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"Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't
take an interest in you."
- Pericles, 430 BC
"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human
destiny is beyond human beings."
- John F. Kennedy
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis'. One brush stroke stands
for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger, but recognise the opportunity."
- John F. Kennedy, Speech in Indianapolis, April 12, 1959
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable."
"Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages
the tormentor, never the tormented."
- Elie Wiesel
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that
an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
- Martin Luther King
"Rise like lions after slumber,
in unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many, they are few."
- Shelley, 1817
"El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" ("A people, united, will never be defeated!")
"It is a sign of just how bad things are that even the modest proposal that everyone
on the planet gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk. One can imagine launching revolutions in the name of some
exorbitant utopian ideal, but to disrupt people's lives in such a spectacular way simply so that everyone may be guaranteed
a supply of fresh vegetables seems oddly pathetic. Only extremists could argue against it, just as only extremists could endorse
a global capitalist system which in 1992 is said to have paid Michael Jordan more in advertising Nike shoes than it paid to
the entire South-East Asian industry which produced them. Revolutionaries are those realist, moderate types who recognize
that to put such things to right would require a thoroughgoing transformation. Anyone who imagines otherwise is an idle utopianist."
- Terry Eagleton (`That dreadful Terry Eagleton' Green Left Weekly, August
6, 2003)
"Its not about being radical or conservative, it about doing what's
needed to
fix the problem."
- Vanessa Bowden
"Almost half the world's population, or three billion people, live on two dollars
(euros) a day or less and the gap between the world's richest and poorest has doubled in 40 years, the International Labour
Organisation said Sunday. Agence France Presse report, July 6."
- (Loose Cannons, in Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003
'Every Mexican baby is born owing $1,000 to a Northern bank.'
- Carlos Fuentes
"The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent
of the world's population."
- Bill Bryson.
"Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for
them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it
made to preserve all her children?"
- Gerard Winstanley
"There is a surplus of democracy in the world which is interfering with the free
movement of capital and investment."
- Renato Ruggiero, former director-general of the World Trade Organisation
"Selfishness, ambition, hatred, envy, rivalries — the worst instincts are
sown everywhere. Education is what the overwhelming majority of people on this planet mostly lack, and that is what turns
newborn babies into human beings.
"A minimal amount of political education for young people and adults would allow
them to understand the world's realities.
"Perhaps, of the evils brought about by developed capitalism, none is so nefarious
as the way of life and the consumerist habits, as unrealistic as they are unattainable, which advertising drums into the world
population 365 days a year, 24 hours a day at a cost of a trillion dollars. If this amount were spent on instilling values
and on rationally educating nations, the face of the Earth would change." - Fidel Castro
"Property is theft"
- Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Questions from A Worker Who Reads - by Bertolt Brecht:
"Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of
kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finnished
Did
the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium,
much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The
drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did
he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick
the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every
ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions."
"What treaty have the Sioux made with the white man that we have broken? Not one.
What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world;
the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where
are our lands? Who owns them?....What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my
skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?"
- Chief Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux (Native American) Leader and Shaman
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
- the U.S. President (played by Peter Sellers) in "Dr Strangelove"
"The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing
much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically and instead to accept
the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good."
- Robert Jensen
"If you want to improve, be prepared to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
"If you want to be free, get to know your real self.
It has no form, no appearance,
no root,
No basis, no abode, but is lively and buoyant.
It responds with versatile facility, but its function
Cannot
be located; when you look for it you become
Further from it. When you seek it
You turn away from it all the more."
-
Rinzai ( d.867?)
"You can learn more about a man in one hour of play than in an entire year of conversation"
- Plato
"it will be a great day
when
our schools
get all the money
they need
and
the air force
has to hold
a bake sale
to buy a
bomber"
- Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Scene from the film "Gandhi":
The British rulers of India call Gandhi, and several other leaders of the Indian
freedom movement, to a meeting.
One of the British Generals says to him, "You don't think we're just going to walk
out of India?"
He turns to the Viceroy and replies, "Yes. In the end you will walk out - because
100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate. And that is what we intend
to achieve - peaceful, non-violent, non-cooperation, till you, yourselves, see the wisdom of leaving, Your Excellency."
Reporter: "Mr Gandhi, what do you
think of Western civilization?"
Mr.Gandhi: "I think it would be
a good idea!"
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether
the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
- Mahatma Gandhi
"It may be long before the law of love will be recognised in international affairs.
The machineries of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such
thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God
on his side."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"We must be the change we wish to see."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes
tainted."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an
ineffable joy."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win. "
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and
it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."
- Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)
"It may be considered as a plain proof of the hollowness of any proposition, if power
be used to enforce instead of reason to persuade its admission. Government is never supported by fraud until it cannot be
supported by reason."
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform.
He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Man, whatever be his country, has the same rights in one place as another, the
rights of universal citizenship."
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The government of a country ought to be perfectly indifferent to every opinion.
Religious differences, the bloodiest and most rancorous of all, spring from partiality."
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless.
How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!"
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Sobriety of body and mind is necessary to those who would be free, because, without
sobriety a high sense of philanthropy cannot actuate the heart, nor cool and determined courage, execute its dictates."
- from "Declaration of Rights" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence,
pollutes whatever it touches; and obedience, bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, makes slaves of men, and of the human
frame, a mechanized automaton."
– from "Queen Mab", by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Dawkins on September 11:
"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting
evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed
faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence
in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes
normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited
tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism.
Let's now stop being so damned respectful!"
"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are
destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy." Proverbs 31:8-9
"Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because
they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because
they are separated."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story (1958)
"A riot is the language of the unheard."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Address given in Birmingham, Alabama (1963-12-31)
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them
that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining
my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so
— what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to
bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today — my own government."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Speech at Riverside Church in New York City (1967-04-04)
"There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would
praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese
children.' There is something wrong with that press."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia (1967-04-30)
"And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand
and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak not now of the soldiers of each
side, not of military government in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three
continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some
attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries. Now let me tell you the truth about it. They must see Americans
as strange liberators. Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945, after a combined
French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi
Minh. And this is a little known fact, these people declared themselves independent in 1945, they quoted our Declaration
of Independence in their document of freedom. And yet our government refused to recognize, President Truman said they were
not ready for independence. So we failed victim as a nation at that time of the same deadly arrogance that has poisoned the
international situation for all of these years. France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought eight
long, hard, brutal years, trying to reconquer Vietnam. You know who helped France? It was the United States of America, it
came to the point that we were meeting more than 80% of the war cost. And even when France started despairing of its reckless
action, we did not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement was reached, because France had been
defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even after that and even after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face the sad fact
that our government sought in a real sense to sabotage the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked
as if independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement. But instead the United States came and started
supporting a man named Diem, who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the world. He set out
to silence all opposition, people were brutally murdered merely because they raised their voices against the brutal policies
of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this
was presided over by United States influence, and then by increasing numbers of United States troops, who came to help quell
the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. And who are we supporting
in Vietnam today? It's a man by the name of General Ky, who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that
the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we're supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government, and the press generally,
won't tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia (1967-04-30)
"Cynicism is the social disease of our age. Cynicism is what passes for insight
when courage and vision are lacking."
- Kevin Danaher, cofounder, Global Exchange; author, Ten Reasons for Abolishing
the World Bank and the IMF
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find
out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact
amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them; and these
will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with
both. The limits of tyrants
are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass, taken from a letter the abolitionist
associate, 1849
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of
its many waters."
- Frederick Douglass
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original
virtue".
- Oscar Wilde
"more and more, people need to see what, historically, individuals have accomplished,
to set HUGE historical movements in motion, that started with one person, and then six people. Labour movements, consumer
movements, civil rights movements all of these movements throughout history started with a few people.
"The moment people believe that they dont count, and if a million people individually
believe that they dont count, then a million people dont count and certainly nobody believes that a million people dont count."
- Ralph Nader
"There's three types of people in the world:
those who don't know what happened,
those
who wonder what happened,
and people like us from the streets that MAKE things happen!"
- Bushwick Bill, Stranded on Death Row
"...It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction
have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands
mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
- Albert Einstein
"More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according
to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest
incarceration level in the world.
"It's the first time the US government has released estimates of the extent of
imprisonment, and the report's statistics have broad implications for everything from state fiscal crises to how other nations
view the American experience.
"If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would
have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in
17."
- from "US notches world's highest incarceration rate"
- The Christian Science Monitor August 18, 2003
"In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because
I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then
they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for
the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that
time no one was left to speak up."
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
"First they put away the dealers, keep our kids safe and off the street/Then they
put away the prostitutes, keep married men cloistered at home/Then they shooed away the bums, then they bashed and beat the
queers/Turned away asylum seekers, fed us suspicions and fears/We didn't raise our voice, we didn't make a fuss/It's funny
there was no-one left to notice when they came for us."
- NO/FX (Regaining unconsciousness )
"You can judge politicians by how they treat refugees; they do to them what they
would do to everyone else if they could get away with it."
- Ken Livingstone.
Karen Lee, a close family friend and an early Tupac publicist, recalls Tupac's
cursing during a lecture to the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement in New York in the early 1990s. 'There was a lady sitting next
to him, and I saw her lean over and say, "could you please change your language? It's offensive,"' Lee remembers thinking
that Tupac would make a spectacle of the exchange, Instead, she remembers, he 'made me very proud. He looked at her and said,
"I'm sorry if my language offends you, but it can't offend you any more than the world your generation has left me to deal
with."'
"I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your
expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other,
it's beautiful."
- Frederick E. Perl
"where was it I read about a man who's been sentenced to die, saying or thinking,
the hour before his death, that even if he had to live somewhere high up on a rock, and in such a tiny area that he could
only stand on it, with all around precipices, an ocean, an endless murk, endless solitude and endless storms--and had to stand
there, on those two feet of space, all his life, for a thousand years, eternity--that it would be better to live like that,than
to die so very soon! If only he could live, live, and live! Never mind what that life was like! As long as he could live!...What
truth there is in that! Lord, what truth!"
- Dostoevsky
"...all of us who are working in the field of human relationships and trying to
understand the basic orderliness of that field are engaged in the most crucial enterprise in today's world. If we are thoughtfully
trying to understand as administrators, teachers, educational counselors, vocational counselors, therapists, then we are working
on the problem which will determine the future of this planet. For it is not upon the physical sciences that the future will
depend, It is upon us who are trying to understand and deal with the interactions between human beings - who are trying to
create helping relationships."
- Carl Rogers (pp. 56-57, "On becoming a person", Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1961)
"Lula promised that his government would devote a large amount of resources to
the elimination of hunger and for land distribution. It was these issues, amongst others, which were key to more than 50 million
Brazilians voting Lula into office.
"In his inauguration speech, Lula launched his Zero Hunger program. Its goal is
to make sure every Brazilian can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. On January 3, at his first cabinet meeting, Lula postponed
buying 12 new planes for the air force and dedicated the US$760 million to the program. Lula plans to release the entire plan
for Zero Hunger by January 30.
"Agrarian reform is vital in a country which is second only to Paraguay in the
unequal distribution of land: 2000 landowners occupy 56 million hectares, while 16 million peasants have no land. Lula has
yet to announce definite land reform proposals."
- Federico Fuentes (Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003
"America enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity under President Clinton.
"But in less than three years under President Bush, we have seen a massive reversal
of the progress America made in the Clinton years. And we need your help to turn it round.
"* Job creation under Clinton has become record job loss under Bush. * Record budget
surpluses have become record deficits that put a burden on our families and future generations.
"Environmental protections have been rolled back, stripped away, and sold to the
highest bidder.
"Our hard-won civil liberties are disappearing before our very eyes.
"As president, Bush has taken eight years of peace and prosperity and wrecked it,
hurting real people in the process. He has misled the American people about his policies, from the reasons we went to war
in Iraq to the reasons he passed massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans."
- Terry McAuliffe, a U.S. Democrat
"Why of course the people don't want war... That is understood. 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
"What seems to me a very...terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies,
is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that's
more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or Lemay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were
it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it's in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant
people who should - who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem
more extreme and more violent"
- Noam Chomsky
"The most effective barrier to a White House decision to launch a war is the kind
of organized popular opposition that frightened the political-military leadership enough in 1968 that they were reluctant
to send more troops to Vietnam -- fearing, we learned from the Pentagon Papers, that they might need them for civil-disorder
control."
- Noam Chomsky
"[If the U.S.A. was truly democratic - i.e. if public opinion was served...] Terror
would be dealt with through diplomatic and economic measures, not force, in accord with the judgment of most specialists on
the topic but again in diametric opposition to present-day policy."
- Noam Chomsky
"When we point the camera at one thing, we are pointing it away from another. Thus,
one of the first things to look at when viewing the media is what you cannot see."
- Linda Ellerbee
"To reject the demonized image of Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to
idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid
the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia."
- Michael Parenti
"...if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War 2 [...] every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot - and this current administration is no
exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they
go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because
this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries
and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive - and that's not a system that changes every four years, it's a system
that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation after generation.... Wake up."
- Zack de la Rocha, paraphrasing Noam Chomsky
"If I were a woman who had almost nothing in my life except the hopes I placed in
my children, I would find it very painful if a woman who had everything roared up to me in her gas-guzzler (as, regrettably,
they do) to tell me I should have no more than one child for the sake of the planet."
- Mark Edwards <http://live.newint.org/issue235/garbage.htm>
"Only the educated are free."
- Jose Marti
"To teach is to teach to think. To assign things to be recited from memory is to
train parrots… Teach the children to ask questions, so that, asking the Why behind what you tell them to do, they become
accustomed to obeying Reason: not authority, like the limited, nor custom, like the foolish."
- Simon Rodriguez, tutor to Simon Bolivar (the liberator of Latin America)
"The United States of North America is destined by providence to plague the people
of the Americas with hunger and misery in the name of freedom."
- Simon Bolivar, 1825
"The inexperienced soldier thinks everything lost when he is once defeated because
he hasn’t yet learned from experience that courage, ability and perseverance correct bad luck."
– Simon Bolívar, Cartagena Manifesto
"In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure
of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years
of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour all these aesthetic
expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and
of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers,
counsellors and bewilderers separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman
and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise
him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of
pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them
into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into
the mind of the native."
- From THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (p.29) by Frantz Fanon
"I want Dr. King to know that I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult. I
really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be
more willing to hear Dr. King."
- Malcolm X
"You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and
call it progress."
- Malcolm X
"Concerning non-violence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when
he is the constant victim of brutal attacks."
- Malcolm X
"The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every
oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti,...Cuba — yes, Cuba too."
- Malcolm X, June 10, 1964
"A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything."
- Malcolm X
"The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual
without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted
by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true
— about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller,
and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and
it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."
- Che
"No soy un libertador. Los libertadores no existen. Son los pueblos quienes se liberan
a si mismos" ("I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people will liberate themselves.")
- Che
"...si usted es capaz de temblar de indignacion cada vez que se comete una injusticia
en el mundo, somos compańeros, que es más importante."
("If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.")
- Che
"Not a single position, not a single weapon, not a single secret, should be given
up to the class enemy, under penalty of losing all."
- Che Guevara in 'Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,' in Cuba Socialista, of September,
1963
"Long ago, Engels, in the preface to the third edition of The Civil War in France,
remarked:
'The workers were armed after every revolution; . . therefore the disarming of
the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois at the helm of the state.'
"Hence after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the
defeat of the workers." (Quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution)"
- Che Guevara in 'Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,' in Cuba Socialista, of September,
1963
"...we must not allow the word democracy, used in an apologetic manner to represent
the dictatorship of the exploiting classes, to lose its deeper meaning and acquire the meaning of giving the people certain
liberties, more or less good.
"To struggle only to restore a certain degree of bourgeois legality, without at
the same time raising the question of revolutionary power, is to struggle for the return of a certain dictatorial order established
by the dominant social classes; it is only a struggle for a lighter ball to be fixed to the convict's chains."
- Che Guevara in 'Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,' in Cuba Socialista, of September,
1963
"War is always a struggle in which each contender tries to annihilate the other.
Besides using force, they will have recourse to all possible tricks and stratagems in order to achieve the goal. Military
strategy and tactics are a representation by analysis of the objectives of the groups and of the means of achieving these
objectives. These means contemplate taking advantage of all the weak points of the enemy."
- Che Guevara (Guerrilla Warfare - Latin American Silhouettes Series)
"Silence is argument carried out by other means."
- Che
"Companiero! Are you totally ready to pulverise the enemies of the people?"
- Comandante Dimas of the FMLN
"Drosam pieder pasaule" (The world belongs to the brave)
- Latvian proverb
"il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace"
- ("we must dare, and again dare, and forever dare.")
"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorius triumphs, even though checkered
by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight
that knows not victory nor defeat."
- Teddy Roosevelt
"There's none so blind as those who will not see."
- unknown
"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients
in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
- Thomas A. Edison
"Business as usual is not an option for the poor, the jobless, and the oppressed.
We keep on chanting Sandino vive, la lucha sigue! El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! (Sandino lives, the struggle
goes on! The people united will never be defeated!)"
- Phil Cournoyer
"The ruling class takes advantage of our weakpoints. I suggest we take advantage
of theirs. We, the common people of the world, can win. We are the majority."
- Simon A. Wood
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