What luck for rulers that men do not think. -- Adolf Hitler
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that...
I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel.
We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
-- Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about
the subject." -- Marcus Aurelius
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion.
Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they
consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move
against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."-- Aristotle
"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, at the Nuremberg Trials
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and
hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" -- H.L. Mencken
“In solitary confinement before his color TV, the citizen is made a part
of all that is happening on a planetary scale and impressed with his
powerlessness to act on precisely that planetary scale. Closed in upon
himself, the citizen is not the yeoman structure that creates the content
of the Republic, but simply a photograph in a collage enormously
larger than himself.”
—W.I. Thompson, Evil and the World Order, 1975
"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy
so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." - J. Edgar Hoover
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was
planned that way." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master
of all industry and all commerce ... and when you realise that the entire
system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful
men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and
depression originate." -- President James A. Garfield, just a few weeks
before he was assassinated on July 2nd, 1881.
"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 dare 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 opinion 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 street 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 the 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 of 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, former chief of staff, The New York Times, in a 1953 speech
before the New York Press Club
"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants,
it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government
that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear
subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished."
-- Michael Rivero