to varying degrees."
— Fred Rexer, Jr.
"Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like? What would be the feeling of a real blade entering another man's body? That initial resistance — and that sudden giving? The surprise on another man's face!"
— "The Villainous Master" in By the Sword (1991)
"After massive bleeding (exsanguination) and infection, most deaths are caused by air in the bloodstream (embolism), suffocation (asphyxia), or collapsed lung (pneumothorax). Even if major arteries are cut and severe loss of blood ensues, an adult can remain fully conscious from two to thirty seconds . . . Even mortally wounded duelists were sometimes able to continue fighting effectively long enough to take the lives of those who had taken theirs. A stricken man frequently does not feel the full effects of his wound and, blinded with rage, may simply throw himself on his opponent with renewed fury."
— Richard Cohen, from By the Sword (pp. 286-287)
"After all, the weapon itself is designed for antagonistic combat. Its point can indeed be described only with the cliche' of 'needle-sharp.' It will snag veins, arteries, and muscles on its path through the body, tearing them as the blade progresses. The resulting damage is a function of organs hit and depth of penetration. Given the anatomical variants of the opponent's body, a deliberate attempt at an instant kill with a thrust into a 'vital point' could be compared with trying to impale an airborne fly hovering behind a curtain."
— Christopher Amberger, from Secret History of the Sword (p. 103)
"The untrained or poorly skilled knife user will stab and slash at anything offered him in the hope of seeing success. Any idiot can pick up a knife and engage in a free-for-all cutting spree. The expert knife player studies human anatomy with the intensity of a surgeon. The right strike at the right point is his goal. A fight can be concluded with a single shallow cut if it is delivered properly."
— Greg Walker, from Modern Knife Combat (p. 52)
"The key point of an effective slash is in the amount of contact made with the sharp edge of the blade. Conversely, the main point in thrusting is to have maximum power in the stabbing motion."
— Michael De Alba
"A slash (or cut) can be long and deep or short and shallow, depending upon the bladesman's skill and the flow of the confrontation. Contrary to popular thought, slashes can be every bit as lethal as a thrust depending upon the target area affected. In most cases, however, the slash is meant to soften up the opponent through mental shock from being cut and physical trauma brought on by bleeding. Filipino knife philosophy offers a thought process of 'three strikes and the man is down.' The slash may commonly be used as the opening strike in such a scenario, with a second slash followed by a thrust completing the equation, or with a thrust inserted between two slashes."
— Greg Walker, from Modern Knife Combat (p. 20)
"Since the daga is very sharp and needle-pointed, the mere twisting of the wrist or the turning of the finger is all that is needed to inflict deep puncture wounds. . . . Fighting with the daga might as well be fighting with the empty hand. You will be well within punching, kicking, head-butting, and wrestling distance, so there is the great need for quick feet to vary distances abruptly."
— Amante Marinas, from Pananandata (p. 50)
"When I pin that foot — as well as shoving a knife into his eyeball — he loses his balance. He goes down very quickly. . . . A quick jab is all you need. We're not trying to kill this adversary. We're trying to dissuade him from attacking us further. To say that this is a humanitarian act — to puncture someone's eye . . . is a little bit far-fetched. But compared to what you could do with a knife, yes — it is humanitarian. You are trying not to kill."
— James Keating, from the COMTECH video, Reverse Grip Knifefighting (0:34, 0:50)
"The knife, it must be remembered, is a universal phenomenon. It exists in some form or other in every culture of the world. When used for personal protection, the techniques for its deployment vary as much as one culture varies from another."
— James Loriega, from Sevillian Steel (p. 2)
"Don't wait for him to attack! Pick up a light chair and rush him with it, lion-tamer fashion. Aim one foot of the chair at his throat and the opposite foot at his groin. The seat of the chair serves as a very reliable shield to protect you from the knife. Remember to thrust or charge with the legs of the chair. Don't make the TV mistake of swinging the chair like an axe or club."
— N. Mashiro, Ph.D., from Black Medicine III (p. 118)
"Using a coat, leather jacket, smock, or a spare shirt to defend against a blade is certainly a practice as old as the blade itself. It would only be natural for the prehistoric hunter to armor himself with the skin of his prey."
— James LaFond
"More than mere technique, he taught the spirit of the use of cold steel as a weapon of preference of a man of honor and a gentleman."
— G. Gordon Liddy, of Captain Stevens
"Hand to hand combat with edged weapons is the most demanding of human physical combat. It not only demands the most skill, both physical and mental, it develops in the adept abilities that separates him from others and elevates intuition, reflexes, and technique to the highest degree . . . the emotional tie is stronger than for other weapons, and the training for its use strengthens spirit."
— Lynn Thompson
"If you're considering training with weapons and are still deciding which one to master first, I'd recommend the butcher knife. The average butcher knife has a wicked 8" blade with a comfortable grip, good balance, and an integral hilt. Not only do they take a far better edge than most flea market fighting knives, but you can find one in virtually any home — just look in the kitchen. It's easy to learn how to use it effectively, it's legal to own, and it'll command a lot more respect than a broomstick or a belt (as Charlie Manson once said, 'Everybody's afraid of gettin' cut!'). Once you believe that you've nearly mastered the use of the butcher knife as a weapon, start training with one in either hand."
— anonymous (RWT)
"A heavy knife is a club with a sharp edge. You chop with it. The feeling is like chopping at a piece of firewood with a hatchet. The heavy knife can cut or break bone where the light knife can only slice soft tissue."
— N. Mashiro, from Black Medicine, Vol. IV, Equalizers (p. 49)
"In close quarters fighting there is no more deadly weapon than the knife. An entirely unarmed man has no certain defense against it, and, further, merely the sudden flashing of a knife is frequently enough to strike fear into your opponent, causing him to lose confidence . . . A quick draw (an essential in knife fighting) can not be accomplished unless the sheath is firmly secured to the clothing or equipment. Moreover, speed on the draw can be accomplished only by constant daily practice."
— W. E. Fairbairn, from Get Tough! (p. 96)
"If you're relying upon a 3" 'tactical folder' or a 2" 'neck knife' for personal defense, be sure you're free of any grandiose delusions about your 'weapon's' capabilities."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 87)
"When utilizing a knife without a proper guard — such as the balisong and many boot knives — it is advised that one 'cap' the pommel with one's thumb if the knife is being grasped in the 'reverse' or 'icepick' grip. Although this may weaken the grip if the weapon is subjected to lateral pressure, it will effectively prevent one's fingers from being sliced if the hand slides up over the blade after impacting bone."
— C. R. Jahn
". . . the greatest advantage of the edged weapon is that it need only touch you to do damage. Contact usually means cutting. . . . The edged weapon requires very little speed and even less strength to do its job. . . . When steel meets human flesh, flesh loses and a slash can open up large wounds. This is because the skin is somewhat elastic and, when severed, the tissue separates around the wound. . . . What would happen if you took a pin and popped a hole in (a garden) hose? You would instantly get a violent spray of water. If you were to slash the hose, the water would surge forth at a rapid rate. So it is with arteries. . . . Cut anything you can. Cut the hands, arms, legs, feet, face, body, anything you can reach, and especially the hand with the (weapon) in it."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 18, 45, 54, 100)
"When withdrawing the knife from a deep stab wound it is oftentimes difficult because the flesh of the body has a tendency to contract and grip the blade and suction adds to the problem and care should be taken not to snap the blade. If penetration was as deep as it should have been you may well require both hands to withdraw the knife. . . . Most experts say to leave the knife in but I don't advocate it because it can be traced . . ."
— John Minnery, from How to Kill, Vol. I (p. 23)
"Be warned! The only way to know whether you are master of balisong is to fight with it — for real!"
— Master Bimba
"The blade must be your constant companion. . . . she should be at your side in whatever you do, always providing assistance, support, and confidence. Treat her well, keep her sharp, and she will be faithful to you to the end."
— Don Santiago Rivera
COMBAT
"Remember: once you have ascertained that you are dealing with hostile intruders, the staircase becomes a free-fire zone."
— Massad Ayoob
"If he is willing to kill, then he must be prepared to die. It is only right."
— C. W. Nicol
"Once you've accepted your own death, you can become really proficient at killing because it is no longer important if you die."
— Dave Nelson, USMC Scout/Sniper
"He found the best way to accept his predicament was to just assume that he was dead already. He was dead already. He just kept doing his job."
— from Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden (p. 255)
"Killing someone is a unique ability all by itself. Not everyone can lay a weapon's sights on a fellow human being and crank off a round. The Army has been keeping data on soldiers' killing abilities ever since WWII. The data supports the conclusion that out of an entire platoon of soldiers, you have perhaps two men who qualify as genuine killers. Men who actually see enemy troops, put the front sight blade on them, and blow them away . . . Genuine killers are not to be confused with guys who simply spray an area and happen to hit and kill someone . . . It takes a certain something not found in everybody."
— Medal of Honor recipient Franklin D. Miller
"My first reaction, rooted in the illusion that anyone trying to kill ne must have a personal motive, was: 'Why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him?' A moment later, I realized there was nothing personal about it. All he saw was a man in the wrong uniform. He was trying to kill me and he would try again because that was his job."
— Phillip Caputo
"Battle scenes in films often make people who have been in battles restless. On the screen there are particular conventions to be observed. Men blown up by high explosives in real war, for example, are often torn apart quite hideously; in films, there is a big bang and bodies, intact, fly through the air with the greatest of ease. If they are shot . . . they fall down like children in a game, to lie motionless. The most harrowing thing in real battles is that they usually don't lie still; only the lucky ones are killed outright."
— General Sir John Hackett
"When you made contact with the enemy, you went from the most horrible boredom to the most intense excitement I've ever known in my life. You couldn't remain detached. Someone was trying to kill you and you were trying to kill someone, and it was like every thrill hitting you all at once. . ."
— Mark Smith
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."
— Ernest Hemingway
"Many had died there, and others were in the last agonies as we passed. Their groans and cries were heart rending . . . The gory corpses lying all about us, in every imaginable attitude, and slain by an inconceivable variety of wounds, were shocking to behold."
— unknown Union soldier at Shiloh
"Attacking such a person or his family, or even posing to do so, is an express ticket to the morgue. In the morgue, your corpse will lie on a cold, stainless-steel tray."
— Peyton Quinn
"There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."
— Winston Churchill
"Yah ta hey! Hoka hey!" ("It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die!")
— Lakota Sioux war cry.
"Become the perfect dance partner. Before you engage, show the terrible joy of your true face. Put on the True Helm of Terror and lay waste to the psychic battleground with the realization that your enemy is self-defeated. This is one of the great secrets of victory."
— Sweyn Plowright, from True Helm
"FINISH HIM!!!"
— from the Mortal Kombat videogame
CHAIRBORNE
"What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me."
— R. Browning
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
— Bernard Shaw
"I hadn't trained myself for years to be a warrior, only to spend my life behind a typewriter writing and editing."
— G. Gordon Liddy, from Will (p. 76)
"How I would've loved to vault over his desk and strangle the bastard, fat squeezing through my fingers. He was condemning me to spend the remainder of my time on this crummy little island in the middle of the East China Sea while my friends went to Vietnam and romped and stomped in the jungles, laughing at me when they came home, covered in honors and medals, while I sat pounding out tepid news release copy . . . It was my misfortune that I had the only journalism degree in the 1st Special Forces Group."
— Jim Morris, from War Story (p. 140)
"They were all Special Forces guys, of course. Not a leg in the bunch. There were about thirty of us in all. The clerks were all guys who had volunteered for the army, volunteered for jump training, volunteered for the Forces, and volunteered for Nam. Then somebody had discovered that they could type or something . . ."
Jim Morris, from War Story (p. 266)
"Those guys would stay around because of the status involved. They were somebody because they were at the place where that dangerous job was done. But they didn't want to or couldn't do that job. The staff sections usually had people in them who had been in the woods once or twice. But that was it. They never went back in again."
— Medal of Honor recipient Franklin D. Miller
"Many men look back to the days of war with an intense longing. They miss a time in their lives when they felt on the edge, intensely alive, a time when life and love walked hand in hand with death and destruction."
— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (p. 54)
"The military is a profession that brands itself on the soul and causes you forever after to view the world and all human endeavor through a unique set of mental filters. . . . Close brutal combat puts a callous layer on each individual who undergoes the experience. With some men, their souls become trapped inside those accrued layers and they stay tightly bound up within themselves, unable or unwilling to reach outside that hard protective shell. For others, the effect is just the opposite. That coating becomes like a looking glass, highlighting and magnifying the things that are really important in life. Every sensation becomes precious and delicious."
— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (pp. vi-vii)
"Many of the well-known difficulties faced by Vietnam vets upon their return home stemmed from a lack of respect for this necessary period of psychological adjustment. Instead of being mustered out over a period of weeks, as in other wars, somebody in the Pentagon decided the more humane approach would be to send the soldiers straight home. Many soldiers found themselves in their quiet hometowns less than seventy-two hours after leaving horrific combat situations. Add to this the indifference or active disrespect with which they were greeted, and their problems in adjusting are clear."
— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (pp. 67-69)
"You had a very weird energy; it was just a completely different energy after you did that thing. You weren't fit for normal people."
— Bill Murray (in reference to something completely different, but it works here too)
"We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men's placidity from his."
— Wilfred Owen, from "Insensibility," stanza V
"Our scars remind us that the past was real."
— Hannibal Lecter, from the screenplay for Red Dragon
WEAPONRY
"Your mind is your most powerful weapon."
— unofficial motto of the United States Special Forces
"In ancient times, tools and weapons meant survival. . . . To an extent, the same is true today. Weapons, or the threat of their deployment, are still used to wage war, to maintain law and order, and deter aggression. Above all else, weapons have kept us alive in a world in which we are physically inferior. Without them, we would have only been a footnote in the evolutionary chain."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 2)
"I train my students first in the use of weapons. As the student becomes more skilled in weapons use, there is instilled in him a mental attitude that weapons training and empty-hands training are identical. Thus, they come to realize that the transition from weapons to empty-hand training is more of a change in mental attitude than a physical one."
— Amante Marinas, from Pananandata (p. 137)
"The old Filipinos who made stick fighting an art preferred to hit the bone and preferred a stick to a blade. Instead of a clean cut, the stick left shattered bone. The business end of a stick can travel many times the speed of the empty hand. And it feels nothing, whether it hits hard bone or soft flesh."
— Dan Inosanto, from The Filipino Martial Arts (p. 11)
"If you're going to carry a weapon, make damn sure that it is legal for you to do so! Many states require a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and if you don't have that official 'permission slip' on your person, you will go to jail. Most states will allow you to carry a knife — even a full-sized hunting knife — but if you're caught carrying a double-edged dagger with a spiked knucklebow, you will go to jail. Most states will allow you to carry pepperspray, a sword cane, a butterfly knife or an oversized 'tactical folder' — but if you instead choose to carry nunchaku, a blackjack, brass knuckles, a switchblade, or a springblade 'ballistic knife,' you will go to jail. Familiarize yourself with your jurisdiction's laws, and don't take the stupid and unnecessary risk of carrying contraband weaponry when a legal alternative will work nearly as well!"
— anonymous (RWT)
"When the World is at Peace, a gentleman keeps his sword by his side."
— Wu Tsu
"The use of one's bare hands to defend against attack or to launch an attack has always been a desperation move, a method of last resort, by any people at any time and anywhere on this squalid little planet. It has only been rather recently in mankind's history that the habitual carrying of weapons has become something less than the universal norm."
— Peyton Quinn
"Don't hit your friend with your soft little hand — use this stick, it's harder!"
— remembered line from an old Cracked comic
"If someone attacks me on the street, I don't wanna just make him cry and give him a runny nose — I wanna wound the bastard!"
— anonymous female (when asked why she carries a knife instead of pepperspray)
"Do not hesitate to use your weapon when you and your loved ones face mortal danger."
— Eugene Sockut
"Weapons were named, surnamed, slang-named, christened, titled and dubbed. Protective devices. Bearings of perfect performance. Reciting these names was the soldier's poetry, his counterjargon to death."
— unknown
"An armed society is a polite society"
— Robert Heinlein
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
— Ani DiFranco
"For among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible."
— Machiavelli
"Armed individuals carry a weapon out of the primitive urge of the animal kingdom, self-preservation of themselves, their family and their chosen territory; whether it be their car, their house, or the bar stool they are sitting on."
— John M. La Tourrette
"It needs to be realized that fighting tactics come from techniques, and techniques are derived primarily (though not exclusively) from the mechanics of the weapon itself."
— John Clements, from Renaissance Swordsmanship
"A good weapon is an instrument of fear. All creatures have distaste for them."
— Lao Tzu
"The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind. The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning."
— Lao-tzu
"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."
Theodore Roosevelt (quoted as an African proverb)
"Give them enough food, give them enough arms, and the common people will have trust in you . . . . when there is no trust, the common people will have nothing to stand on."
— Confucius
"For psychological reasons, a man will have more confidence in a weapon of his own choosing; hence the weapon will have a direct bearing on his proficiency in practice and in combat."
— Rex Applegate, from Kill or Be Killed (p. 123)
"A man without a weapon to defend himself, especially after long exposure, is very likely to give up in despair. It is remarkable what a difference it would make in his morale if he had a small stick or cane in his hand. Now, add to this the knowledge that he could, with ease, kill any opponent with a stick, and you will then see how easy it is to cultivate the offensive spirit which is so essential in present-day warfare."
— W. E. Fairbairn, from Get Tough! (p. 74)
"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them."
— Thomas Jefferson (to George Washington, 1796)
"One should never be far from one's weapons
When faring from home
You can never be certain when you will need
The use of your spear while out and about"
— from Havamal, verse 38, Plowright translation
"When the gods made man, they made a weapon."
— from The Odin Brotherhood, by Dr. Mark L. Mirabello
"If you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one."
— Luke 22:36, attributed to Jesus (although many theologians are in disagreement as to this book's accuracy).
"If it looks like the shit is gonna go down, I reach into my pocket, smile, and whip a handful of pennies right in the fucker's face. Unlike Mace or aquarium gravel, a pocketful of change won't get a second glance if you happen to get frisked by the cops."
— anonymous (RWT)
"'I see two knives,' Mowery said calmly. 'Skinny guy in the middle, bald prick on the left.' Shifter laughed. 'Wait'll they see my sword." He smashed his cue stick violently on the edge of the pool table. When the stick snapped it broke along the grain, creating a long, very sharp point."
— from Chain of Evidence by Michael Detroit (p. 228)
"A flail is a flexible weapon like a chain or an extremely lightweight stick like a metal curtain rod or automobile antenna. . . . The amount of pain inflicted can be large even when the weapon is very light and insubstantial. . . . One of the really nice things about the light flail is the sound it makes as you swing it through the air. It 'hums.' People who hear that sound usually back off. Make it sing for you."
— N. Mashiro, from Black Medicine, Vol. IV, Equalizers (pp. 31-32)
"There was no way he could claim that he was just a tourist with a handgun in his pants. The same went for knives, garottes, and other aids to mayhem. Harsh language and a dangerous attitude would be all he had — that and a talent for turning household items to unintended purposes."
— James D. Macdonald, from The Apocalypse Door (p. 40)
"All uncouth, unknown wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as by cold iron."
— Robert Kirk (1691)
"Don't carry a weapon unless you're going to pull it. Don't pull it unless you're going to use it. Don't use it unless you're going to kill with it."
— Animal's 3rd Law of Weapons
"The right to buy weapons is the right to be free."
— A. E. Van Vogt, from The Weapon Shops of Isher
GUNFIGHTING
"The man who wears a gun carries with it the power of life and death, and therefore the responsibility to deport himself with greater calm and wisdom than his unarmed counterpart, whose panic or misjudgement in crisis situations will have less serious consequences."
— Massad Ayoob
"A gun will not crawl out of a drawer to attack you; it will not change you into a hero or a villain; it will not drive you mad with power; and it will not make you capable of anything except expelling a lead projectile by means of expanding gases. Therefore, do not fear the handgun, and do not expect it to save you from your own weaknesses. It is only a tool."
— Fred Rexer, Jr.
"A lotta people belittle the diminutive .22 autoloading pistol, but it has always been a favorite of mine. This piece is lightweight and nearly invisible when you drop it in a vest pocket — you barely know it's there. It has almost no recoil when compared to a .38 or 9 mm, so one can easily rapidfire 10 rounds into a beer can-sized target 15 feet away in under 3 seconds. Drop the clip and snap in another, and you're good to go with 10 more rounds. Loaded up with bored out CCI Stingers, it's bad as fuck. It may not be able to defeat a Kevlar vest, crack an engine block, or drop a man with a single shot, but it will always remain my carry weapon of choice."
— Jake Bishop
"If you have to shoot a man, keep shooting until he is either unconscious, dead, disarmed, or so torn apart that he can't function. A major fallacy is that the criminal will fall with the first bullet. He may take a clipload before he goes down, and if you wait for him to fall after the first hit, you may get shot yourself. Keep firing 'til he can't shoot back."
— Massad Ayoob, from The Gravest Extreme (p. 113)
"Rapid fire comprises strings of shots usually fired at clearly definable targets at short range. Twenty aimed shots a minute is rapid fire . . . remember that your aim will suffer if you try to hold your breath and sight picture for more than seven or eight seconds. Rapid fire heats up rifles to an uncomfortable degree, so if you get a pause in the firing, lock back the action to allow air to circulate around the chamber. . . . Not only is fully automatic fire inaccurate, it eats up your ammo at an incredible rate."
— Peter McAleese, from McAleese's Fighting Manual (pp. 169-170)
"With (a) 12-gauge shotgun, you've got buckshot that does the same thing as your pistol — times nine — each time you pull the trigger."
— Bill Clede, from Police Shotgun Manual (p, 15)
"I've been seeing these fat little orange derringers stamped 'MARINE FLARE PROJECTOR' being sold from a number of sources (along with several short low-pressure capsicum rounds) for 'personal protection.' A foreign company, Aquilla, has recently made available a 12 gauge mini-shotshell which can be chambered in these pocket-sized, plastic-barreled flareguns — unfortunately, it will blow up like a grenade if you're actually stupid enough to fire it (I've seen photographs of the test results)."
— anonymous (RWT)
"I'd rather not oil the gun at all than use too much oil. For that reason, I don't like spray cans. You can easily spray too much. Use a simple squeeze bottle, so you can put on just one drop of oil."
— Don Vivenzio, Smith & Wesson's Armorers School
"Over 90 percent of gunfights occur within 21 feet. More than half of these occur within 5 feet. Most people, when put to the test, can't even get their guns out in time to defend against a person rushing them from across a large room. You also must know hand-to-hand combat."
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (p. 199)
"A prudent man will not rely upon hip shooting at distances greater than seven yards, the practical limit of fast gunmanship. Beyond this distance the pistol should be brought up toward eye level as the range increases until at the longer ranges it is fired by looking down the barrel or actually using the sights."
— William H. Jordan, from No Second Place Winner (p. 62)
"You should neither see the sights nor be conscious of them. The weapon must be a natural extension of your arm; look at where you're going to shoot and think the bullet into the target."
— John Minnery, from How to Kill, Vol. I (p. 51)
"These experts believed that shooting was 20 percent physical and 80 percent mental. . . . Each became one with the weapon. The gun was an extension of the shooter. They let the bullet go down range — they didn't fire it. . . . Surprisingly, these experts do not need to hold their weapons perfectly still to shoot accurately. Under observation, the shooters displayed a great deal of arm movement as they were firing. They mentally controlled the trigger squeeze, and would not allow the bullet to 'go down range' until their sights were on target. This mental control was an unconscious process that allowed trigger squeeze to occur only when the sights were aligned. The expert shooters call their technique 'controlling the smallest arc of movement.' They knew they would be moving and controlled the arc."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (pp. 78-79)
"Don't always assume that by having a gun you have all of life's answers — because you don't."
— James Keating, from the COMTECH video Crossada: American Blade Concepts (1:10)
"Bring a gun (more than one, if possible); bring all your friends who have guns — preferably long guns."
— adapted from "Rules for a Gunfight" (author unknown)
SURVIVAL
"The fundamental principal of surviving violence is mental. Not physical, not gadgetry, but mental preparation, mind-setting. It consists of visualizing a crime scene and mentally rehearsing your response. Mind-setting gives you this crucial advantage when violence strikes: 'This is not new to me, I've thought about this before. I know what to do.' Then your instincts trained for this moment will kick in."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 35)
"Cops play what-if games in their minds, alone and with each other. Every time they read a newspaper account of something or investigate a crime, they reenact it, mentally transferring themselves into other crime situations, and plan a response. Stories, as gruesome as they may be, are an important part of survival planning. They motivate people to plan against that same crime happening against them."
— Capt. Mark Leap, LAPD
"Survival is the art of staying alive. Any equipment you have must be considered a bonus. You must know how to take everything possible from nature and use it to the full."
— John Wiseman
"The human body has an amazing ability to cope with arduous situations and testing environments. People who have come through, after enduring terrible hardship under seemingly impossible conditions, are a living proof of this."
— John Wiseman
"Lack of food constitutes the biggest single assault upon morale . . . Apart from its purely chemical effects upon the body, it has woeful effects upon the mind. One is in the dismal condition of having nothing to look forward to."
— Brigadier Bernard Fergusson
"The standard 'safe' shelf life of canned food is 2 years from the date of manufacture. But consider this: In the 1820s, Sir William Edward Parry carried a 4-pound tin of roasted veal on two expeditions to the Northwest Passage. The can was never opened, so it was kept as an artifact. In 1938, scientists analyzed the 100-year-old contents and found them to be intact both physically and nutritionally. The veal was then fed to a cat, who had no complaints. According to the Canned Food Alliance, unless your can bulges, is dented, or squirts when opened, the contents are edible."
— David Joachim, from A Man, A Can, A Plan (p. 16)
"The Russians, he found, could march incredible distances, sleep in wet rags, live on roots from the fields. They had stomachs that would digest anything; he saw prisoners tear raw chunks from a long-dead horse and march on, refreshed. Such insensibility is a high military asset. It meant that they could drink from marshes and shell holes . . . they could even exist without supply columns."
— Charles Foley, from Commando Extraordinary (p. 21)
"On some day, in the not too distant future, Shit will Happen, and the streets will be filled with a conglomeration of sorry fucks looking to get out, get off, get paid, or get that last can of wax beans sitting way in the back of that empty supermarket shelf. The entire fucking city would turn into a gigantic parking lot as traffic stopped, and the cops would say 'fuck this' and disappear, leaving Joe Citizen to fend for himself."
— from Underground, by C. R. Jahn (p. 264)
"She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or one who imagines life must be full of emergencies."
— Mavis Gallant, from A Fairly Good Time
"Animal food will give you the most food value per pound. Anything that creeps, crawls, swims or flies is a possible source of food."
— excerpted from S.A.S. Combat Survival course notes
"If you are captured, someone soon will bring you a bucket of slop and, after your stomach has flipped from the sight and smell of it, you say, 'I can't (or won't) eat that stuff.' You'd better eat it because that's all you'll get and it may get progressively fouler and skimpier. . . . You must eat everything you can get — issued rations, things you can steal, things you procure from the environment. . . . You will be revolted by the food given you as a POW, but if you miss one meal as a prisoner it will take you weeks to regain your lost strength. You can't afford to miss a single bite when you're on a bare subsistence diet."
— Dr. Gene N. Lam
". . . most recruits in Western armies have come from urban backgrounds and have little or no understanding of the countryside. Theses days, almost everyone buys their meat pre-cut in packs from the supermarket; families no longer keep chickens, rabbits and the odd pig to eat. So not only do few young soldiers have the skills to hunt animals for food, they won't have a clue how to skin and butcher them either."
— Peter McAleese, from McAlees's Fighting Manual (p. 158)
"Are you willing to do everything necessary in order to live?"
— Shiguro Takada, from Contingency Cannibalism (p. 4)
AWARENESS
"Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you."
— Bruce Lee
"Observe things as they are and don't pay attention to other people."
— Huang Po
"You always want to know what's going on around you. Always. When you're walking or driving, you're constantly scanning, right sidewalk to the left sidewalk, left sidewalk to the right sidewalk. You just look for something out of the ordinary. Something that doesn't look right. And the best way to do it is — if it catches your eye, if it makes you take a second look, look at it a third time. Satisfy your curiosity."
— anonymous, from What Cops Know, by Connie Fletcher (p. 20)
"Modern life so celebrates intellect that we ignore instinct, but when recon men "felt" something — danger, anticipation, anxiety, hackles rising on their neck — they thought it a subconscious warning. Some hints might be too oblique to be articulated but were to be considered real nonetheless. It could be the gut feeling that someone's watching you, or an overwhelming foreboding about climbing a hill. Recon men learned to trust their instincts."
— John L. Plaster
"If as a kid, they see a dragon, they get smacked for asking about it. Once they forget that these sort of questions exist, they are given a pair of sunglasses. These sunglasses are ultraviolet and dragon-blocking. Put them on and you don't see dragons . . . These sunglasses, in reality, are various operating systems. Take this operating system and you won't see dragons. Take this one and you won't see violence. Take this one and you won't see drug/alcohol abuse. This way people can wander around happily not seeing things."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung
"The best way to avoid violence is to always be aware of what's going on in your surroundings, and to feel secure enough in your manhood that you cannot be made to fight over insignificant things."
— C.R. Jahn
"Nurture the ability to perceive the truth in all matters. Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye."
— Miyamoto Musahi
"Observe what is with undivided awareness."
— Bruce Lee
"Keep your eyes open when entering,
Always wary, always watchful,
You may never know if an enemy,
May sit in hiding within the hall"
— from Havamal, verse 1, Plowright translation
"There's really no such thing as an 'ex-cop' or a cop who's 'off-duty' or 'retired.' Once trained, once indoctrinated, a cop is always alert, assessing reality in terms of its potential for illegal acts."
— Sue Grafton, from "H" is for Homicide
"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough."
— Robert Heller
"When you're ridin' high on the open highway, senses heighten as you absorb the sights. Initially, there's an internal dialogue; you talk to yourself. After a while, everything settles down to a cerebral level; you become still. With a 360-degree panoramic view, everything seeps in and registers. The little voice that natters and chatters in your head eventually disappears. Many riders slip into a free form of meditation, except you're much more alert."
— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin' High, Livin' Free (p. 51)
"He experienced 360 degree vision while running away from a German machine-gun nest. Not only could he see ahead as he ran, but he could see the gunners trying to draw a bead on him from behind."
— Robert Sullivan, referring to a WWII veteran, from Light by Moody & Perry (p. 129)
"Your heart is still pounding from that burst of speed and energy, but your mind has to remain calm and detached. It's like you have to observe yourself and the scene from outside your body — from a spot on the ceiling where you can take it all in with a fish-eye lens."
— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (p. 105)
"Your greatest weapons are your awareness and the reactions that become instinctive tools of your awareness."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 5)
"One of the things that saved my ass in the bar was continually scanning everyone around me. You can and must learn to do this on a subconscious level in such a way that nobody even notices you're doing it. This is the 'see everything and see nothing' Zen concept. It means you never allow your full consciousness to settle on any one thing, but you are continually aware of everything."
— Peyton Quinn, from A Bouncer's Guide to Barroom Brawling (p. 8)
"To stand silent and aware while the suspect is taunting, insulting, and otherwise trying to distract you gives you a distinct advantage. You can read the person's body language and sense his energy if you don't focus on the abusive and derogatory behavior. It doesn't distract you from what the suspect is actually doing. This allows you to respond quicker and use less force to control him should he become violent. Often it permits you to deal with the situation without resorting to physical means at all."
— Kerr Cuhulain, from Full Contact Magick (p. 81)
"Pay attention to what they tell you to forget."
— Muriel Rukeyser
"WAKE UP!!!"
— G. I. Gurdjieff
FEAR
"DON'T PANIC!!!"
— from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams
"Without mind-setting, people freeze up; they have no way to cut through the overwhelming fear that boxes them in during a crisis."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 19)
"If what you fear more than anything else is injury, you will not have the determination necessary to escape a criminal attack. Never. When frozen by fear of injury, you will believe all the criminal's promises, you'll be unable to concentrate on saving yourself, and you'll never notice any fleeting opportunities to escape. The criminal will use your fear to control everything you do."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 26)
"Truly fearless people are extremely rare — they tend to be robotic psychopaths who, having no hope of future happiness, simply do not care what happens to them. Most foolhardy idiots who appear 'fearless' are either drunk or trying to impress others."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 7)
"To instil fear, you must appear to be without fear yourself."
— Harold S, Long
"I have no fear of an opponent in front of me."
— Bruce Lee
"It is within your power to transfigure your fear of death. If you learn not to be afraid of your death, then you realize that you do not need to fear anything else either. A glimpse at the face of your death can bring immense freedom to your life. It can make you aware of the urgency of the time you have here.
— John O'Donohue
"Man's greatest fear is death. But think of the power you have when you throw off any fear of dying."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"Die in your thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death."
— Hagakure
"To learn to die is to be liberated from it."
— unknown
"Though warriors aspire to fearlessness, they shun bravado and taking unnecessary risks."
— Robert L. Spencer
"Fear is a good thing. It keeps you alert. It keeps you alive. You can do a lot of things when you're scared."
— Steve Hartman
"Overcoming fear? I don't look at it as fear. I look at it as an adrenaline rush."
— Dennis Chalker
"When you feel great fear, your body goes into a mild state of shock. The blood which normally flows freely throughout the body is pooled into the vital organs by the restriction of the capillaries in the extremities. . . . Adrenaline is dumped into the system. Adrenaline is super soldier serum. It's like tapping into a power generator. It supercharges your system, making you many times faster, more powerful, and more alert than you were a moment ago."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 134)
"I'd be lying between my teeth if I said I never get scared. I wouldn't want to work with a police officer who said he's never scared. That macho act — can't nothing hurt me; can't nothing touch me — that's all it is, an act."
— anonymous, from Pure Cop by Connie Fletcher (p. 253)
"My greater fear was not that I might be killed, but that I might be grievously wounded and left a victim of suffering on the field."
— Lieutenant Frederick Hitchcock
"'Fear of being a coward' was the most strongly felt sensation on the part of troops going into action for the first time. Other major fears — of being crippled, killed, captured and tortured, or painfully wounded — were markedly less common."
— John Dollard (paraphrased)
"There was great assurance in looking over, narrow-eyed and tense, your thumb easing the CAR-15 safety off, to see your partner's eyes just the same, both knowing that no matter the fury to be unleashed he would not run off and leave you, nor would you leave him. That's not cheap talk. When ten times as many NVA as anyone should reasonably fight suddenly appear, eons of evolution and every bit of common sense screams Run! Afraid? Beyond words. But you stay and fight."
— John L. Plaster
"The coward and the hero both feel the same feelings in the face of adversity. The hero controls these feelings; the coward doesn't."
— Geoff Thompson
"Scared to death, but I'd rather die than have my friends think I was chickenshit."
— Ken McMullin
"The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness."
— unknown Union veteran of Antietam
"A kung fu man who was really good was not proud at all. Pride emphasizes the superiority of one's status. There has to be fear and insecurity in pride, because when you aim at being highly esteemed and achieve such status, you automatically start to worry about losing status."
— Bruce Lee
"What else is there in life to be feared more than fear itself? Fear paralyzes the very being of a person. Fear destroys the whole capacity for rebellion. Fear makes any change impossible. Fear binds one to the known, and the journey to the unknown is completely stopped — although whatever is worth knowing and achieving in life is all unknown."
— Osho
"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
— Nelson Mandela
"Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out."
— Karl A. Menniger
"Fear is only natural. Don't be ashamed of it. It has probably saved your life before and will do so again."
— Edward Lewis, from Hostile Ground (p. 2)
"A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear; the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath."
— Joseph Conrad, from An Outpost of Progress
"If you are possessed of fear, do not waste time trying to 'kill out' fear, but instead cultivate the quality of courage and the fear will disappear."
— The Kybalion
"Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear you."
— Eliphas Levi
"When someone goes white (or just pales, depending on his pigment), it means that the blood is rushing away from the skin and into the muscles, readying him for action. People in this state can take blows that would ordinarily drop them and not even feel it — as in, 'keep coming at you.' Pain sensors get turned off. Adrenaline is pumped. The arms and legs go anaerobic. The pupils contract. Jaw and back muscles constrict. Trembling sometimes occurs. Basically, physiology aside, all hell breaks loose."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (p. 115)
"Unless you're a fool you're going to be scared. Your hands are going to sweat — dry them. Your knees are going to knock — brace them. Your stomach is going to be queasy — this is caused by your diaphragm falling on it, making you want to vomit and have butterflies. It can be controlled by thrusting both hands under your rib cage and lifting it off your stomach. Take a deep breath and still clutch the diaphragm and bend over. Straighten up and the diaphragm should be back in place and a lot of your fear will have left you. If it comes back, repeat. One of the biggest problems is holding your breath upon approaching the subject. You must make every effort to breathe deeply and naturally."
— John Minnery, from How to Kill, Vol. I (p. 57)
"Fear is nothing but idleness of the will."
— Eliphas Levi
"Knowledge is the antidote to fear."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Courage
"We have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear."
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"Where there's fear, there's power."
— olde witchy sayin'
GLORY
"The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be."
— Socrates
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
— Gray
"Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience — the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or 'of those who are to be.'"
— Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (#47)
"At the end of the course, all students should go through a rites-of-passage ceremony to bond them to their unit and each other. They should be given something to wear as a symbol that they have paid their dues and are now one of the guys."
— Robert K. Spear, from Survival on the Battlefield (p. 166)
"Glory was incompatible with retreat."
— Hershman & Lieb, from A Brotherhood of Tyrants (p. 78)
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail."
— Confucius
"The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory."
— Cicero
"Surely a king who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory."
— Nancy Mitford, from The Water Beetle
". . . (his) training was psychological as well as physical, and he was drilled in a sort of camouflage calculated to conceal the miseries and terrors of war and to exaggerate its glory and glamour. The stoicism of the Spartan is proverbial — it was not in his code to admit that sorrow was sorrowful, that misfortune was misfortunate, or that life was preferable to death."
— Stanton A, Coblentz, from From Arrow to Atom Bomb (p. 104)
"He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life — of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess."
— Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage (p. 3)
"At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be particularly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage."
— Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage (p. 62)
"Their minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero and winning ribbons and decorations."
— from Men Under Stress, by Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel
"Showing off is the fool's idea of glory."
— Bruce Lee
"Without showing himself, he shines forth
Without promoting himself, he is distinguished
Without claiming reward, he gains endless merit
Without seeking glory, his glory endures"
— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 22
MURDER
"There is no excuse for taking a man's life for life is precious. Any man can take a life but no man can give back a life. Killing is then a matter between a man and his own personal conviction and conscience. It is a matter of your own personal belief of right or wrong."
— Dan Inosanto, from The Filipino Martial Arts (p. 168)
"Self-defense is not murder!"
— from the script for "Enough"
"Murder weapons — they use whatever's handy. Murder is, in most cases, a spontaneous act, and whatever is the first thing they can pick up is what they're going to use. Bricks and rocks and bottles, electric fans, frying pans, gasoline, table legs. We get a lot of barbecue-fork murders in the summertime."
— anonymous, from Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know (p. 71)
"There are a lot of people in prison, and a lot more in graveyards, because a barroom brawl or streetfight got "out of hand." I don't think those people in prison wanted to go there, and I don't think those people in the graveyard wanted to die. They went to prison or were killed because they did not think beyond some machismo bullshit they were sold at some point in their lives."
— Peyton Quinn
"If somebody pointed a gun in here, sure these people would be nervous, but do they know what a gun could do? Only veterans of combat and cops know what high-velocity gunfire does to a body. You'll see heads completely exploded, limbs torn off. The people sitting here — if somebody pulled out a large hunting knife and went to attack someone else, nobody here knows what would happen. They haven't seen somebody's eye carved out of the head. Do these people in here know how much blood there is with a stabbing — that the heart keeps pumping and there'd be a geyser shooting to the ceiling with every pump? When you've seen this and somebody draws a knife on you, you know you've got just one chance."
— anonymous, from Pure Cop by Connie Fletcher (pp. 246-247)
"One thing that must be considered at this point is the issue of blood — there is a terrific amount gushed about in any throat cutting operation. It can squirt back into your mouth — keep it closed; into your eyes — try to avoid it because it will temporarily blind and disconcert you. . . . Be prepared for the bowels and bladder to let go while you're holding him. . . . blood will fall onto your pantleg and shoes. . . . An added precaution could be an overcoat or reversible jacket."
— John Minnery, from How to Kill, Vol. I (p. 21)
"The straight razor is the weapon most likely to be used to inflict a pressure cut (slice). It is the blade preferred by black women . . . The aptly named screwdriver, the Darth Vader of shanks, is the preferred weapon of the impoverished male sociopath . . . The butcher knife is the weapon of choice of the white working-class woman."
— James LaFond, from The Logic of Steel (p. 6)
"Murder? Let me tell you about murder . . .
It's fun . . .
It's easy . . .
And you're gonna learn all about it . . ."
— "Tin Tin," from The Crow
"Let us, then, be practical, let us call ourselves murderers as our enemies do, let us take the moral horror out of this great historical tool and just examine closely whether perchance our enemies may claim a special privilege in the matter of murder. If to kill is always a crime, then it is forbidden equally to all; if it is not crime, then it is permitted equally to all. Once one has overcome the objection that murder per se is a crime, all that remains is to believe one is in the right against one's enemy and to possess the power to obliterate him."
— Karl Heinzen (1849)
"God, if people knew what murder is. So silly, so stupid, so — ugly."
— Ray Bradbury, from "A Touch of Petulance"
"It is an awful thing to handle the still-warm body of a man you've just killed. It feels like God has you under a powerful microscope, and is minutely examining the wrinkles and hidden recesses of your soul. It is a moment that is sad, solemn, and utterly lonely."
— Eric L. Haney, from Inside Delta Force (p. 313)
BAD MUTHAFUKAH
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, ever so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson, from Snow Crash (p. 271)
"Rene' Alleau relates that in each of these schools, men, stripped to the waist and without any defensive weapons, were taught to become hard by such ordeals as fighting off for twelve minutes attack dogs that were unleashed and incited to kill. If the candidates took flight, they were shot. . . . Officer candidates were often told to pull a pin out of a grenade, balance it on their helmets, and stand at attention until it exploded."
— Dusty Sklar, from Gods and Men (p. 100)
"Here's to you, as good as you are,
And here's to me, as bad as I am;
But as good as you are, and as bad as I am,
I am as good as you are, as bad as I am."
— old Scotch toast
"In Texas a cop asked me, "Excuse me, partner, but . . . why do you and your friends carry those big knives?"
I told him, "Because we're all felons and we can't carry a big gun like you.""
— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, HAMC
""There is a story told of a karate master in Japan who was challenged to a fight by a belligerent sailor in a bar. The karate master reluctantly agreed to the contest, but first walked over to a nearby table and picked up a large bread knife. He dropped it on the floor and kicked it over to the astonished sailor. 'Pick it up,' said the martial artist quietly. 'You are going to need it.'"
— recounted by N. Mashiro in Black Medicine IV, Equalizers (p. 83)
"I shot two people in December, but neither died . . . Both I sprayed with buckshot. I liked to see the buckshot eat away their clothing, almost like piranha fish."
— Monster Kody Scott
"After I kill you, I'm gonna cut off yer head and take it home to my dog."
— an unknown biker, after being "threatened" by a punk with a set of nunchaku (he ran away when the Bowie knife came out).
"The way of revenge lies in simply forcing one's way into a place and being cut down. . . . No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"I showered and shaved, put on a chambray shirt with a plain black knit tie under a cream-colored leather jacket. Looked at myself in the mirror and realized it was all for nothing — dressing me up was like tying a red ribbon around the handle of an ice pick."
— Burke, from Pain Management by Andrew Vachss
"From what I understand and from how I've seen it used, Drano will cause internal bleeding. It used to be one of the oldest methods, a lot of the pimps would use it on their prostitutes. They would hold them down on the floor and then pour Drano down the person's throat. This would cause convulsions, and the person's insides start bleeding. It eats up the entire body. That is one method commonly used in the Agency."
— Robert J. Hunt (fmr CIA / SEAL Team 6)
"I see a car following me — I got all kindsa enemies that wanna kill me — so I try to check it out. I sneak up behind it, see two bad-looking dudes. I bang hard on the car with the butt of my gun. They turn quick — it looks to me like they're reaching for guns. I empty my two guns, 26 fucking rounds, into their heads. Then I say, 'Gee, I'm sorry . . . I made a mistake.' Prove me a murderer!"
— an anonymous street narcotics agent, relating how he plotted to kill two inspectors who were dogging him day and night.
"I like to look them in the eyes. I want to see their eyes. At the moment of death — I mean the exact moment — you can see the eyes change, like the eyes of a fish. That's why I love the knife. It's personal. You know what I'm saying? You can feel it; you're part of it. You know what I mean?"
— Roberto Torrez, fmr CIA "asset"
"The guy was a seasoned pro, there's no doubt about that. His fast draw, lack of hesitation or nervousness, and choice of the kneecap as a target all indicate that I was just one more nick in a very notched grip. . . . Amateurs panic, and amateurs waste shots. My guy was cool and calm with his pistol, loose and relaxed. The two-bit street corner version of Al Pacino's Tony Montana in Scarface."
— Chris Pfouts, referring to the piece of shit that shot him, from his book, Lead Poisoning (p. 13)
"There have been incidences where people with tattoos — phoney Hell's Angels tattoos — have had them cut off their arms, had the whole tattoo just removed by knife. . . . A lot of people just more or less canned it and showed it around, showed it off. I know one guy, he kept one for a couple of years. It was considered quite a trophy."
— Addie Crouch, HAMC
"Dismemberment is probably the most efficient method of disposal. You'll have to detach yourself from what you're doing, or it could really screw you up emotionally — even some of the toughest criminals I've known would have difficulty cutting a warm human body into pieces. After several hours have passed, the blood will begin to thicken, and the task will be considerably less messy."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 161)
"What can I do? The man isn't being reasonable."
— "Don Corleone" from The Godfather (paraphrased).
"But — I never killed anyone who didn't deserve it!"
— Christopher Walken's character in King of New York
"Look carefully at what is in front of you, and listen. I am going to ask you questions, many questions. If you don't answer fully and truthfully, I will untape your left hand, lay it on the table, and hammer a spike through it. Then I'll take that knife and cut your fingers off — one by one. You won't bleed to death. That's an electric soldering-iron. I'll use it to cauterize the stubs."
— from Man on Fire, by A. J. Quinnell (p. 225)
"They have an air of coiled tenseness about them. Motion is something that is done deliberately and with great control, usually very slowly. Something about these people makes you just want to step out of their way when they approach. . . . When they look at you, it's like having a scope dropped on you; a little target is projected on you. . . . The average tough will look at you and try to guess if they could take you out or not. These people look at you and know how they would take you out if they had to."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons (pp. 134-135)
"You want to avoid any physical hassles with these 'most dangerous' people. Recognize when you are molesting such an individual. If you force him to it and leave him no way out (or he's given reason to believe he is in, or directly headed for, such a situation), then you will die. Do not make the fatal mistake of confusing this with an expression of machismo. It is not. Machismo is a false thing; this is a very real thing. Attacking such a person or his family or even posing to do so is an express ticket to the morgue."
— Peyton Quinn, from A Bouncer's Guide to Barroom Brawling (p. 18)
"The bad guys kill the bad guys. The bad guys kill the good guys. If you want to survive the bad guys, you have to have some bad in you — a lot actually. You have to know what they know."
— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (p. 230)
THE DEMON
"This is the aspect of the Warrior we fear so much within ourselves and others. Whether or not we act out the sociopathic rage that takes us over as the barrier is crossed, we are left afterward with a feeling that we were not 'ourselves.' Indeed, we were not. This is the 'battle frenzy' and 'blood lust' celebrated by the epics of patriarchal societies and guarded against by its laws."
— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (pp. 133-134)
"Once they see you don't mind dying, they're in serious trouble and know it."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung
"There was no soul in the eyes, no emotion — They were just eyes."
— Captain Bill O'Rourke
"He had this way of looking at you with his eyes half open. If he looked at me like that, I'd just about freeze."
— Frank Burkhart
"Aiki is the art of defeating your opponent with a single glance."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"Thugs are greatly unsettled by confident opponents. The mugger threatens you and you don't look scared. In fact, you start to grin and circle closer to him. He decides he has made a mistake. Sometimes this will end the situation with no further action."
— N. Mashiro, Ph.D., from Black Medicine IV (p. 84)
"My temper represented a grave threat to me; it signified a loss of control by the reason and will and a surrender to ungovernable emotion. I felt as if there were a terrible creature within me whom I must never let escape or he'd destroy blindly — friend, foe, and innocent bystander alike."
— G. Gordon Liddy, from Will (p. 51)
"Everyone . . . bears within him a colossal charge of malice, just as a thundercloud bears its charge of electricity. It is not surprising that for a spetsnaz (soldier) war is just a beautiful dream, the time when he is at last allowed to release his full charge of malice."
— Viktor Suvorov
"The men are loading and firing with demonaical fury and shouting and laughing hysterically."
— unknown Union officer, speaking of Antietam
"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."
— Mark Twain
"Kill without joy."
— John Minnery
"The only thing I feel when I kill is the recoil of my weapon."
— seen on an obnoxious T-shirt at a recent S.O.F. convention
"Get down with your bad self!"
— African American colloquialism
"Look through your subject's face and not at it. This will make you appear spiritless and empty hearted, sending no vibration for your subject to read. It will also cast an "empty" emotion over you. When you experience this empty emotion you will have no fear of being attacked."
— Edward Lewis, from Hostile Ground (p. 5)
"(His) eyes gave him away — they told you what he was. If you studied his pupils you saw that they were as dead and lusterless as tiny brown tombstones; the eyes of someone who kills often and without conscience . . . a CIA agent I knew once called them 'executioner's eyes.'"
— Michael Levine, from The Big White Lie (p. 31)
"For over ten years, my primary function was to kill — but I don't consider myself a 'bad guy' seeing as these skills were never misused; however, the indoctrination I received combined with all the shit I've been through really fucked up my programming — they call it PTSD, although I don't exhibit a lot of the symptoms of this disgusting weakness. What happens sometimes, if someone is attempting to physically intimidate me or if some truck starts tailgating me, or if I feel threatened in any significant way, It seems like my entire personality is shoved aside and something else suddenly appears in its place. This demonic self is either cold as ice or really pissed off, and it deals with hostile persons in a socially unacceptable manner. I try to keep the demon on a very short leash, but it's hard sometimes."
— anonymous (RWT)
"In violence, we forget who we are."
— Mary McCarthy, from On the Contrary
"The youth had been taught that a man became another thing in a battle. He saw his salvation in such a change."
— Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage (p. 28)
"Think of the situation like a computer would, in cold rational terms. Erase the opponent's face, his clothing, and his words . . . become ruthlessly calm and viciously calculating and turn off your emotions. You can deal with them later, after you've dealt with the attacker."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 80)
"As your targeting mechanism locks onto your opponent's killzones, you tense ready to spring and fix him with a steady unwavering glare. Your face is flat and emotionless, as is your voice. You temporarily become a psychopath capable of killing another human being as if he were simply an annoying fly to be swatted. There is no need to shout, go into a fancy stance, or puff yourself up — that simply shows that you are afraid of him. Simply fix him with your stare and slowly declare your intentions in a low monotone: 'If you do not go away, I am going to kill you.' If you mean what you say, and truly intend to kill him, then something very unusual happens to your eyes. Your opponent looks into them and sees no warmth or fear there — only coldness and death. He sees that he is fucking with some inhuman thing that will neither retreat nor show any mercy."
— Jake Bishop
"The epitome of skill among the most proficient navajeros in the gitano style is the ability to reach the state known as duende (DWEN-deh). The word duende literally means 'demon' or spirit.' Achieving this state — whether in dance or in knife combat — implies the presence of something magical or supernatural; that one is moving as if possessed. The state is more difficult to explain than to understand. . . . With his knife drawn, he does not follow any strict rules of steps or techniques; instead, his movements surge up as instinctive and spontaneous expressions of the moment. In essence then, achieving duende signifies a kind of possession by some mysterious force, driving the navajero to a lethally artistic display of ability that far exceeds the bounds of mere technique."
— James Loriega, from Sevillian Steel (p. 59)
"There was a buzzing in his head and a red veil slid over his eyes as he turned, robot-like."
— from Underground, by C. R. Jahn (p. 240)
"It takes a certain something (or lack of something) to be able to look a man in the eyes as you're twisting a blade deep in his guts, or to methodically pump round after round into his center of mass without flinching. This is a valid, crucial, and widely misunderstood aspect of the Warrior's persona. You see, it is imperative that a Warrior be psychologically capable of performing such an act, however, it is equally imperative that these negative thoughts be suppressed if one is to be part of a civilized society. Only immature freaks and psychotic goblins fixate upon such negativity. Certain psychologists have dubbed this state of mind 'the demonic self.' Indicators that the demonic self is online are: expressionless face, unblinking eyes, color drains from skin, body temperature drops, and a surreal calmness permeates. For the duration of this state, an individual can no longer be considered a fellow human being. In a combat scenario, such an individual will be transformed into an unstoppable killing machine, totally focused on a single destructive goal. After a time, it will be possible to enter this state instantly and at will — much like the act of flipping a switch.
— anonymous (RWT)
"Andrew Vachss speaks of the 'Ice God' in many of his Burke novels. This is a state of sociopathic transcendence in which fear of death — and indeed, all vestiges of human emotion — ceases to exist. Once communion with the Ice God has been achieved, he becomes a part of you forever; and although he abstains from interfering with your daily activities, he is always present, and can be accessed in a heartbeat if the need ever arises."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"Once a confrontation turns physical, the warrior's body, mind, and spirit fuse into an unthinking, unfeeling weapon. At this point, there are no considerations of honor, no thought of consequences. In this mode, the warrior will only think of destroying his enemy."
— Forrest E. Morgan, from Living the Martial Way (p. 165)
"Release the fiend that lies dormant within you, for he is strong and ruthless and his power is far beyond the bounds of human frailty."
— Robert DeGrimston
OUTLAWS
"They branded us as outlaws. We know, as you, only outlaws can be free."
— excerpted from the introduction of Hell's Angels Forever
"You only carried a gun when you wanted to do business with it. That's a very disrespectful thing to do, carry a weapon into a meeting. Among criminals, they have their own code of ethics. If you and I are going to sit down and do a deal of stolen merchandise or dope and we're just in the talking stages of it, why do I need to have a gun at the table? I am either a cop or extremely paranoid about my own survival or I'm out to do something to you. Then nobody will deal with me and how am I going to make any money? So that's the reason you don't carry that weapon."
— anonymous, from Mark Baker's Cops (p. 136)
"The question of how you will respond to a confrontation with police at the scene of a crime, or in the immediate area, is one that must be examined carefully and thoroughly. Most often, this very real possibility isn't even considered, yet such a confrontation could create life threatening circumstances."
— Harold S. Long
"When the wind kicked up, I could smell the plants and it seemed unreal to me that this idyllic, starry night could at any moment be raided by a bunch of pissed-off, caffeine-wired, wife-beating federal agents, and we'd all spend the next ten or twenty years behind bars."
— Chris Simunek, from Paradise Burning (p. 20)
"You should always strive to steer clear of any form of intoxicant. Booze and drugs can really fuck up your life . . . except for reefer . . . marijuana really gives you a mellower perspective of things . . . it really helped me to curb my violent impulses and self-destructive tendencies."
— Tony Miles
I'm one with my gun,
I love it like my first son,
It protects me,
And makes sure that the jakes respect me."
— Talib Kweli, from "Sharp Shooters"
"We do a job together. I don't know your real name. The only people that know the real names are the president and the treasury, for bail purposes. We do something together. They can put a polygraph on me, I still don't know your name. . . . They could ask me your real name . . . and I wouldn't know it."
— Edward Jackson, Pagans Motorcycle Club
"You fucked with Death, and now she's your wife . . ."
— overheard being spoken to the deceased at an open casket "one-percenter" funeral
"I got no love for a brother who comes to the party with no bud."
— "B-Real" of Cypress Hill
"There are a few good cops out there — most of the best cops, however, never intended to go into law-enforcement as a career — they might've originally been social workers, teachers, or graduate students before going through some sort of existential crisis (or something) which made them suddenly decide to enroll in the police academy -- and then they discovered that they really liked it. These individuals tend to reflect well upon their new profession, and usually do quite well at it. Conversely, those individuals who have 'always wanted to be a cop' often get involved with police work due to some deep rooted inadequacy which they hope to compensate for by acquiring the symbols of authority. Law-enforcement has always held a great attraction for bullies and other control freaks."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Let's say that you happen to find yourself in a situation where you might be considered a 'material witness' to a crime. Maybe someone who really fuckin' deserved it got whapped upside the head with a ballpeen hammer, or sumpthin. Anyway, the cops come around and ask you what happened, since (possibly due to the splatter marks) you were obviously in close proximity to the incident. What do you say? If you say, 'I ain't tellin' you shit,' then you can be jailed for obstruction of justice; if you exercise your 'right to remain silent,' you can be jailed as an accessory; if you say 'That guy with the bloody hammer didn't do it,' you'd be lying (which is dishonorable); and if you fucking rat someone out (especially if they were justified in their actions), then you are lower than dogshit and oughta be hammered on yourself! No, in a situation like this, it's usually best just ta calm down and say, 'Officer, my back was turned when this occurred, so unfortunately I didn't see nuthin."
— anonymous (RWT)
"He told me that if I was ever stranded on the side of the road, broke down or in trouble, and if a (Hell's Angel) came by, accept their help. Trust them. Nothing bad would come of it. They'd do me right. He even went on to say that if the politicians ran the country like the Club ran its chapters, we'd all be much freer. I think he admired their honor system and the fact that with bike riders, a handshake was a handshake and a deal was a deal."
— Barbara McQueen, speaking of her departed husband, Steve.
"The outlaw trail is like the path of the wolf: it teaches you much about life and gives you an understanding of how things work. It can also be an insane, lonely, and vicious path."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Pool Cues, Beer Bottles, & Baseball Bats (pp. ix-x)
"It's good to be known as a thief when you go Inside. It's even better to be known as a killer, but only a certain kind. Like if you killed someone in a fight, that would be good. Or if someone paid you to do it. . . . But not every killing got you respect. The sick-in-the-head kids, they were nothings. Nobody was afraid of them. Like the one who chopped up his mother with an ax. Or the one who went to school with a rifle, and shot a bunch of other kids who were bullying him. After that kid got locked up, he still got bullied, only much worse. The kind of bullying they do in here."
— Andrew Vachss, from The Getaway Man (p. 4)
"No-one knows what it's like,
To be the bad man. . .
To be the sad man. . .
Behind blue eyes."
— from "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who
"I suppose that in any well-ordered society people like us would be locked up or shot. But then you would have to get people like us to do the locking up and the shooting."
— Jim Morris, from War Story (p. 158)
PEACE
"You dumbasses need to know that the alleged 'peace sign' is, in actuality, the depiction of a cursed amulet!!! Do you realize that, when it was officially adopted as the symbol of the peace movement its origin and true significance was completely unknown? The Fundies like to call it the 'cross of Nero,' but they are a bunch of ignoramuses. Do you want to know what this evil symbol really means? It is an ancient symbol known as 'the dead man's rune.' When you invert the protection rune, it becomes a curse, drawing to the bearer strife, harm, injury, illness, and persecution. Binding it within a circle increases its power. The leaders of this country belong to secret societies which practice ceremonial Teutonic magick, and, along with the neurological agent LSD, they used highly-placed infiltrators to thrust this cursed thing upon the peaceniks — the better to wipe them out!!!"
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"Go placidly amid the noise & haste; and remember what peace there may be in silence."
— Desdirada (line one)
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
— General George Washington
"If this endeavor of ours to arrive at peace fails, we have our armaments to fall back upon."
— Woodrow Wilson
"The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world."
— Etty Hillesum
"Peace is the skillful management of conflict."
— Kenneth Boulding
"Many soldiers — tired by the rigidities of normal life — look back at violent moments of their war experiences despite the hunger and terror, as the monumental culminating experiences of their lives."
— Joost van Meerlo
"It is worth noting that retired officers are amongst those professional groups with the highest rate of suicide, in part because the military values which they have acquired during their service often conflict with the values of civilian society."
— Richard Holmes
"They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war — as though the absence of war was the same as peace."
— Dorothy Thompson
"Well, I have tried to be meek.
And I have tried to be mild,
But I spat like a woman,
And sulked like a child,
I have lived behind walls,
That have made me alone,
Striven for peace,
Which I never have known."
— from "The Man's Too Strong" by Dire Straits
"While the Swiss believes in peace, and desires it above all else, his good sense tells him this is best assured by preparedness at all times."
— Colonel George Bell
". . . I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
— Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
"Culture and Peace are the most sacred goals of humanity."
— Nicholas Roerich
"Who desires peace, let him prepare for war."
— Vegetius (4th c.)
"It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace — fear and selfishness."
— Katherine Paterson, from The Horn Book
"It's perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants peace. The question is, on what terms?"
— Noam Chomsky
"First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others."
— Thomas a Kempis (1420)
"They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war — as though the absence of war was the same as peace."
— Dorothy Thompson, from On the Record
"There can be no peace without law."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The arts of peace are great,
And no less glorious than those of war."
— William Blake, from King Edward III
"He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace."
— Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage (p. 156)
LIFE
"You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called LIFE. Each day in this school, you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons, or think them irrelevant and stupid."
— Seneca Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge
"Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning."
— Bruce Lee
"Human incarnation os not simply an opportunity to learn, but rather an obligation to participate in humankind's condition, purpose, and responsibilities."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 9)
"One of the greatest sins is the unlived life."
— John O'Donohue
"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of."
— Benjamin Franklin, from Poor Richard's Almanac
"All the things that used to bother me are so small and silly. I know what life is worth, now I've seen so much death."
— unknown Israeli paratrooper
"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think."
— Jean de la Bruyere
"Life is the span of time appointed for accomplishment. Every fleeting moment is an opportunity, and those who are great are the ones who have recognized life as the opportunity for all things."
— Manly P. Hall
"Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, pleasure. But if you had to die right now, what would you want?"
— Taisen Deshimaru
"Dreams are real while they last. Can we say any more of life?"
— Havelock Ellis
"Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal."
— Longfellow
"Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament."
— George Santayana
"You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have had to fight for it, life has a flavour the protected will never know."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"Everybody dies, but not everybody lives."
— Thomas Lynch
"All life is an experiment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was (his) secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage."
— Joseph Heller, from Catch-22 (p. 554)
". . . the stoics regarded life as a difficult voyage in which most men are shipwrecked; they felt that man's only chance of escaping shipwreck was through reason and self-discipline."
— Colin Wilson
"Life is suffering."
— Buddha
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
— Helen Keller
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."
— Henry David Thoreau
"Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition."
— Florida Scott-Maxwell, from The Measure of My Days
"I am one of those people who just can't help getting a kick out of life — even when it's a kick in the teeth."
— Polly Adler, from A House Is Not a Home
"Life is an illusion."
— Mata Hari, as she prepared to meet the firing squad in 1917
"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."
— Helen Keller
"What, after all, is human life if not a continuous performance in which all go about wearing different masks, in which everyone acts a part assigned to him until the stage director removes him from the boards?"
— Erasmus
"Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I'd like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing."
— Stephen King, from On Writing (p. 148)
"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."
— Alice Walker
"Life, being sacred, demands our full participation."
— Starhawk, from Dreaming the Dark (p. 42)
"Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down."
— Rabindranath Tagore, from Stray Birds (CCLXVII)
"What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own."
— Neal Stephenson, from In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (p. 151)
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
— Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth
PSEUDOSPECIATION
"Pseudospeciation is the ability to assign inferior and subhuman qualities to one's enemy."
— unknown
"Sometimes people denigrate others to justify maltreatment of them. To reassure ourselves that the things we do and the lives we lead are proper, we rationalize our actions. We can feel justified in discriminating, subjugating, enslaving, or even killing others, if we are able to convince ourselves that the other group is inferior, immoral, or less than human."
— from the textbook Contemporary Social Problems, 2nd edition (p. 257)
"Most people believe that it is wrong to kill another human being, yet we send our young off to war and expect them to rapidly change their beliefs and begin killing on command. To facilitate this change, we often use new words, commonly racist in nature."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 24)
"To poison the mind of an individual against some other individual is an easy, all-too-common practice — so common that the phrase describing it is familiar in all languages. . . . Poisoning group minds against other groups is an equally familiar phenomenon. Common metaphors frequently conceal deep metaphysical truths. The term 'spellbinder' — originally applied only to an actual witch or sorcerer — has become a common appellation for the rabble-rousing orator. Baboon talk, direct in its appeal to the emotions, short-circuiting the mind and substituting 'feeling' for 'thinking' sets nations at each other's throats. Adolf Hitler was a bloodier witch and weaver of evil incantations than the foulest witch in any German fairy tale."
— William Seabrook, from Witchcraft (p. 84)
"The key to success is the fact that most barroom brawlers and marauding motorists share a common failing: they're assholes."
— N. Mashiro, Ph.D.
"There is good clinical evidence for the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal."
— Erich Fromm
"The will to kill, the complete lack of sympathy and compassion, and no hesitation in killing the subject, is paramount. You must take his life as detachedly as you might swat a fly or crush an ant."
— John Minnery
"When I was killing the enemy I was killing a commie. . . . Oh, maybe the first time I saw a dead North Vietnamese I flinched a bit but after that they just became dead animals. It was either he'd shoot me or I'd shoot him and I wasn't shooting at a person. I was shooting at a bunch of ideologies."
— Simon Cole
"I've noticed that the putrid punks and other throwbacks who wander the streets of latter day civilization devise weapons quite similar in construction to stone axes and pikes . . . they are as deadly as the bludgeons and flint knives that earlier savages created from the shadows of their bestial and soulless minds."
— Fred Rexer, Jr.
"All these people start filing out of the bar — they're winos, street people, buzzards, lowlifes. They really are skeletons. Scumbags, street urchins; they're white, black; their teeth are rotted."
— Bill McCarthy
"Slime, sleaze, rejects. Crooked, bent, needing to straighten out. Rascals, hooligans, thieves, scoundrels. Corrupt, rotten, stinking. Shitheads, assholes. People with no respect for the law, the straight and narrow, the right way, the one way. People who don't fear God or man. Animals, perverts, dogs, mongrels, coyotes. Mixed-up, confused, crazy, insane, psychopathic. Wayward souls, lost souls, ingrates. Butchers, skull-bashers, cold-blooded murderers. Cold as ice — they'd rob their own mothers."
— Jerry Fjerkenstad
"They peep out from under cardboard crates, cursing me under their breath. They parade up and down the street day after day, year after year, screaming at invisible foes. Their hearts are pumping, but their brains are stalled. Their minds are warped from booze, neglect, religion, and war. They contribute nothing to society. Their unnecessary lives are carried out on a dead-end street."
— Debbie Goad
"By thinking abstractly, and identifying your opponent as something 'subhuman' (for example: a goblin, troll, zombie, or caveman), it is possible to achieve a killer mindset in short order. By visualizing such a loathsome creature standing before you, you will automatically expect to be lied to and misdirected prior to your attempted victimization, so it is highly unlikely that you will be tricked or surprised. Furthermore, you will not hesitate to respond to a perceived threat, and you will strive to inflict maximum damage forthwith."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 12)
"When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity."
— Noam Chomsky
WORLD WAR III
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
— this quote has been attributed to both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
"It seems politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case — except in war conditions."
— John Maynard Keynes
"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation."
— Marshall McLuhan
"While in theory there is nothing which is absolutely inevitable, in actuality there are things which are almost inevitable. People believe that wars happen in the future, whereas in reality they happen in the past; the fighting is only a consequence of many events which have already occurred. Viewed from this perspective, all the causes of the Third World War have already happened. There is therefore only a very remote possibility that the conflict itself will not take place."
— Osho
"I don't know what weapons will be used in World War III, but I do know World War IV will be fought with spears and clubs!"
— Albert Einstein
"There will be entirely new weapons. In one day more men will die than in all previous wars combined. . . . Gigantic catastrophes will occur. . . . The third great war will be the end of many nations."
— Stormberger (18th c.)
"The whole country will become so utterly desolated and depopulated that the crow of a cock shall not be heard, deer and other animals shall be exterminated by horrid black rain."
— Brahan Seer (1665)
"If only one-third of humanity will survive it is better!"
— Meishu-Sama (1955)
DISHONOR
"There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse . . ."
— Edwin Arlington Robinson
"When honour's lost, 'tis a relief to die;
Death's but a sure retreat from infamy."
— Samuel Garth
"There is a boundary in each man. He can eat crow and brown-nose to an extent. He can shuck the Man for a while, become a good "actor." But when a man goes beyond the last essential boundary, it alters his ontology, so to speak. It's like the small pebble that starts a landslide no-one can stop. You can betray the pigs until, lo, you've betrayed yourself. You want to survive so badly, to be free of violence so terribly, you will literally do anything after you start across that boundary. You'll allow anyone to order you around. You'll let your ma, wife, kids die just to stay alive yourself. You'll wallow in the gutter of man's soul to live. You'll suck every cock in the cellhouse to "get along". There is nothing you won't do."
— Jack Henry Abbott
"This is the punishment of a liar: He is not believed even when he speaks the truth."
— Babylonian Talmud
"Lying was not condemned as sin, but simply denounced as weakness, and, as such, highly dishonorable."
— Nitobe, on bushido
"There smites nothing so sharp, nor smelleth so sour
As shame."
— William Langland
"To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it."
— Plato
"He will find ways to disrupt your family life or damage your standing at work. He will do things like start painful rumors or manipulate people around you through lies and deception. His motive is to get others to harm you for him. He doesn't care if you are harmed physically, emotionally, or financially."
— Edward Lewis, from Hostile Ground (p. 11)
"Mother, your eyes have gone suddenly cold,
And it wasn't what I was expecting.
Once I did think that I'd find comfort there,
And instead you've gone hard and suspecting. . ."
— Suzanne Vega, from "Bad Wisdom"
"We should not pity or pardon those who have yielded to great temptation, or, perchance, great provocation. Besides, it is right that our sympathies should be kept for the injured."
— Benjamin Disraeli
"Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."
— Hannah Arendt, from Crises of the Republic
"Of course the ideal samurai was as rare as the courteous knight. In both Europe and Japan a satiric literature chronicles the misdeeds of these 'sacred' warriors. Sadistic cruelty, an exaggerated sense of personal honor, or just plain foolishness was the stuff of these satires."
— Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, from The Warrior Within (p. 84)
"I know that we all stumble down dark paths and we don't quite know what to make of life. But if you are reading this and you ever get to the point in your life where you want to fuck or murder a kid, forget prison. You've got to kill yourself."
— Dennis Miller, from Comic Relief (p. 144)
"Having the thoughts is sick. Acting on those thoughts is evil."
— Andrew Vachss
"Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying, we would see it as more worthy of the stake than other crimes."
— Montaigne
"Remember the Oliver North trial? Even though years have passed, I can't figure that one out. He was dismissed from the military, right? But when he went to court he wore his uniform. Now I've been fired from a lot of jobs, but you don't see me tooling around in my Burger King outfit."
— Bob Goldthwait, from Comic Relief (p. 178)
"Don't step on your dick."
— old biker sayin'
COWARDICE
"To see what is right and to not do it is want of courage."
— Confucius
"Lying is not so much an act of immorality as it is one of cowardice."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"A sword is useless in the hands of a coward."
— unknown
"Experience shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases the sadist is a coward, incapable of sacrificing himself."
— Victor Suvorov
"The attacker is generally a coward who either fights under the influence of alcohol or drugs or attacks from the rear, possibly with a weapon or an accomplice(s) or both."
— Geoff Thompson
"If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you; may your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
— Samuel Adams (1776)
"A cowardly man thinks he will live forever
If he can avoid fighting
But old age will give him no mercy
Though he be spared by spears"
— from Havamal, verse 16, Plowright translation
"Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Man were born to succeed, not to fail."
— Henry David Thoreau
"I've got no problem with pacifists — as long as they're willing to use limited violence against criminals who would deliberately harm those whose safety they're directly responsible for. If a man won't stand up to defend a woman or child, then he's nothing but a fucking coward — philosophical bullshit aside."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Ridicule is a weak weapon, when leveled at a strong mind; But common men are cowards and dread an empty laugh."
— Martin Farquhar Tupper
"A coward threatens when he is safe."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Don't be a wussy!"
— Papa Titus
ASSOCIATES
"A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth."
— Charles Darwin
"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence."
— George Washington
"Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company."
— George Washington
"People should learn to see and avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, so one should not make friends with evil men."
— Buddha
"Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."
— Jane Howard, from Families
"To betray you must first belong."
— Harold Philby
"While honourable associates will enhance you, there are some who will only drag you down. It may be difficult to deal with such people because, being an honourable person yourself, you feel that you owe them loyalty for their friendship. This problem is not easily resolved. You may be able to lead by example, or talk them into improving themselves; you may find that you have to just start to distance yourself and gradually let them go their own way. You may have to tell them to get lost. . . . try not to waste your energy and wyrd on those who are unworthy."
— Sweyn Plowright, from True Helm (p. 23)
"Sometimes people will make friends who engage in dangerous practices such as car-theft, shoplifting or periodic disruptive drunkenness. The person who travels with such a crowd while not engaging in any of these activities must know, in his deeper self, that he takes an awful chance of being arrested along with his friends and charged, even imprisoned, despite his innocence. People who travel with dangerous crowds are excitement junkies."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 174)
"O wise man, wash your hands of that friend who associates with your enemies."
— Saadi
"Always have distinguished friends. Never have fools for friends, they are of no use."
— Benjamin Disraeli
"Beware of the man who has no regard for his own reputation, since it is not likely he should have any for yours."
— George Shelley
"Every dunderhead needs a sidekick."
— Grandfather
". . . it is better not to become acquainted with men about whom you have formerly had some doubts. No matter what you do, they will be people by whom you will be tripped up or taken in."
— from Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Wilson translation)
"True friends are like diamonds, precious and rare. False friends are like autumn leaves, found everywhere."
— Bruce Lee
PHILOSOPHY
"Without philosophy one should be little above animals."
— Voltaire
"Philosophy
Is a walk on the slippery rocks,
Religion
Is the smile on a dog."
— Edie Brickell, from "What I Am"
"Try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value."
— Albert Einstein
"As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons."
— Desdirada (line two)
"Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull & ignorant, for they too have their story."
— Desdiada (line three)
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise."
— Manly P. Hall
"The map is not the territory."
— Alfred Korzybsky
"Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy."
— I Ching
"One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure."
— John W. Gardner
"The risk of insult is the price of clarity. To be clearly understood one must speak the simple, essential truth as plainly as he is able."
— Roy H. Williams
"Greatness requires the taking of risks. That's why so few ever achieve it."
— unknown
"So you will see how absurd is the whole structure that you have built, looking for external help, depending on others for your comfort, for your happiness, for your strength. These can only be found within yourselves."
— Krishnamurti
"Horror is that which we have not yet come to terms with."
— Ramsey Campbell
"Each experience teaches us a lesson."
— unknown
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— Santayana
"Self-education makes great men."
— unknown
"Procrastination is the thief of time."
— Edward Young
"If you want to learn new things, you should try reading old books."
— unknown
"Quarrel is the weapon of the weak."
— unknown
"The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought to light the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based."
— Niels Bohr
"You have to try and learn something new every day."
— Grandfather
"Procrastination is one of the worst things you can ever do."
— Grandfather
"Beware the fury of a patient man."
— Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I
"To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever."
— Bruce Lee
"There are old bikers, and there are bold bikers, but there ain't no old, bold bikers."
— classic biker aphorism
"Shit Happens. . ."
— classic biker aphorism
"You can't polish a turd. . ."
— old hillbilly sayin'
"Don't piddle where you fiddle."
— seen on a bottlecap from "Magic Hat Brewing Company"
"Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment."
— Lao Tzu
"Only after he has gained the trust of the common people does the gentleman work them hard, for otherwise they would feel themselves ill-used. Only after he has gained the trust of the lord does the gentleman advise him against unwise action, for otherwise the lord would feel himself slandered."
— Tzu-hsia
"There are three things which the gentleman values most in the Way: to stay clear of violence by putting on a serious countenance, to come close to being trusted by setting a proper expression on his face, and to avoid being boorish and unreasonable by speaking in proper tones."
— Confucius
"Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?"
— Taisen Deshmaru
"The man who enjoys keenly, is subject to keen suffering; while he who feels but little pain is capable of feeling but little joy."
— The Kybalion
"My religion is Kindness."
— the Dalai Lama
"Selfishness is the root of all evil."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"Wisdom is crystallized pain."
— Dr. Rudolf Steiner
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become."
— Buddha
"Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind."
— William James
"There are four things that come not back:
The spoken word,
The sped arrow,
The past life,
The neglected opportunity."
— Omar of Persia
"Do more than exist — live.
Do more than touch — feel.
Do more than look — observe.
Do more than read — absorb.
Do more than hear — listen.
Do more than listen — understand."
— John H. Rhoades
"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values."
— Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
"The nine impediments that hinder the mind or consciousness from gaining tranquility are disease, mental sluggishness, doubt, carelessness, physical laziness, uncontrolled sensual craving, delusion, lack of perseverance and instability."
— Patanjali, from Samadhipada, #30
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, and disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place of where your mind's wings should have grown."
— Ayn Rand, from Philosophy: Who Needs It?
"THE ALL IS UNKNOWABLE. All the theories, guesses, and speculations of the theologians and metaphysicians regarding the inner nature of the ALL are but childish efforts to grasp the secret of the Infinite. Such efforts have always failed and will always fail, from the very nature of the task. And still more presumptuous are those who attempt to ascribe to the ALL the personalities, characteristics, and attributes of themselves, ascribing to the ALL the human emotions, feelings, and characteristics, even down to the pettiest qualities of mankind, such as jealousy, susceptibility to flattery and praise, and desire for offerings and worship. The ALL is Infinite Living Mind — the Illumined call it SPIRIT!"
— from The Kybalion
"Mountains cannot be your guru . . . . Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone? . . . That is your cave. That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God."
— Ram Gopal Babu, from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (p. 161)
"It hath been said that the continuation of the species is due to man's forgiving. Forgiveness is holiness; by forgiveness the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the Self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue."
— from the Mahabharata
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, pitch manure, solve equations, analyze a new problem, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for the insects."
— Robert Heinlein, from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
". . . any virtue becomes a vice unless it is balanced by its own opposite. Beauty, when unsustained by strength, is vapid, lifeless. Power is insufferable when untempered by compassion. Honor, unless balanced by humility, becomes arrogance; and mirth, when not deepened by reverence, becomes mere superficiality."
— Starhawk, from The Spiral Dance (p. 84)
"To the pure, all things are pure; to the base, all things are base."
— from The Kybalion
"The man who enjoys keenly, is subject to keen suffering; while he who feels but little pain is capable of feeling but little joy."
— from The Kybalion
"Don't get involved in a threesome — someone always gets pissed off."
— Papa Titus
"Don't put yer food in the microwave — it turns it all backwards and shit."
— Scribe 27 (RWT)
"The only reason stereotypes exist is because they happen to be accurate so damn often."
— Spider 1%er
"Hell is other people."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
"Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry."
— Henry Ward Beecher, from Life Thoughts
"Beware the fury of a patient man."
— John Dryden, from Absalom and Achitophel
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
— Richard Steele
"A man's got to know his limitations."
— unknown
"Estrangement permeates our society so strongly that to us it seems to be consciousness itself. Even the language for other possibilities has disappeared or been deliberately twisted. Yet another form of consciousness is possible. Indeed, it has existed from earliest times, underlies other cultures, and has survived even in the West in hidden streams. This is the consciousness I call immanence — the awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with living energies: a living being, a weaving dance."
— Starhawk, from Dreaming the Dark (p. 9)
"The without is like the within of things; the small is like the large."
— Hermes Trimegistus
". . . our physical world of the senses is a mere illusion, a world of shadows, and he three-dimensional tool we call our body serves only as a container or dwelling place for Something infinitely greater and more comprehensive . . ."
— Holger Kalweit, from Dreamtime and Inner Space
"I believe that the phenomenon is one of the ways through which an intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically. There is no indication that it is extraterrestrial. Instead, there is mounting evidence that it . . . (comes from) other dimensions beyond spacetime; from a multiverse which is all around us, and of which we have stubbornly refused to consider in spite of the evidence available to us for centuries."
— Jacques Vallee, from Dimensions (p. 284-289)
"There is no reason why anyone cannot get an education if he or she wants it badly enough and is persistent. Most cities have libraries, and often state libraries will mail books to a reader. Books are available on every conceivable subject and there are many good 'how to' books from which one can learn the basics of a trade. . . .Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth. If one does not move on from what merely amuses to what interests, the fault lies with the reader, for everything is there."
— Louis L'Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (pp. 14, 192)
"Don't cry, children — it's Salisbury steak day!"
— "Chef," from the "South Park" cartoon
"I know that I know nothing."
— Socrates
ZEN
"The Way of the Sword and the Way of Zen are identical, for they have the same purpose — that of killing the ego."
— Yamada Jirokichi
"Zen is simply a voice crying, "Wake up! Wake up!"
— Maha Sthavira Sangharakshita
"So, instead of telling us what the problem is, Zen insists that our whole trouble is just our failure to realize that there is no problem. And, of course, this means that there is no solution, either."
— Bruce Lee
"Zen is not interested in high-flown statements; it wants its pupil to bite his apple and not discuss it."
— Anne Bancroft
"To know and to act are one and the same."
— samurai maxim
"To confuse the indivisible nature of reality with the conceptual pigeonholes of language is the basic ignorance from which Zen seeks to free us. The ultimate answers to existence are not to be found in intellectual concepts and philosophies, however sophisticated, but rather in a level of direct nonconceptual experience."
— from Games Zen Masters Play, by Robert Sohl and Audrey Carr (p. 15)
"Traditional karate derives much of its devastating speed from mental processes related to Zen Buddhism, concepts which can be understood by dedicated students but which cannot be expressed in words at all."
— N. Mashiro, Ph.D.
"This mental state (mushin, or "mind-no-mind") is the principle source of the traditional warrior's quick reactions, extra-sensory perception, and steely calm."
— Forrest E. Morgan
"Ideally, at some point you enter what servers call a "rhythm" and psychologists term a "flow state," where signals pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a Zen-like emptiness sets in."
— Barbara Ehrenreich, from Nickel and Dimed (p. 33)
"There is a common experience in Tai Chi of seemingly falling through a hole in time. Awareness of the passage of time completely stops."
— Tom Horwitz
"Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment."
— Lao Tzu
"Fuckit."
— unknown Ranger combat veteran from The Deer Hunter. By E.M. Corder
"To know and act are one and the same."
— samurai maxim
"When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of his enemy's sword movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the unconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the unconscious that strikes."
— Takuan
"Where Zen ends, asskicking begins."
— Richard Marcinko
"If you're going to change, you must KILL YOUR ENTIRE PREVIOUS LIFE — you must DIE to everything you have 'known'."
— The SubGenius Foundation
"Why have you fucked with my serenity?"
— "Chains," the main bad-guy from the great biker movie Stone Cold
"I'm here with, basically, nothing to say. And that's what I want to talk to you about tonight. Are you saying what you really mean to say? Do you even know what you're really thinking?"
— J. R. "Bob" Dobbs
". . . a car runs a red light right in front of you. Automatically, you jam on the brakes, tighten up and prepare for the possibility of a crash. During those actions, there were literally hundreds of physiological, psychological and emotional responses occurring in a patterned way, designed to effectively help you. If you had to 'think' . . . you would have had an accident."
— from Monsters and Magical Sticks, by Heller & Steele (p. 67)
"We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing."
— Simone Weil, from Gravity and Grace
"It all happened in a few seconds, but it felt like hours."
— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin' High, Livin' Free (p. 105)
"When the shit's going down, it's like you're in a time warp, or sumpthin.' You're speedin' down the freeway at 140 mph, and it seems like the other cars are barely movin' at all. Some fucker's charging at you with a naked blade, and it seems like he's runnin' in slow motion. I've actually seen bullets flying through the air just in time to move outta the way! Some folks'll say that sorta thing's 'impossible.' Maybe so, but I know what I've seen, and I know that other people have seen the same thing too. No eggheaded dipshit is gonna be able to convince me that I didn't see these things, because I did."
— anonymous (RWT)
"The most noticeable psychological effect is, as in sensory deprivation, one of the slowing down of time: second hands on clocks seem hardly to move. This sort of 'eternal present' is very much like a prolonged version of the way time can stand still in moments of great personal danger."
— Lyall Watson, from Supernature (p. 241)
"The speed at which time passes depends on 'absorption,' that is, on how focused the mind is. The reason we assume that all time intervals are the same is that we have invented clocks that measure time as if that were the case — 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour. But in reality we experience time far more subjectively, so that at various times it seems to speed up, slow down, or stand still. In flow, the sense of time adapts itself to the action at hand."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from Good Business (p. 54)
"A mind free of thought,
merged within itself,
beholds the essence of Tao
A mind filled with thought,
identified with its own perceptions,
beholds the mere forms of this world"
— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 1
"The idea behind the so-called empty mind is the surcease of all thought. Since we cannot create an empty mind by forcing out our thoughts, we do it by doing nothing at all. We make no attempt at forcing anything to happen to us, or to prevent anything from happening."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 176)
"I have learned that there is a space in my head where I can go where no one can get to me. Often when I'm on the street, that's where I am. I have learned to find open fields in the space of the seat on a bus."
— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (p. 242)
"The study of Zen teaches to live in the moment, and in reality it's all we really have, the here and now. . . . We exist in the fleeting moment. The past is gone the moment it is experienced and the future has yet to happen. . . . You must deal only with the present, moment by moment, second by second."
— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 79)
"What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?"
— Albert Einstein, from The World As I See It
INDIVIDUALITY
"What we call 'normal' in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and widely spread that we don't even recognize it ordinarily."
— Abraham Maslow
"Each (man) has his separate individuality and his priceless initiative which made him infinitely better than the clockwork soldier."
— unknown Australian sergeant
"We live, as we dream — alone."
— Robert Conrad, from "Heart of Darkness"
"Shit, I don't like this white man's army. Teach us to shoot, but forget about the rest. You are wasting our time. They treat us like slaves. I don't mind fighting, but you can't make a windup toy out of me."
— John Lame Deer
"Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man."
— Dean W. R. Inge
"Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of this time."
— unknown
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
— Jonathan Swift
"Originality and the feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle."
— Dostoevsky
"Few realize that the universe is made up of individuals in various stages of development, responsibility is consequently individual, and everything which man wishes to gain he must himself build and maintain."
— Manly P. Hall
"The nail that sticks out will be pounded down."
— Japanese proverb
"The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
— Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, V
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him."
— Swift, from Thoughts on Various Subjects
"And some who turned away from life, only turned away from the rabble, they did not want to share well and flame and fire with the rabble."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathustra
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
— Albert Einstein
"Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
— John Dewey (1899)
"Imitation is a form of stealing: you are nothing but he is somebody, so you are going to get some of his glory by copying him."
— J. Krishnamurti
"Gradually, I became used to the idea that there were damned few groups around who wanted independent thinkers, and that most of the organizations I infiltrated or joined were likely to kick me out the second I started deviating from their party line."
— Isaac Bonewits
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
— Henry David Thoreau
"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him — to escape from the general law, to be free."
— G. I. Gurdjieff
"A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."
— Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
"Do not choose to be wrong for the sake of being different."
— Lord Samuel
"To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone."
— Suzanne Gordon, from Lonely in America
"Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries."
— Jenny Holzer, from Truisms
"There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price."
— Shirley Chisholm, from Unbought and Unbossed
"You won't have a future if you don't make one for yourself. It is as simple as that. If you accept the forms that be, then you are doomed, to your own ultimate blandness."
— John Lydon
"We are a group of complete individuals, and I mean individuals. Every one of us has a different reason for being who we are."
— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin' High, Livin' Free (pp. 184-185)
"The sage does not care whether or not anyone follows his teachings or ideas. To care would be to have ego. The sage does what he has to, what he is 'told' to do by his own voices from within. If no-one even listens to him, he does not care. He has done his job and therefore fulfilled his reason for being."
— Erle Montaigue
"Since when was genius found respectable?"
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance
"One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We must overcome the notion that we must be regular . . . it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre."
— Uta Hagen
"Self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others."
— Joan Didion
"One must live the way one thinks or wind up thinking the way one has lived."
— Paul Bourget
"Whoever would make of himself a distinctive individual must be keen to perceive what he is not."
— Friedrich Schleiermacher
"Be a light unto yourself."
— Buddha's last words, 485 BC
PRECOGNITION
"Coming events cast their shadow before."
— Goethe
"Intuitive flashes are transient, spontaneous altered states of consciousness consisting of particular sensory experience or thoughts, coupled with strong emotional reactions . . ."
— Andrew Weil, from The Natural Mind
"If you cannot imagine something, you also cannot predict it, nor protect against it."
— Gavin de Becker
"In order to know the future it is necessary first to know the present in all its details, as well as to know the past. Today is what it is because yesterday was what it was. And if today is like yesterday, tomorrow will be like today. If you want tomorrow to be different, you must make today different."
— G. I. Gurdjieff
"Perhaps I like to dwell on what might happen so as never to be surprised."
— from Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks (p. 124)
"The heightened cognition often shown by those — such as sailors, woodsmen, airmen and others — who live in relationship with natural forces . . . indicate the existence of influences which are present for all of us, whether we know of them or not, whether we become conscious of them or not."
— Denning & Phillips, from Psychic Self-Defense & Well-Being (p. 11)
"Trust your instincts. 'Intuition' can be the result of your subconscious comparing non-verbal cues to past experiences; your olfactory gland registering the nearly imperceptible trace of certain hormones being released; or possibly something even more subtle and incomprehensible, yet real nonetheless. Intuition often proves true — disregard it at your peril."
— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 37)
"There are three types of sweat: the sweat of strenuous labor, the sweat of fear, and the sweat of insanity — all of which have a separate and distinct aroma recognizable to the limbic brain."
— unknown
"Ask someone who's been in combat if he ever had a feeling that he was going to get hit right before a firefight. You'll be amazed at the number of stories you'll hear about people hitting the deck a split second before a bullet whizzes through where they just were. Some people even hear voices that say 'duck.'. . . If you've got this gift, listen to it! It can and will save your ass!"
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Street E&E (pp. 121-122)
"I had this sense of danger. I felt the sensation of something almost gripping me at the back of the neck. I turned around and there, about twenty yards away, was a chap in a uniform with a red star on his cap gazing hard at me. He was bringing his rifle up and I knew one of us was going to be killed. I shot him before he shot me, so I have lived to tell the tale."
— William Carter (referring to an incident in 1951 Malaya)
"Within one second prior to actual termination, a target would somehow seem to make eye contact with me. I am convinced that these people somehow sensed my presence at distances over one mile. They did so with uncanny accuracy, in effect to stare down my scope."
— Robert Hendrickson, USMC Scout/Sniper
"I have lived through a dozen or more such freak near-misses. But something has always saved me at the last moment. Maybe it was my guardian angel that alerted me. . . . I believe they telepathically warn people at such times when, unbeknownst to them, their lives are in grave danger. Some people hear and react to these warnings, others do not."
— Robert Bruce, from Practical Psychic Self-Defense (p. 162)
"Intuition is not a close faculty or a quirky gift that some people have and some don't, but a natural sense that all living creatures are born with. Intuition is a partnership between the one who feels it and the all-life that sends signals to be felt. Intuition is a flow of energy between Spirit . . . and the alert being who receives that flow and understands the messages within it. . . . In Western society, we are taught to ignore our psychic sense, and so most of us lose touch with it in early childhood."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 20)
"The warrior bets his life on his intuitive decision making. . . . In war fighting, it is a truism that certain people possess intangible qualities that make them good point men. . . . Successful point men have the intuition that leads their patrol safely through great danger. They simply 'feel' where ambushes are. They sense danger lurking in the bush. They know when to stop, proceed, or run. This sixth sense is renowned throughout the combat arms of fighting forces around the world."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (pp. 113-114)
"The warrior who is sensitive to synchronicity can generate luck. . . . To harness synchronicity, the warrior must become a focus of coincidence. Simple coincidence may be chance. Multiple coincidences linked by correspondence and interconnectedness are called luck — unless one is consciously trying to generate such coincidences. . . . The individual who applies the same techniques to life is using the warrior's edge to make precognition an ally. . . . The warrior manipulates coincidence to create luck. As any warrior knows, it doesn't matter how good you are if you aren't lucky."
— from The Warrior's Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (p. 108)
"Instinct is the sum of information collected by your senses that is not readily obvious to your conscious mind. It often produces a 'feeling' that something is wrong or right without a logical explanation. When you are uncertain what to do next or how to handle an opponent, rely on your gut feelings. The more experience you have in combat, the more reliable your instincts will be."
— Hanho, from Combat Strategy (p. 16)
TRUTH
"The search for truth is neither new nor old . . . nobody is a founder in it, nobody is a leader in it. It is such a vast phenomenon that many enlightened people have appeared, helped, and disappeared."
— Osho
"I maintain that Truth is a pathless Land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect . . . The moment you follow someone, you cease to follow Truth.
— Krishnamurti
"The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe."
— George Bernard Shaw
"They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth."
— Plato
"Statistics indicate that such sightings are indeed rare events, perhaps akin to the sighting of an extremely rare or unnamed species of bird (and how would you prove that on a walk through the mountains and woods you had sighted a California condor?) though not as rare as finding a coelacanth in the ocean depths."
— J. Allen Hynek
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself, now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
— Sir Isaac Newton
"Once you see something as false which you have accepted as true, you can never go back to it."
— J. Krishnamurti (paraphrased)
"90% of everything is crap."
— "Sturgeon's Law"
"Even when one compromises, one should never compromise in regard to the basic truth."
— Jawaharlal Nehru
"Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon."
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1895)
"Not only are there many conflicting truths as there are people to claim them; there are equally multitudinous and conflicting truths within the individual."
— Virginia Peterson, from A Matter of Life and Death
"Opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."
— from The Kybalion
"I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please."
— Mother Jones
"Just as some cheap magazines are deliberately written to generate fear in the public and to capitalize on that fear, some scientific reports are deliberate hoaxes designed to reinforce the credibility of our scientific, political, or military establishments. This is a fact of life, and it should not discourage one from the study of science. It does not necessarily mean that anyone is hiding some formidable truth. If the idea that science knows nothing about certain phenomena is unacceptable to the public, why should it be more easily acceptable to professional scientists?"
— Jacques Vallee, from Passport to Magonia (p. 156)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
— Arthur Schopenhauer
"Everything could be settled by speaking the truth. But now, people wouldn't know the truth if you spoke it. It only upsets them. It hurts their ego. And then you are their enemy."
— Grandfather Semu Huarte
"Without courage there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue."
— Sir Walter Scott
"Few men have imagination enough for the truth of reality."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!"
— "Col. Jessup," Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men
"If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."
— The Talmud
"All great truths began as blasphemies."
— George Bernard Shaw
"In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
— George Orwell
"Half a truth is often a great lie."
— Benjamin Franklin
"Knowledge is neither good nor evil. It is truth. How it is utilized, for good or evil, is the responsibility of the user."
— Anthony B. Herbert, from Military Manual of Self Defense (p. 7)
"The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence."
— Rabindranath Tagore, from Stray Birds (CLXXVI)
CIVILIZATION
"We are all born charming, fresh, and spontaneous — and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society."
— Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
"Civilization means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained."
— Winston Churchill
"I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul."
— Joseph Conrad
"Something about servitude stills. Something about domestication stifles. The wolf, now the poodle, no longer howls. The wild boar lies on its side in the hog pen and grunts. The wildebeast stands in her stall placidly chewing her cud while she's milked dry. Domestication of man and beast muffles the cry of freedom and suffocates the spirit of liberty."
— Gerry Spence
"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 Spence
"We are no longer alert. We continuously lie to our children and teach them to be liars. Easter bunnies, Santa Claus, denying what their senses tell them, these are all lies . . . If you're well educated you'll work to hurt people, you'll do the work of big institutions. You'll work to make alcohol, drugs, TV, schools, religion, things to put people's minds to sleep."
— Grace Spotted Eagle
"Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or unbalanced, people's minds are running all the time. Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete. They are eaten alive by their egos. They think they see, but they are mistaken; all they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world. There is no clarity, no wisdom in that!"
— Taisen Deshimaru
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
— Barbara Tuchman
"The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence."
— Simone Weil, from "The Power of Words"
"For the first time ever in the history of mankind, the wilderness is safer than 'civilization.'"
— Faith Popcorn, from The Popcorn Report
"It is alien to the Hopis to settle matters out of hand by majority vote. Such a vote leaves a dissatisfied minority, which makes them very uneasy. Their natural way of doing it is to discuss it among themselves at great length, and group by group, until public opinion as a whole has settled overwhelmingly in one direction."
— Oliver La Farge
"When someone stepped away from what was natural, the elders told him what was kind, what was right, what worked and what didn't. It was the job of the elders to make sure the people were straight with the universe, their job to leave order in this world before they went on to the next. In our time, we do not have elders; we have old people who do not know any more about living that we do and whose existence is increasingly burdensome to us and to them. . . . Without a link between us and the elders, there is no longer anyone to tell us we're on the wrong road. Nobody argues against our shallow life, nobody talks about a better time, because nobody alive now remembers a better time."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (pp. 11-12)
"Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years . . ."
— Louis L'Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (p. 195)
"The great ruler speaks little
and his words are priceless
He works without self-interest
and leaves no trace
When all is finished, the people say,
'It happened by itself'"
— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 17
CARELESSNESS
"Do not be negligent, even in trifling matters."
— Miyamoto Musashi
"Unwatchfulness is the path of death."
— Buddha, 500 BC
"Those who are watchful never die; those who do not watch are already as dead."
— Buddha, 500 BC
"The most dangerous words are vain and lightly uttered words, because they are the voluntary abortions of thought."
— Eliphas Levi
"Complacency will kill you every time."
— Albert Tremblay
"Many little leaks may sink a ship."
— Thomas Fuller
"Don't get caught slippin'."
— popular gangsta sayin'
"There is, among New Age people, an astonishing lack of good sense and a dangerous Pollyanna attitude toward the realities of the occult. . . . When the door to the occult is opened, light and darkness spill out together. The idea that as long as we don't believe in evil it cannot harm us is disastrously wrong."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 254)
"The mundane realities of living and our failure to address them responsibly offer means of attack. We may habitually run out of money, ignore balding tires or overload the electrical wiring in our houses. We may let our teeth deteriorate or eat food that weakens instead of nourishes us. Attention to the facts of daily living and responsible care-taking in every aspect of our lives shuts the door on a multitude of ills."
— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 272)
Sweet merciful fuck!
Looks like I have some printing to do...
THE MASSES
"We cannot trust . . . people who are nonconformists."
— Ray Kroc, former CEO of McDonald's
"Man would yield his sovereignty to an immense power; one that does not destroy, or even tyrannize, but one that serves to stupefy a people, reducing them to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious sheep."
— Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America
"The breathing dead emulate machines. Their work is mechanical. They relate more to the simulated life on television than to their own species."
— Gerry Spence
"Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies."
— Clive Barker
"People in riots tend to act as one organism, the riot becoming some moving, twisting monster that sweeps along those in it in a sea of human emotions. There is a loss of individuality that many find very attractive. The riot itself becomes a cloak, a cover that protects the individual from being identified . . . Riots then become a convenient excuse for some humans to do everything they really wanted to do but never had the nerve to. It's carnival time where the mask of the riot provides anonymity."
— Eugene Sockut
"The chief preoccupation of a mass movement is to instill in its followers a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, and it achieves this facility by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgement of its own. The result is not only a compact and fearless following but also a homogeneous plastic mass that can be kneaded at will."
— Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (p. 79)
"A few punks get out of hand, and the mob goes right with it. Even sheep can kick you to death when they stampede."
— Andrew Vachss, from Only Child (p. 192)
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
— Albert Einstein
"Humankind cannot bear much reality."
— T.S. Elliot
"It seemed there were a thousand identical twins standing around with cans of Schlitz in their right hands. Each of the Thousanduplets was tall, with a flat, muscular stomach, a dark tan, and of course, blond hair down to his shoulders. Cocked at just the right angle at the front of their blond mops, as you've already guessed, were sunglasses . . . They were concentrating on assuming 'cool' poses and making sure their sunglasses didn't fall off."
— Robert J. Ringer, from Looking Out For #1 (pgs 92-93)
"The People, your People, sir, is a Great Beast!"
— Alexander Hamilton
"The mass of the people, ignorant and easily swayed by violent passions, must have a strong arm over them for their own good. Otherwise, they would tear themselves and everything else to pieces."
— John McConaughy, from Who Rules America? (p. 11)
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country."
— Edward Bernays
"(The masses) are ruled almost entirely by the minds and wills of other persons, whom they allow to do their thinking and willing for them. How few original thoughts or original actions are performed by the average person? Are not the majority of persons mere shadows and echoes of others having stronger wills or minds than themselves?"
— The Kybalion
"The majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display."
— Emma Goldman, from Anarchism
"The collective intelligence of any group of people who are thinking as a 'herd' rather than individually is no higher than the intelligence of the stupidest members."
— Mary Day Winn, from Adam's Rib
"Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor. They condemn everything they don't understand."
— Tallulah Bankhead
"'Mediocrity' does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters."
— Ayn Rand, from The New Left
"Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."
— Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own
"No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion."
— Carrie Chapman Catt (1900)
"A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; as is the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government. . ."
— John Stuart Mill
"Looking at all the brightly dressed college kids walking down the street makes me glad that I chose not to go that route. Hearing the shit they talk about is beyond belief. I can't understand how people of that age can be into such mindless bullshit. . . . I don't like college towns. The streets are full of people wearing the same clothes. It's like being stuck in a wine-cooler commercial and not being able to find the exit door."
— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (pp. 242-243)
"To prevent them from really thinking out anything themselves, we shall deflect their attention to amusements, games, pastimes, excitements, and people's palaces. Such interests will distract their minds completely from questions on which we might be obliged to struggle with them. Becoming less and less accustomed to independent thinking, people will express themselves in unison with us because we alone offer new lines of thought — of course through persons whom they do not consider as in any way connected with us."
— Protocols
"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. . . . Whenever I'm in the middle of conformity, surrounded by oneness of mind with people oozing concurrence on every side, I get scared."
— P. J. O'Rourke, from Parliament of Whores (p. 194)
". . . the observer would have to remark the docility of the masses — their pliability beneath the thumb of unscrupulous leaders, their credulity that made them believe almost anything poured into their ears."
— Stanton A. Coblentz, from From Arrow to Atom Bomb (p. 417)
"To play on those millions of minds, to watch them slowly respond to an unseen stimulus, to guide their aspirations without their knowledge — all this whether in high capacities or in humble, is a big and endless game of chess, of ever extraordinary excitement."
— Sidney Webb, founder of the Fabian Society, 1890
"Crowds are easily influenced and controlled, and it is well known that crowd violence can be orchestrated by a few key agitators. If an idea is presented to a crowd at the right time and in the right way, the crowd will act on the idea as a group, without thinking. Crowds will often do terrible things that no individual within the crowd would ever do alone."
— Robert Bruce, from Practical Psychic Self-Defense (p. 122)
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."
— unknown (oft attributed to Albert Einstein)
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful. Then maybe some of these of these people would go get some help."
— Anton LaVey
"It is important to observe the normality of abnormal behavior, and to realize that it was in a hysterically deranged period of cultural history that the witch persecutions flourished."
— Julian Franklyn, from Death by Enchantment (p. 17)
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
— Hitler
"The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to those of us who don't."
— Neal Stephenson, from In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (p. 60)
"The administration says the American people want tax cuts. Well, duh. The American people also want drive through nickel beer night. The American people want to lose weight by eating ice cream. The American people love the Home Shopping Network because it's commercial free."
— Will Durst
THE BEAST
"Hate is like acid. It can damage the vessel in which it is stored as well as destroy the object on which it is poured."
— Ann Landers
"Violent criminals are like nothing the average person has ever experienced. They are psychopaths, which means they release their anger and get their kicks from senselessly hurting or killing other people. Many of them don't care whether they live or die. They may sound and look like anyone else, they are often friendly, but that's only so they can get what they want — control over others, then the injuries begin."
— Sanford Strong, from Strong on Defense (p. 30)
"The psychopathic violent criminal is not a movie character but a living beast who enjoys senseless acts of brutality — the maiming or killing of innocent people — to release his seething rage. . . . He attacks instantly and decisively, relying on surprise or subterfuge, either armed or bare-handed. He gives no quarter and cares little about being killed himself. This is what you may come up against."
— from Attack Proof , by John Perkins, Al Ridenhour, and Matt Kovsky (p. viii)
"Thieves are usually those who have something and want more. They steal not for food but for flashier clothes, a better watch, a handsome car. They steal for money to spend on flash, on women or drugs."
— Louis L'Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (p. 11)
"He sounded tough — the way a car with a bad muffler sounded fast."
— remembered line from an Andrew Vachss novel
"Despite a multitude of difference in their backgrounds and crime patterns, criminals are alike in one way: All regard the world as a chessboard over which they have total control, and they perceive people as pawns to be pushed around at will."
— Stanton E. Samenow
"A street criminal lives by a very basic philosophy: there are two types of people in the world, predators and food. The former are to be feared for the pain they can inflict, and the latter are to be victimized and used."
— from Safe in the City, by Marc MacYoung and Chris Pfouts (pp. v-vi)
"Although it is true with criminals in general, you should really consider a street addict as someone from an entirely different planet. . . . We're talking someone who was conditioned from childhood that the way to get what he wants or needs is to batter and abuse the weak and take it from them. You are not a person to an addict; you are a source for what he needs. . . . he's got nothing to do except get high and watch for ways to get his drug money. In a real sense, his profession is being an addict and a thief. . . . In their world there are no boundaries except those enforced by violence. . ."
— from Safe in the City, by Marc MacYoung and Chris Pfouts (p. 88, 90)
"Street criminals get a rush knowing they are feared, a response they define as "getting respect." They look at average people as wimpy suckers who are there to frighten, take from, and to hurt."
— Loren Christensen
"When they see an easy target they react almost reflexively, giving little or no thought to the act."
— Loren Christensen
"They wake up every morning to a nothing day and a zero life. The poor uneducated, beaten, and forgotten. Nowhere near enough prisons to handle them. They're gone from the system, but they won't crawl under the nice clean streets and disappear."
— unknown
"Killing makes them feel big. Their sense of being alive comes from the fear they inspire, the pain they inflict, their survival while others are dead."
— unknown
"Some have decided not to be apprehended and will even charge against a drawn pistol rather than risk prison. One has no leeway against such predators, and they expect and give no quarter."
— Eugene Sockut
"Like with the psychopathic robot, a junkie high on drugs may become impervious to bullets. At last count, I read that 33 (9mm rounds) failed to stop one of these human sponges."
— Eugene Sockut
"Violent criminals often reflect startlingly peaceful exteriors."
— unknown
"That men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"
— unknown
"He believes profoundly in the depravity of human nature and knows (from his own experience) that in extreme conditions a man becomes a beast."
— Viktor Suvorov
"He is a walking time bomb that can be detonated at any moment by some tiny slight . . . Because he thinks someone's staring at him, he's ready to fight. (If) a motorist cuts him off . . . he speeds in pursuit intending to do the same to him."
— Stanton E. Samenow, from Straight Talk about Criminals (p. 69)
"They joined gangs because they failed at school, had miserable home lives, were excluded from the job market, or knew that they qualified for only the most menial positions. Gangs provided a means of transcending these circumstances, of allowing adolescents to establish themselves as part of a "street elite," and to define a masculine identity in spite of the humiliations of everyday life. In gangs, adolescent males proved themselves, acquired respect and honor, and demonstrated their masculinity by humbling a foe. Violence arose out of the need to meet these intangible goals."
— Eric C. Schneider
"To achieve this state of control, they employ a range of linguistic and behavioral methods, like rhetorical questions, shame tactics, lies. Looking you straight in the eye, challenging, making themselves taller than you, intimidating, testing. Assuming a preaching style, using blanketing statements, asking questions, acting as instructor, treating you as student, giving you no room to respond, defining the power dynamic between you."
— Susan A. Phillips
"The rational faculties are clouded by strong drink, and the animal nature, liberated from bondage, controls the individual."
— Manly P. Hall
"EXPECT NO MERCY"
— a patch worn by many members of the Banditos outlaw motorcycle gang
"When you got a little kid with a gun that has a fuck it attitude, those are the most dangerous ones."
— anonymous, from Wallbangin' (p. 349)
"Once, that was what I wanted. No conscience. How I envied the sociopaths around me. Without moral and ethical baggage weighing them down, without the boundaries that restrain the rest of the world, they're the most efficient human beings on earth. You can kill them, but you can't hurt them."
— Burke, from Pain Management by Andrew Vachss
"Crackheads and speed freaks are violently unstable individuals, and their thought processes are so scrambled that they tend to do things impulsively without considering the consequences of their actions. And not all the things they do are to get drug money either — they just do whatever the hell they feel like doing."
— anonymous (RWT)
"I don't have much compassion for some of these seemingly able-bodied mid-twenties, vaguely threatening, attitude laden guys who have decided that their personal statement is that they're going to give up on life at a very early stage of the game."
— Dennis Miller, from The Rants (p. 75)
"Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill! . . . You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go. Why things are what they are."
— William Golding, from Lord of the Flies
"Most violent men are failures."
— A. E. Van Vogt
". . . the basic characteristic of the criminal is not so much calculated wickedness as a kind of childish wilfulness."
— Colin Wilson (paraphrasing Yochelson and Samenow)
"The assistants . . . were tied up (as were several customers) . . . The bandits then forced everyone to drink a caustic cleaning fluid, which burned their mouths and throats. Then they were shot. The girl was raped before being shot. One of the bandits pushed a ballpoint pen into the ear of Mr Walker and kicked it into his head."
— Colin Wilson, from A Criminal History of Mankind (p. 638)
"Fiends — you can tell a fiend a mile away. Somebody who looks like they lost a lot of weight, got on some raggedy clothes, they really don't care about theyself. They dirty all the time."
— "Maurice," 107 Hoover Crip
"We never killed nobody that I know of. We have put people in a coma, paralyzed them — stuff like that, but we ain't never killed nobody. Gave them brain damage."
— "N.A.," Compton Gangster BIC
"Chillin' on the corner on a hot Summer day,
Just me, my posse, and MCA,
Lotta wine, lotta beer, and a lot of cursin'
Twenty-two automatic on my person. . ."
— Beastie Boys, from Licensed to Ill
"They're not 'white trash' — they're like white toxic waste!"
— Chris Rock
"I think playing with toy guns doesn't make you a killer. I believe ignoring your kids and giving them Prozac might."
— Ted Nugent
Most people who practice Satanism are Christian fundamentalists in drag."
— Isaac Bonewits
"He'd forgotten just how addictive crime can be. Repeat offenders are motivated more by withdrawal symptoms than necessity."
— Sue Grafton, from "H" Is for Homicide
"Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life."
— Anais Nin
"Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence."
— Pearl Bailey
"The fool shouts loudly, thinking to impress the world."
— Marie de France (12th c.)
"One attacks those who possess things that one does not possess. The attack is all the more savage because the one who attacks is destitute and the one who is attacked is well provided. The one who attacks always considers himself to be in the position of legitimate offence."
— Adrienne Monnier
"Persons who drop things from overpasses and walkways can usually be spotted behaving in a suspicious manner immediately prior to the act. Always be cautious of persons milling about aimlessly over a highway, especially if no protective chainlink fencing (sometimes referred to as an 'anti-drop barrier') is evident. These persons tend to favor large rocks and cinderblocks, which can easily crash completely through either the windshield or roof, resulting in serious injury or death."
— from Evasive Driving, by T. J. Steele
"There are people that are so damaged that they are beyond all fear and are damn near unpredictable . . . Most of these people are killing themselves with drugs, but that takes too long . . . They are no longer human beings. I don't know any other way to describe them. There is something about them that causes an instinctive reaction of 'Wrong!' in normal people — not wrong in the sense of moral right and wrong, but wrong against nature and evolution . . ."
— Marc "Animal" MacYoung, from Violence, Blunders, and Fractured Jaws (pp. 106-107)
"What causes opponents to come of their own accord is the prospect of gain. What discourages opponents from coming is the prospect of harm."
— Sun Tzu, from The Art of War
"A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes."
— Dorothy Gilman, from Incident at Badamya
"In one series of interviews I spoke to four convicts, each of whom implied that he had committed more than a hundred muggings. I did not find these men to be irrational, violent, impulsive, or sadistic, but experienced them (remember, I saw them in a prison setting) as quiet, rational, and not psychotic. They were, however, singularly lacking in insight and frightening in their inability to relate to anyone's needs but their own. One man said, 'I am not a sadist. I don't beat people — only if they are slow in giving me my money.'"
— Dr. Martin Symonds, from "Victims of Violence"
"Some murderers seem to kill for enjoyment, and a few become serial killers, killing again and again, seemingly for the love of it. These people seem to have no conscience at all. . . . Lack of conscience and remorse for wrongdoing are indicators of serious Neg contamination or possession."
— Robert Bruce, from Practical Psychic Self-Defense (p. 160)
". . . the Amoral Thrill Cannibal is largely a prison phenomenon. Since the former republics of the Soviet Union do not carry out the death penalty much, they have tens of thousands of individuals facing incredibly long sentences with no hope of release. . . . By killing and eating the new guy, they figured they could at least vary their diet, come up with a new reason to kill someone, do a cursory study of anatomy, and have something new to talk about. They would also get a trip out of the prison for a court date and perhaps an evaluation period at a mental institution, which was bound to have better food and provide a glimpse of a nurse or two. From their perspective, their planning made sense."
— Shiguro Takada, from Contingency Cannibalism (pp. 97-98)
"One thought consumes me,
The anger of lust denied
Covers me like darkness.
I have become a demon dwelling
In the hell of my dark thoughts,
Stormcloud of my desires."
— Seami Motokiyo, from The Damask Drum (13th c.)
"Study shows that 8% of women and 2% of men have been stalked at some time."
— CNN news ticker
". . . but I do wonder, dear, if you've considered that there are those who are not merely unfortunate or deranged but actually evil."
— Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, from The Godmother (p. 46)
"I don't like going out in the day. I can't take the sun. It's not good for me. I don't like all the ugly fucking people looking at me like they do. All I can do is dream of killing them. It would feel so good to just be able to shoot them like the pieces of shit that they are."
— Henry Rollins, from The Portable Henry Rollins (pp. 227-228)
"Anger is short madness."
— Horace
THE PANTOMIME
"Every emotion expresses itself in the muscular system."
— Bruce Lee
"Gurdjieff stated that our movements are quite automatized. We have a fixed number of characteristic movements, gestures, postures, definitions of personal space, and the like, each keyed to certain situations and subpersonalities that bring them out."
— Charles T. Tart, from Waking Up (p. 99)
"The face is the mirror of the mind. The human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person."
— John O'Donohue
"People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning."
— Gavin de Becker
"The face tells us subtleties in feelings that only a poet can put into words."
— Paul Eckman
"It is inappropriate behavior that's relevant: a stare held too long, a smile that curls too slowly, a narrowing or widening of the eyes, a rapid looking away."
— Gavin de Becker
"One may smile, and smile, and be a villain."
— Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1, 5
"In dealing with men, female offenders frequently resort to flattery and seductive behavior. To gain sympathy with either sex, some female offenders appear to turn tears off and on virtually at will."
— Stanton E. Samenow
"Humility is a good thing, but overhumility is near to crookedness; silence is a virtue, but undue silence bespeaks a deceitful mind."
— unknown
"These guys get out of the joint, they come at you down the street, they look like gorillas. They swing their torsos when they walk; they look menacing . . . He's got the joint body, the prison strut. You can spot an ex-con in a second that way."
— anonymous, from Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know (p. 25)
"Ever notice two policemen talking to each other on the street? They never look at each other. One is always looking behind the other. They very seldom look each other in the eye. It's a survival mechanism. They want to know what's coming up at them."
— anonymous, from Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know (p. 18)
"If you see a woman rubberneck, she's usually a pickpocket or a whore. Whores rubberneck. They know what's going on. As a rule, whores know more about what's going on in the street than anybody. The guy whose head is on a swivel, the rubberneck, that's the guy who's probably looking to commit a crime. When you see a guy looking all around him, the trick is not to be seen by him, just to kind of lay back and let him look around, follow him to where he's going."
— anonymous, from Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know (pp. 24-25)
"Don't believe anything they say, especially if they say they don't want to fight . . . especially if they come closer rather than back away. Look out for ones who will touch you or put their arm around you, and never shake hands with them — it's the oldest trick in the book."
— Geoff Thompson
"Look for erratic eye movement, wide eyes, fidgeting, hand concealment, false smile, or pincer movement of companion(s)."
— Geoff Thompson (on precursors to an attack)
"You could see his bent little mind overextending itself, reading your insults, your fears straight from your brain, picking up on the thoughts you were too chickenshit to say."
— Chris Simunek, from Paradise Burning (p. 72)
"Fake smiles are usually spotted easily, but if the subject is experienced at deception, it can be difficult to catch. A fake smile usually only shows the top teeth; natural smiles show both the upper and lower teeth."
— Edward Lewis, from Hostile Ground (pgs. 14-15)
"As they talked, I was no longer hearing their words. I was watching the foam forming in the corners of their lips and the spray of saliva as their voices grew louder and more insistent."
— Michael Levine, from The Big White Lie (p. 120)
"The study of psychology should be a history of the metamorphoses of men and women into their habitual Masks."
— Sigismundo Celine
"I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week if there is anything to be got by it."
— Charles Dickens
"Become aware of body language. Your own and other people's. If you're explaining something important to your staff, try to convey some of your own urgency and enthusiasm; you'll diminish your effect if you're sitting rigidly, drawn tight together, with arms and legs crossed. . . . The body language that expresses confidence and authority is the easy, open stance, accompanied by direct eye contact with the other person. . . . If you stand up to address a seated person, you gain height and a certain amount of temporary power. But if you face the person directly, on his level (whether sitting or standing), you are more likely to establish communication."
— Cheryl Reimold
"Adopt a stance with the head erect, neither hanging down, nor looking up, not twisted. Your forehead and the space between your eyes should not be wrinkled. Do not roll your eyes nor allow them to blink, but slightly narrow them. With your features composed, keep the line of your nose straight with a feeling of slightly flaring your nostrils."
— Miyamoto Musashi, from The Book of Five Rings
"Don't let your face or eyes give away your intention. If you can't depend on a dead pan poker face remaining that way, smile! Then make your move and carry it all the way through. If force is required, use enough to do the job, use it first and without hesitation."
— William H. Jordan, from No Second Place Winner (p. 108)
"Your face, especially your eyes, mirrors your emotions. If you are tentative or nervous, frightened or apprehensive, the emotion is reflected in your expression and the way you look at someone. . . . When confronted by potential violence on the street, your face should be expressionless and your eyes watchful. . . . Keep your face as still and calm as possible. Don't try to do anything special with your eyes by making them appear hard, cold, or haughtily staring. They should be opened, not narrowed, reflecting only that you are awake and alert."
— Joe Hyams, from Playboy's Book of Practical Self-Defense (p. 59)
"A general reading of someone's face, especially their eyes, will usually give you a clue to what is in their minds. Attackers are usually tense, the muscles around the neck and shoulders are tight, the body rigid. Their movements are usually stiff because they are keyed up emotionally and therefore tense. Most attacks are preceded by a shove or physically aggressive move intended to intimidate you."
— Joe Hyams, from Playboy's Book of Practical Self-Defense (p. 13)
"The smile, as most any tactic, has its risks. It must not appear foolish or project ridicule; nor should it look like an arrogant smirk."
— Myles Martel
"He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points."
— Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
"An amateur in possession of a concealed weapon will often be seen adjusting its position when it shifts uncomfortably, or grazing his hand against it when he feels threatened."
— anonymous (RWT)
"Haggard and Isaacs suggested that these expressions, which they called 'micromomentary' expressions or 'micros,' are not intended as messages, consciously or unconsciously, but are leakage of true feelings. They may actually serve as a safety valve, permitting a person to express, very briefly, his unacceptable impulses and feelings."
— Flora Davis, from Inside Intuition (pp. 57-58)
"The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual — as we think so will we act."
— Martha Graham
ACTIVISM
"Civil disobedience on grounds of conscience s an honourable tradition . . . and those who take part in it, may in the end be vindicated by history."
— Lord Justice Hoffman
"To violate the law is often the highest, most sacred duty that can devolve upon the citizen."
— Clarence S. Darrow
"Pie is the great equalizer. How wealthy or powerful are you with pie dripping off your face?"
— Rahula Janowski, on behalf of the Biotic Baking Brigade
"Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you."
— George Bernard Shaw
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
— George Orwell
"Strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself."
— Thomas Jefferson
"Never depend on government or institutions to create change. All significant social change in human history was accomplished by individual action."
— Margaret Mead
"Avoid the faint-of-heart, the excessively paranoid, and the not-quite-thoroughly committed. Avoid the casual acquaintance you only see at a protest rally, especially the ones who "talk tough." Such people may well be police spies or agents provocateurs."
— Etta Place, from Ecodefense (pg 237)
"If ever you happen to be sneakin' around, doin' sumpthin' the average citizen might frown upon (like kidnaping Ronald McDonald, or altering an offensive billboard), always be sure to be packin' some pepperspray! If you happen to be accosted by some nosy bastard intent on makin' a 'Citizen's Arrest,' a snootful of peppers will make that dumbass change his tune right quick! What happens if two drunken 'do-gooders' were to happen upon you if you were unprepared? Do you think idiots like that would be respectful of your Civil Rights? Fuck no — the cops would treat you better! If you don't have pepperspray, you'd have to use a screwdriver or a can of spray paint, or sumpthin' — and then the idiots would need to be hospitalized — and you really don't want that."
— Razor
"Nonviolent actions are almost completely useless when deprived of media exposure."
— Antonio Negri
"Remember, there is a fine line between activism and just being a pain in the ass."
— Dennis Miller
"One has the right to be wrong in a democracy."
— Claude Pepper
"I presume that in general those who meddle with public affairs sometimes perish miserably and that they deserve it . . ."
— from Candide, by Voltaire
"Sitting in a circle singing Kumbaya isn't going to change anything."
— Ainsley Hargus
"Being fond of courage while detesting poverty will lead men to unruly behavior."
— Confucius
"The stakes . . . are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
— Barbara Jordan
"If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest."
— Audre Lorde
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
— Audre Lorde
"The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content."
— Simone Weil, from Oppression and Liberty
"Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. . . . They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them."
— Shirley Chisholm, from Unbought and Unbossed
"The rich are never threatened by the poor — they do not notice them."
— Marie de France (12th c.)
". . . police have issued misinformation claiming unsubstantiated evidence of violent plans by protesters gathering for mass actions. The false information is then used as a pretext for unwarranted police actions. . . . many media outlets appear to have been predisposed to repeat information provided by police without fact-checking or seeking responses from the organizations accused. The damage to free speech and the mass protest movement has been extensive. In addition, activists are scared. Anyone who has been involved in the mass protest movement . . . has friends who have been brutalized at the hands of the system."
— Tim Ream
"The real troublemakers at the demonstrations are always a small minority — usually only about five percent — and they always seem to be able to magically slip away, ninja-like, sometime between when the gas grenades start getting fired into the crowd and when the police start putting everyone they can grab into flex-cuffs and loading them onto hot, crowded, bathroomless buses — where the captured activists will be made to sit until nearly everyone has pissed in their pants at least once. Humiliation is an even better means of aversive conditioning than gassing, beating, and jailing combined. Indeed, many demonstrators subject to this kind of treatment have dropped out of the movement altogether. It is not inconceivable that a handful of compensated federal intelligence 'assets' are deliberately perpetuating acts of criminal mischief by which law enforcement can justify 'collective punishment' of the entire crowd as a whole."
— Razor
"The greater the resistance, the greater will be the force and scope of the state repression brought to bear upon the people. When resistence is at a high level, the enemy takes measures against the people. But treading lightly will not assuage the rulers. Violent repression is built into the status quo."
— from Prairie Fire, Weather Underground (1974)
"Those who have joined the revolutionary left just to be trendy had better be careful bot to involve themselves in something from which there is no going back."
— Baader-Meinhof Group, from Dans Konzept Stadtguerilla (April, 1971)
"The declaration that our people are hostile to a government made . . . for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult."
— John Adams
". . . my duty is to unify the people, 'cause to divide people is to destroy people, and destroy yourself, too."
— Peter Tosh
"Rights are never given, only asserted."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The protests and people who indulge in the protests are completely misguided. . . . These protests are a complete outrage."
— Tony Blair
"Despite such amiable slogans as 'Make love not war,' the whole hippie movement was heavily loaded with hostility. It was Freaksville versus Squaresville, the counter-culture versus the establishment."
— Robert S. de Ropp, from Warrior's Way (p. 287)
"Someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign-flashing flower children and eventually discover that, underneath the facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love, and harmony had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways."
— Neal Stephenson, from In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (pp. 30-31)
"Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their secrets to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting that the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put gloves on before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt."
— Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac (pp. 30-31)
"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses."
— Utah Phillips
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
— Voltaire
FANATICISM:
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
— Winston Churchill
"Every reform movement has its lunatic fringe."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet."
— Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (p. 81)
"Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet."
— Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (#62)
"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."
— Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (#75)
"You think I want some farmer with a grenade pin for a brain blathering on about how the entire world is run by about five Jews from a luxury cave on Barbados? Well, frankly, yes, I do. The louder they bellyache, the better. Because then and only then — we know exactly where these people are. We can listen to them and, God forbid, actually communicate with them. This way they can't ferment like bad yeast and ooze out of the brew vat when we're not looking."
— Dennis Miller, from The Rants (pgs 104-105)
"Manson became a hero of the west-coast 'underground' network. But the trial had the effect of convincing the rest of the world that the whole movement of social revolt was a form of mindless emotionalism whose arguments defied logic; it produced, in fact, precisely the kind of revulsion against the left that the McCarthy witch hunts had created against the right. In America, at least, the Manson family had discredited 'revolution.'"
— Colin Wilson, from A Criminal History of Mankind (p. 630)
"To the fanatic, everything is black or white, curse or blessing, friend or foe — and nothing in between. He is immune to doubt and hesitation. He perceives tolerance as weakness."
— Elie Wiesel
"The trouble with our Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough."
— William Brann, editor of The Iconoclast, who was shortly thereafter shot in the back by an irate Baptist, whom he managed to mortally wound with his own revolver before expiring (1898)
"Bennett's voice is the voice of an intolerant scold, narrow and shrill and mean-spirited, the voice of a man afraid of liberty and mistrustful of freedom. He believes that it is the government's duty to impose on people a puritanical code of behavior best exemplified by the discipline in place at an unheated boarding school. He never misses the chance to demand more police, more jails, more judges, more arrests, more punishments, more people serving millennia of 'serious time.'"
— Lewis Lapham
"Fundamentalists have never had too much respect for law and order."
— Isaac Bonewits
"In order to make sense of the brutal activities of the SS, it must be seen that its members were motivated, for the most part, not by sadism, but by sacrifice in a fanatical utopian cause which suspended normal judgement. . . . The master race was to be the culmination of a biological evolution. If 'inferior' races prevented these goals, the master race would be justified, by the 'natural law' of Darwinism, in doing whatever it needed to survive the harsh struggle for existence. . . . For the sake of being part of a utopian society which would usher in a golden age, he was willing to give up personal liberty. . . .Though SS men were trained to be the first stage in a superhuman mutation, and already behaved as if they were supermen, they also exhibited a robotlike quality. Fearless and cruel, they were also capable of a cringing subservience to superiors."
— Dusty Sklar, from Gods and Beasts (pp. 94-96)
"Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from Dancing at the Edge of the World
"The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institutions may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest of purposes."
— George Washington
"Jesus said to be like children, but like 7th grade children? Cruel, gossiping liars and bullies that roam in packs and cliques, looking for weak and unsuspecting VICTIMS? If you're having the kind of fun that they cant experience, then you must be sinning — and in their eyes, Slack is the ultimate sin."
— from Revelation X (pg. 49), by The SubGenius Foundation
"People on the whole are very simple-minded in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than not, the things their leaders tell them."
— Pearl Buck, from What America Means to Me
". . . the Pilgrims hardly let everyone 'worship God in his own way' once they arrived. They immediately set up a quasi-theocracy and expelled or imprisoned their own believers who spoke against ministers. . . . The Puritans to their north were even worse."
— James W. Loewen, from Lies Across America (p. 385)
"If religion becomes a cause of enmity and hatred, it is evident the abolition of religion is preferable to its promulgation; for a religion is a remedy for human ills. If a remedy should be productive of disease, it is certainly advisable to abandon it."
— 'Abdu 'l-Baha (1912)
"You've seen an increase in career prosecutors that you didn't have 15 years ago, people who never practiced in the public sector. They sit in this lofty tower with a rather skewed vision of the world. They are on a divine mission, and everything that gets in their way is evil. The ends justify the means."
— Thomas Dillard
"Numerous religious extremists claim that a race war will soon begin, and have taken steps to become martyrs in their predicted battle between good and evil. Almost uniformly, the belief among right-wing religious extremists is that the federal government is an arm of Satan."
— excerpted from the FBI's Project Megiddo report
"Some delusional conspiracy nuts seem to think that simply lining up the object of their hatred in the crosshairs of a high powered rifle will magically reverse all the 'wrongs' the target in question is alleged to have committed. This is not so. Presidents of countries, CEOs of multi-national corporations, Chairmen of banking institutions, and Directors of large organizations are, almost invariably, nothing more than mere figureheads intended to take the blame for crimes committed by their handlers — an effigy for the rubes to huck tomatoes at, if you will. As Bobcat Goldthwait so eloquently put it, 'If you get a bad hamburger, you don't blame Ronald McDonald.' The true controllers tend to shun the spotlight."
— Razor
"When there is One Right True and Only Way — Ours! — and everybody else is wrong, then those who are wrong are damned, and the damned are evil. We are excused from recognizing their humanness and from treating them according to the ethics with which we treat each other. Generally, the Chosen People set about the task of purifying themselves from any contact with the carriers of evil. When they are in power, they institute inquisitions, witchhunts, pogroms, executions, censorship, and concentration camps."
— Starhawk, from The Spiral Dance (p. 189)
"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion — the revolution. In the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultured world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions, and its ethical rules. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that is only to destroy it more effectively."
— Sergey Nechaev, from Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869)
"One man willing to throw away his life is enough to terrorize a thousand."
— Wu Ch'i (400 BC)
"After browsing through various hate group websites, you may notice a common denominator: Hate groups want the freedom to prevent others from exercising the same rights that they enjoy. If you look beyond the surface distinctions (skin color, national citizenship, religious affiliation. etc.) That hate groups use to identify their members, you'll see that hate groups are often more similar to each other than they are to the people they're trying to recruit."
— Wallace Wang, from Steal This Computer Book 3 (p. 59)
"Have you noticed that most people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?"
— George Carlin
JUSTICE
"Kindness is the beginning and the end of the Law."
— The Talmud
"Justice is . . . the conscience of the whole of humanity."
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
"Fairness is what justice really is."
— Potter Stewart
"The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government."
— George Washington
"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Man does not give rights. He only takes them away."
— Gerry Spence
"Laws are like spider webs. If some poor weak creature comes up against them — it is caught. But the bigger ones can break through and get away."
— Solon (630-555 BC)
"Under current law, it's a crime for a private citizen to lie to a government official, but not for the same official to lie to the people."
— Donald M. Frazer
"The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging onto power, whatever it took."
— Carl Hiaasen, from Sick Puppy
"The majority of defendants are provided with overworked, underpaid, and thoroughly apathetic public defenders, most of whom aspire for a better paying job in the office of the District Attorney, and jockey for the few available positions in that office by cooperating as much as possible with the prosecutors against whom they're paired in court."
— Wayne Henderson
"A conscientious law-abiding person might get arrested for inadvertently committing some minor infraction that is on the books but rarely enforced. In such a situation, one could say that an increased level of law enforcement led to identification of a crime (another officer might've ignored the offense or given a warning)."
— Stanton E. Samenow, from Straight Talk about Criminals (p. 59)
"Search and seizure, the Miranda decision, all this kind of stuff, police have never cared about any of that. That's all bullshit. They testify however they want to . . . Who's there to say he didn't give the prisoner the Miranda warning? The prisoner? That's a joke."
— anonymous, from Mark Baker's Cops (p. 318)
"If you want to stay afterwards and face the authorities, good. I am sure you will enjoy your trial, especially when the opposing attorney points out to the jury how you, a trained killer, did attack and assault that poor mugger."
— John La Tourrette
"Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them."
— Ed Howe
"Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law."
— Goldsmith
"Laws that do not embody public opinion can never be enforced."
— Elbert Hubbard
"You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people."
— Will Rogers
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
— Louis D. Bradeis
"I proclaim that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger."
— Plato
"Laws are silent in time of war."
— Cicero (110 B.C.)
"The more laws, the less justice."
— Cicero
"Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted."
— Cicero
"Let the punishment fit the crime."
— Cicero
"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn."
— Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian (p. 250)
"Watching the trust we had in the legal system disappear has been a sad, confusing experience . . . In the past, we revered the legal system as the backbone of democracy. Now we quite frankly fear it — its linguistic fog, the casualness of the brutal transactions, the sheer density of its unconcern."
— Dennis Miller, from The Rants (p. 15)
"You may not believe a law is moral, but it might be wise to obey it out of the rational fear of what might happen to you if you didn't. Laws themselves don't keep people in line (except through intimidating slogans such as 'your duty,' 'law-abiding citizen,' etc.); it's the threat of violence — the guns behind those laws — that do the job. Therefore, it's perfectly rational to obey an immoral law if you feel your chances of getting caught are great enough, and the punishment duly severe, to warrant it."
— Robert J. Ringer, from Looking Out For #1 (pgs. 109-110)
"Punishments for capital crimes were almost never carried out. Such crimes and their punishments are on the books primarily as deterrents."
— Isaac Mozeson, Orthodox Judaic linguist
"The CIA in its pursuit of intelligence and influence, often courts the same powerful figures (DEA) pursued as criminals . . . and intelligence wins precedence over law enforcement. The highly connected tuxedo-clad criminal is left in place to provide intelligence to the United States — and drugs to its citizens."
— James Mills, from The Underground Empire
"Law is anything which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained."
— Aaron Burr
"What's really astounding about these brickheads who claim to be in touch with the original intent of the founders is (1) none of them seem to have read what the founders wrote, from Thomas Jefferson's essays to Jamie Madison's notes, and (2) you know damn well that if they had been alive at the time of the American Revolution, they all would've been Tories."
— Molly Ivins
"The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts — wets, drys, and hypocrites."
— Florence Sabin
"Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?"
— Anna Quindlen
"Petty laws breed great crimes."
— Ouida, from Wisdom, Wit and Pathos (1884)
"That is what is so bizarre about the American legal system. Where else in the world would stealing from a phone booth be considered more serious than polluting the earth?"
— Laura Nader
"The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society."
— Margaret Mead
"The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes."
— Lady Marguerite Blessington (1839)
"Privilege is the greatest enemy of right."
— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"For many persons, law appears to be black magic — an obscure domain that can be fathomed only by the professional initiated into its mysteries."
— Susan C. Ross, from The Rights of Women
"(Law) is one part justice to nine parts expediency. Who needs it."
— Lucille Kallen, from Introducing C. B. Greenfield
"A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much."
— Simone Weil, from The Need for Roots
"What does Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, 'First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there where of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns. . . . And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.'"
— John Lame Deer
"There (have) been . . . literally thousands of instances of injustice where minor co-conspirators in cases, the lowest level participants, have been given the sentences that Congress intended for the highest kingpins. . . . the taxpayers are paying a fortune for excessive punishment. You know there's nothing conservative about punishing people too much. That's an excess. And it's just a waste. . . . There don't have to be drugs. All there have to be are witnesses who say, 'I saw the drugs,' or, 'He said there were drugs.' That's all you need."
— Eric E. Sterling
"Criminals are likely to say and do almost anything to get what they want, especially when they want to get out of trouble with the law. This willingness to do anything includes not only truthfully spilling the beans on friends and relatives, but also lying, committing perjury, manufacturing evidence, soliciting others to corroborate their lies with more lies and double-crossing anyone with whom they come into contact . . ."
— Stephen Trott
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
— Thomas Jefferson
"Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many citizens, because of their respect for the law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights, due to ignorance."
— U.S. v. Minker 350 U.S. 179, 187
"If a drug-free America is such a good idea, why aren't members of the House of Representatives taking drug tests? Why isn't the U.S. Senate pissing into jars on C-Span?"
— P. J. O'Rourke, from Parliament of Whores (p. 119)
"This is the cynical truth about the War on Drugs. Officially-sanctioned factions within the National Security State allow drugs into the country, then domestic law enforcement agencies recruit informants to arrest the people who use them."
— Jim Redden, from Snitch Culture (p. 199)
"Is anybody else indignant that we have a legal system where you can blow your mother's head off with a shotgun, and then upon advice of your legal council get a neatly trimmed haircut and wear a cable-knit sweater and actually have that matter in a court of law?"
— Dennis Miller, from Comic Relief (p. 142)
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice."
— Francis Bacon, from Revenge
"Our great cornerstone of democracy, the rule of law, has become a source of power and influence, not liberty and justice. I resent the insidious manipulations by those entrusted with such authority, but even more, I despise our deliberate ignorance and passive acceptance of these shackles on the American spirit. We have abdicated our freedom, literally our democracy, to the rule makers. Our institutions now serve these masters."
— Catherine Crier, from The Case Against Lawyers (p. 5)
"Always take a jury trial. Your chances of a not guilty verdict are always greater, and there is always the chance of a hung jury or a reversal of the conviction in a higher court. . . . Your only real chance for an acquittal is to take a jury trial. . . . Court appointed attorneys could care less if you go to prison and are only there to make a show on the transcript to make the court records look all legal and official. . . . The system loves guys who sit in the courtroom nice and quiet while a mock-up trial is held right in their presence. . . . Your repeated objections and complaints about your attorney will open the doors for post-conviction relief. Stand up for yourself. You are probably the only one who will."
—Harold S, Long, from Making Crime Pay (p. 29, 34, 36)
"If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence."
— 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969
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
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
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)
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
"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)
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)
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
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
"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
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)
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
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
"When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
— anonymous
I misread this like so
When piracy is outlawed, only outlaws will have piracy. :lol:
"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.
Boom boom, b-bump the post.