Miscellaneous Quotes

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
William Casey, CIA Director from first staff meeting, 1981

"If I wanted to create a surveillance society, I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so that the next generation could not comprehend a world without surveillance."
Andre Bacard, author of 'The Computer Privacy Handbook'

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
John F. Kennedy

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
John F. Kennedy

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

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
John F. Kennedy

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill

A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.
Former Senator Barry Goldwater

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.
Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
Woodrow Wilson

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx

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

If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?
Paul Harvey

"Diet, Injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible."
Bertrand Russell, "The Imact of Science on Society"

"And I actually think the world will be much better when there's only 10 or 20 percent of us left."
Dr. Eric Pianka, University of Texas Biologist

China was able to turn the corner and become a leading world super power because they have a police state and they are able to force people to stop reproducing.
Dr. Eric Pianka, University of Texas Biologist

"A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95 percent decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Ted Turner

I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. .. We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected.
John Danforth, Republican senator from Missouri, reported in the Arizona Republic of April 21, 1992

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their childen into philosophers or men of learning, or of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set task before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, and on the farm."
John D. Rockefeller's "Occasional Letter No.1" detailing plans to mold the people, reduce national intelligence to the lowest common denominator, destroy parental influence, traditional and customs, and eliminate science and real learning, "in order to perfect human nature".

"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to the American Defense Society in 1919

"3 1/2 million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We must gaurd against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process.
Dwight Eisenhower

Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.
Ralph Nader

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson

"History is written by the winners."
Napoleon

"Now that we can control the weather, create earthquakes and tidal waves and use it as a weapon of war we do not need a treaty."
Senator Claiborne Pell, Senate Intelligence Committe member, commenting on a USA/USSR treaty signed in 1978

Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
Bertrand Russell

"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)

"If you examined the 16th amendment carefully, you would find that a sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment."
U.S. District Court Judge James C. Fox 2003

"Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
Henry Kissinger