Quotes

Quotes from famous historical figures can give us perspective, inspire us, educate us, and rouse us to action. So take a look at the following quotes, and see if they apply to our situation today...

War and Terror

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector." - Plato

"If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within."
- President James Madison

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-James Madison

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
- James Madison

"Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people."
- Richard Perle

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
- General Douglas Macarthur, 1957

"As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Carter

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
- Adolf Hitler

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or 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 to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

"I know two types of law because I know two types of men, those who are with us and those who are against us."
- Hermann Goering, 1936

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".
- Josef Stalin

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not traitor, he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."
- Cicero, 42 B.C.

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. "
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, President and 5-Star General

"In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political
aims?"
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire

"The first casualty of war is truth."
- Aeschylus, Greek writer, Hiram Johnson, Republican Senator, and others (paraphrased)

"Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans."
- Hermann Hesse

"War is the public agenda for the hidden desires of a private elite"
- Bodazey

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
- J. Edgar Hoover

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy

"War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies."
- Ernest Becker

"The American people don't read."
- Former CIA director Allen Dulles, speaking about how the American people would respond to the inconsistencies in the Warren Commission report on the JFK assasination

"Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."
- Albert Einstein

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it"
- Albert Einstein

"No matter how noble the objective of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion it is an evil government"
- Eric Hoffer

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
- H.L. Mencken

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural

"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."
-Thomas Jefferson, American Declaration of Independence

"Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."
- Henry Kissinger

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation."
- George W. Bush

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier...just as long as I'm the dictator"
- George W. Bush

"There ought to be limits to freedom"
- George W. Bush

"The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief."
- Aristotle

The Battle of Truth Versus Disinformation

"The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. Especially if it is repeated over and over."
- Adolph Hitler

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth"
- Adolph Hitler

"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
- Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Goebbels

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
- Goebbels

"There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear."
- Ted Turner

"We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated....
"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain."
- Dr. Jose Delgado (U.S. government mind-control experimenter associated with the "MKULTRA" program who demonstrated a radio controlled bull on CNN in 1985)

"In March 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press ...They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
- U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; To lie outright; To pervert; To vilify; To fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
- John Swinton, the former chief of staff of the New York Times, called by his peers, "The Dean of his profession," in a speech at the New York Press Club.

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
– Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

"The mass media is itself part of the same power structure that plunders the planet and inflicts human rights abuses on a massive scale"
– David Cromwell

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic."
- Dresden James

"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool"
- Plato

"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people." ... "Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals"
– Noam Chomsky

"As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege"
– Noam Chomsky

"Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining."
– Benjamin Barber

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
– J. K. Galbraith

"The world's press is losing its ability to keep power in check"
– Frank Vogl

"The New York Times is for us what Pravda was for the Soviets"
– Gore Vidal

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad."
- Aldous Huxley

Corruption

"There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."
- Senator Daniel K. Inouye

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
- Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

"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 processes. We should take nothing for granted."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
- Theodore Roosevelt

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. 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 better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
- Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913)

"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks."
- John C. Calhoun, Vice President of the United States

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies...The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the Government, to whom it properly belongs."
- Thomas Jefferson

"If the people only understood the rank injustice of our Money and Banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
- Andrew Jackson

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."
- James Madison

"In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
- Andrew Jackson

"I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion -- the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government -- would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities."
- Martin Van Buren, Eighth President of the United States

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
- Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President of the United States

"I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party.… Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly." Teddy Roosevelt added, "The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign -- that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole -- some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct."
- Theodore Roosevelt

"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. ...And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man....
- Franklin Roosevelt

"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness."
- Franklin Roosevelt

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
- Franklin Roosevelt

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
- James A. Garfield

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
- Amschel Mayer Rothschild 1838

"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
- James Paul Warburg

"The drive . . . is to create a one world government ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope . . . ."
- Congressman Larry P. McDonald, 1976

"That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich"
- John Loftus, widely-respected authority on terrorism and security

Voting

"The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do."
- Joseph Stalin

"The authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides."
- Goebbels

"The election is over. We won." (Reporter's voice - "How do you know that?") "It's all over, but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
- Congressman Peter King (R-NY), before the 2004 election (watch the video; if you can't hear it, watch this version)

Israeli Influence on the U.S.

"Israel controls the United States Senate."
- Sen. William Fulbright

"I want to tell you something very clear, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, [Israel] control[s] America, and the Americans know it."
- Ariel Sharon to Shimon Peres, October 3rd, 2001, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

"To wage war by way of deception"
- Official Motto of Israel's Mossad secret service

Liberty and Justice

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."
- Saint Augustine

"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it."
- Woodrow Wilson

"Those who wish to be ignorant and free, believe in something that never was and never shall be."
- Thomas Jefferson

"Those who are willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
- Benjamin Franklin

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent"
- Thomas Jefferson

"Powerlessness and silence go together. We...should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used."
– Margaret Atwood

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
– Teddy Roosevelt

"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."
– Teddy Roosevelt

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."
– Mark Twain

“The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.”
- Mark Twain

"When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure"
– Rudolf Bahro

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
– G.K. Chesterton

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error"
– United States Supreme Court decision in American Communications Association v. Douds

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
- George Washington

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism."
-Thomas Jefferson

"To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men."
- Abraham Lincoln

"What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that its people preserve the spirit of resistance."
- Thomas Jefferson

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to prevail in the world is for enough good men to do nothing."
- Edmund Burke, British statesman

"Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it."
- Will Durant

"Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Ben Franklin

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"A Republic, if you can keep it."
- Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the Constitutional Convention, in response to the question "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
- Thomas Jefferson

"At this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that . . . liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing"
-Starhawk

"Activism is the rent we pay for living on the planet"
- Alice Walker.

"In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action"
- Dag Hammarskjöld, former secretary-general of the United Nations.

Good News

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- Goethe

"Within each of us is a hidden store of energy. Energy we can release to compete in the marathon of life. Within each of us is a hidden store of courage. Courage to give us the strength to face any challenge Within each of us is a hidden storeof determination. Determination to keep us in the race when all seems lost."
- Roger Dawson

"My greatest wealth is the deep stillness in which I strive and grow and win what the world cannot take from me with fire or sword"
- Goethe

"There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress."
- Howard Zinn, historian

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
- Robert F . Kennedy

"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority."
- Soren Kierkegaard

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
- Hellen Keller

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."
- Seneca, Native American

"Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway."
- John Wayne

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer."
- George Patton

"Fear is a reaction; courage is a decision."
-Anonymous

"Courage is contagious."
- Various

"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Nelson Mandela

“Your playing small doesn't serve the world . . . It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
- Attributed to Nelson Mandela (originally written by Marianne Williamson)

"We remember our heroes most for perseverance during dark times."
-Anonymous

"The problems we face today cannot be solved by the minds that created them"
- Albert Einstein

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea"
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)"

"We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history."
- Sonia Johnson

"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
- Samuel Adams

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Note: About 99% of these quotes have been verified for accuracy. Some of them cannot be verified for sure.