"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 today."
--U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

"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."
--U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, March 9, 2006

"I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been."
--Billie Holiday

"Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
--James Bovard

"It is this calculated use of deception and falsehood that we should fear, more even than the wrongheaded policy."
--Charles Utwater [Source] (alt)

"The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time."
--Albert Einstein

" "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The American public cannot depend on our much overrated system of "checks and balances" to prevent a needless and costly war. Congress and the Supreme Court have proved to be no check for an executive branch hell-bent on combat. Only an aroused citizenry can provide the check on unbridled power that a democracy requires."
--Howard Zinn [Source]

"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either."
--Edward Zehr

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
-- George Jean Nathan

"Bush Sr. jumped over the line and we had to whack him."
-- Grover G. Norquist, 25 Jan. 2004, New York Times

"We took an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president or secretary of defense."
-- Navy Rear Admiral Don Guter [Source]

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-- Albert Einstein

"If you depend on the news for your worldview, friends, you're in a sad place."
-- Garrison Keillor 9 Nov.'02 [Source]

"There's a great deal of 'hype' in that 'hyperpower'."
-- Tom Engelhardt 31 Oct.'03 [Source]

"And through the lips of raygun came the words, "This dirtying of the air, it comes from the trees! I know this, as it comes from a great study." And many did wail that it could not be, and brought they many studies, but yey, their studies were lacking. For no other study carried the word of the Profit."
-- Beltaine 23 Oct.'03 [Source]

"Authentic Democracy, increasingly, cannot tolerate the impositions of Washington or Wall Street."
-- Al Giordano and Luis G¢mez 18 Oct.'03 [Source]

"a policy built on deception will always require further deception to sustain itself"
-- Jay Bookman, 16 Oct.'03 [Source]

"the Bush administration thought it could, with impunity, invent a bunch of phony intelligence ('hooey' in CIA-speak), get caught, and blame it on the CIA."
-- Ben Tripp, 11 Oct.'03 [Source]

"It is an inescapable truth that capital, by virtue of its control over strategic resources, is very much in the position to shape a government's agenda, no matter who forms the government, and remains so, so long as it presides over a country's wealth and assets and so long as the state, tethered to the corporate world through innumerable connections, remains in place."
-- Stephen Gowans, 5 Oct.'03 [Source]

"Terrorism will only be defeated if we act to solve the political disputes and long-standing conflicts which generate support for it. If we do not, we shall find ourselves acting as a recruiting sergeant for the very terrorists we seek to suppress."
--U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Sept. 2003 at the start of a day-long international conference on terrorism. [Source]

"What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy."
-- Edward Said [Source]

"If retaliation worked, Israelis would be the world's most secure people."
-- Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. [Source]

"There is Tranquility in Ignorance, but Servitude is its Partner."

The original Greek word "idiotes" referred to people who were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.
-- Jim Hightower [Source]

"You know, there are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics of love and the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation, sharing and inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual to a life neither suppressed nor exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its full potential--a life for its own sake and so that we may all benefit by the gift of that life. Fear and the politics of fear is about narrow ideologies that separate us, militarize us, imprison us, exploit us, control us, overcharge us, demean us, bury us alive in debt and anxiety and then bury us dead in cancers and wars."
-- "Granny D" Haddock, 16 August 2003 [Source]

"Men will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe absurdities."
-- Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Paris, France,1764 [Source]

"Stop the crazy son-of-a-Bush"
-- unknown

"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place."
-- reputedly Jonathan Swift

"It is better to communicate good information than to offer misinformation in the name of good communication."
-- Alistair B. Fraser [source]

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out."
-- Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530) [source]

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
-- U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, 12 Feb. 2003 briefing

G.W.Bush "is smart enough to know that he's not particularly smart so he surrounds himself with smart people in much the same way a hole surrounds itself with a doughnut."
-- Dennis Miller [source]

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Under the Bush administration, corporate polluters have been allowed to write the laws."
-- League of Conservation Voters [source] 24 Jun'03

"recession has become a permanent way of life for much of rural America"
-- John Edwards [source] 23 May'03

"An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead."
-- Nancy Mitford

"A president who has allowed the loss of 2.5 million jobs should be the next worker to get pink-slipped."
-- John Kerry, 19 June 2003

"The Islamic tradition values order more than law, authority more than liberty, obedience more than challenge, solidarity more than freedom, harmony more than dissent, status quo more than change, the group more than the individual."
-- Roedad Khan, "Dawn"  Opinion Page, 15 June 2003

"The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary."
-- George Orwell, 1984

"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department."
-- James Madison [Source]