fear

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~ H.L. Mencken 1880-1956 American journalist, satarist, social critic, anti-establishment figure, considered by scholars as one of America's greatest writers, known as 'The Sage of Baltimore.'

justice & truth

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
~ Kahlil Gibran

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

believing what is true

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.
~ Buddha - Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta

seeing the truth

To preserve their [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
~ Thomas Jefferson

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. ~ William Blake

The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.
~ Mahatma Gandhi: Indian leader, 1869-1948

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
~ Hermann Hesse, German poet and novelist.

truth & integrity

It is easier to find a score of men and women wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition to stand up for it. ~ A. A. Hodge

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself. ~ Jane Addams

The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us. ~Butler Shaffer

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

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