reAct   Quotes

"Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."
- Angela Davis.

"The outcome of today's struggles does not matter. It does not matter in the final count that one or two movements were temporarily defeated because what is definite is the decision to struggle which matures every day, the consciousness of the need for revolutionary change, and the certainty that it is possible."
--Ernesto Che Guevara

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, wether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
--Dwight Eisenhower

"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time...I don't believe there is such thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
--Pres. Eisenhower, 1953 upon being presented with plans to wage preventive war to disarm Stalin's Soviet Union

"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering conditions."
--Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."
--a quote from the president at the end to Bob Woodward's book, "Bush at War"
International Herald Tribune 2003-04-08 Tue


"...perhaps, the best organized dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
--Jeremy Hardy, the Guardian (UK)

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
--Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin
Historical Review of Pennsylvania 1759


"Fascism: a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
--American Heritage Dictionary
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983


"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
--Gore Vidal
novelist and critic


"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."
--Howard Zinn
historian and author


"...As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their "sweetheart deals," to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate Globalization-or shall we call it by its name?-Imperialism-needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice."
--Arundhati Roy

"...We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair-and their allies-for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are. We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass. When George Bush says "you're either with us, or you are with the terrorists" we can say "No thank you." We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs. Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness-and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
--Arundhati Roy

"What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?"
--Charles Higham, researcher
about U.S.-Nazi collaboration during WWII


"Of course the people don't want war... That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander
at the Nuremberg trials, 1946 from "Nuremberg Diary" by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947)


"People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the richer and stronger to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have."
--Theodore Adorno

"All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they DIE. That's economics in a nutshell..."
--Noam Chomsky

"Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 7, 1957


"Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is - the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom."
--Noam Chomsky

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
---Albert Einstein

"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
---Martin Luther King, Jr.

"My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opoortunities as the strongest. . .no country in the world today show any but patronizing regard for the weak. . . Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism. . true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village."
---Gandhi.

"Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit."
---Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment...People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway strangers DO NOT become President of the United States, or Vice President, or Secretary of State, or National Security Adviser or Secretary of the Treasury. Nor do they want to!"
---William Blum.
Rogue State


"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."
--- Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
--- William Blum

"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
--- Neil Postman

"Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics."
--- George Orwell
Observer, 9 April 1944


"....Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world...."
--- Rachel Corrie
2/27/03


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

"[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy."
--- Michael Parenti

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the 'haves' refuse to share with the 'have-nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
-General David Sharp
[Former United States Marine Commandant 1966]


"We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
["A Time to Break the Silence" speech given at Riverside Church New York City April 4, 1967]


"Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world - particularly the Third World - since the late 1940s, a fact ignored by the elite-owned media."
-Ralph McGehee
[Former CIA analyst & Author]
CIABASE; The Crisis of Democracy Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA


"The U.S.A. has supplied arms, security equipment and training to governments and armed groups that have committed torture, political killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the world."
-Amnesty International
["United States of America - Rights for All" October 1998]


"The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad."
- CIA officer testifying to U.S. Senate hearing, after bloody CIA aided Ba'th Party coup overthrew Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Kassem, 1963


2006-03-06 Mon 22:41ct