courage

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundnce of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
~Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians .. . which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~George Orwell

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

torture

They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.
~ Richard Bourke, Australian attorney

[torture] presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.
~ Ariel Dorfman [from his book "Torture: A Collection"]

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
~ Octavio Paz quotes

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world.
~ James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
~ Bertrand Russell

The healthy man does not torture others."
~ Carl Gustav Jung

We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country.
~ George W. Bush [Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003]

Those who torture, or allow or recommend it, make the greatest liars.
~ Sebastian L. Muccilli, Embarrassed U.S. Citizen

war & peace

"I BELIEVE that God wants me to be president." George W. Bush
"I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany," Adolf Hitler - Berlin March, 1936

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands: George W. Bush

If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the lord God will always help us:
Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937

"freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." George W. Bush

"Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!" : Adolf Hitler - Nuremberg Sept. 13, 1936.

civil obedience

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem.

~ Howard Zinn, from Failure to Quit

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

heroic labor of peace

I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!
~ George W. Malone (1890-1961) U.S. Senator (Nevada) 1957 - Source: speaking before Congress

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
~Thomas Merton

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing.
~ Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.)