war propaganda

There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland.
~ George W. Bush(1946- ) 43rd US President: Source: In a speech on August 7, 2002

The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.
~ Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister in: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943

All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.
~ Jacques Ellul

the freedom to think and speak

We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men.
~ Gerald W. Johnson - (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958

And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
~James Russell Lowell: - (1819-1891) Poet and author Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848

This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
~ Simon Heffer Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.
~ Justice Hugo L. Black: (1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice Source: NY Times Company vs. Sullivan, 1964

freedom & laws

Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother's keeper.
~ Everett Dean Martin - (1880-1941) Source: Liberty, 1930

Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
~Somerset Maugham

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self- preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.
~Thomas Jefferson to John Colvin, 1810

freedom & government

These things I believe: That government should butt out. That freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant government will take it all away. That individual freedom demands individual responsibility. That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil. That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid. That political parties have become close to meaningless. That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away. That government should provide for the national defense and work to insure domestic tranquillity. That foreign trade should be fair rather than free. That once a year we should hang someone in government as an example to his fellows.

~Lyn Nofziger

a free press

Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
~ Hugo Black

freedom

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that `if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' it is a very serious consideration...that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event. ~ Samuel Adams, speech in Boston, 1771.   

 

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride. ~ William James   

 

The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people. ~ Frank Kent   

 

Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. ~ Thomas Paine

what is morally wrong can never be advantageous

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.
~ George W. Bush UN Speech Sept 2004

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. If today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.'
~ Abraham Lincoln

So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

american freedom

We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, known only as Americans.
~Martin Kelly

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
~Eugene Victor Debs

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
~Arthur Miller, playwright

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
~Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. - (1888-1965)

war, service & love

If they do it, it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom. ~ Anthony Quainton, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984 – Anthony Quainton – Source: Off the record response of the Ambassador to a group of concerned U.S. citizens when asked to explain the difference between U.S. government actions in Nicaragua and the violence it condemns as terrorism elsewhere in the world.

 The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~ Louis Simpson

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory but let me say war is all hell. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman. 

The greatest spiritual practise is to transform love into service. ~ Sai Baba

freedom, truth & courage

If “freedom” means purely and simply an uncontrolled power to make money in every possible way, regardless of consequences, then freedom becomes synonymous with ruthless, mindless and absolute exploitation… The psychological root of it is doubtless in the profound dehumanization and alienation of modern Western man, who has gradually come to mistake the artificial value of inert objects and abstractions (goods, money, property) for the power of life itself, and who is willing to place immediate profit above everything else. Money is more important, more alive than life, including the lfe and happiness of his closest and most intimate companions. This he can always justify by a legalistic ethic or a casuistical formula of some sort, but his formulas themselves betray him and eventually lose even the meaning which has been arbitrarily forced upon them.  ~Thomas Merton, re-excerpted & edited from an article that appeared in the Catholic World, December 2008; excerpted originally in the CW, June 1968

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- ) Russian writer, Soviet dissident, imprisoned 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Lit., 1970

honesty & freedom

thank God that at this hour I am dangerous to the war profiteers of this country who rob the people on the one hand, and rob and debase the government on the other; and then with their pockets and wallets stuffed with the filthy, bloodstained profits of war, wrap the sacred folds of the Stars and Stripes about them and [about] their blatant hypocrisy to the world.
~ Kate Richards O’Hare’s Address To the Court Proceedings on the Sentencing of Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare by Hon Martin J. Wade, 1 P. M., Friday, Dec 14, 1917.
http://pages.slu.edu/student/alamla/Doc13.html

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
~ Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi – (1828-1910) Russian writer; Source: On Life and Essays on Religion

Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success.
~ Paul Kurtz; Source: A Secular Humanist Declaration, in On The Barricades, 1989

This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
~ Simon Heffer; Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

When people who are honestly mistaken learn the truth, they will either cease being mistaken, or cease being honest! : Anonymous

america

The convention which framed the Constitution of the United States was composed of fifty-five members. A majority were lawyers-not one farmer, mechanic or laborer. Forty owned Revolutionary Scrip. Fourteen were land speculators. Twenty-four were money-lenders. Eleven were merchants. Fifteen were slave-holders. They made a Constitution to protect the rights of property and not the rights of man.  ~ Senator Richard Pettigrew – Triumphant Plutocracy (1922)

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless. ~Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864

This great and powerful force-the accumulated wealth of the United States-has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property. ~Senator Richard Pettigrew – Triumphant Plutocracy – Published, January 1, 1922.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. ~Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961) – Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958

freedom

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.
~ Robert Frost