Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Tyranny
& Oppression
- "You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded
by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police.Yet in their hearts
there is unspoken -- unspeakable! -- fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!
Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are
forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse -- a little tiny mouse! -- of thought
appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
Winston Churchill
- Heinrich Heine: "Where they have burned books, they will
end in burning human beings."
Nazis burn books in Berlin, 1933
- George Orwell, 1984: "We know that
no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a
means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard
a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship... The
first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has
power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan Freedom is
Slavery. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone
-- free -- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is
doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter
submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the
Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal."
- V.I. Lenin: "Freedom is a bourgeois
prejudice. We repudiate all morality which proceeds from supernatural ideas or
ideas which are outside the class conception. In our opinion, morality is entirely
subordinate to the interests of the class war. Everything is moral which is
necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting order and for uniting the
proletariat. Our morality consists solely in close discipline and conscious warfare
against the exploiters."
Jim Garrison, American Hero
|
|
JIM
GARRISON, District Attorney
of New Orleans, October, 1967: "A
number of the men who killed the President [Kennedy] were
former employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro
underground activities in the New Orleans area. The CIA knows
their identity. So do I." read
more |
- M.Y. Latsis senior official in the "All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission," better know as the "CHEKA," or Soviet political
police, quoted in Harrison Salisbury's Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions,
1905-1917: "The Extraordinary Commission is neither an
investigating commission nor a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home
front of a civil war. It does not judge the enemy: it strikes him... We are not carrying
out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.
We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet
power. The first question we ask is -- to what class does he belong, what are his origins,
upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This
is the essence of the Red Terror."
- Sergei Nechayev, Catechism of a Revolutionary:
"Hard towards himself, he must be hard towards others also. All the tender and
effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honor must be
stifled in him by a cold and
single-minded passion for the revolutionary cause. There exists for him only one delight,
one consolation, one reward and one gratification -- the success of the revolution. Night
and day he must have but one thought, one aim -- merciless destruction. In
cold-blooded and tireless pursuit of this aim, he must be prepared both to die himself and
to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the way of its achievement."
- Paul Johnson, Modern Times: "The
stages by which Lenin created [the] autocracy are worth describing in a little detail
because they became the grim model, in essentials, for so many other regimes in the six
decades which have followed. His aims were fourfold. First, to destroy
all opposition outside the party; second, to place all power, including government, in
party hands; third, to destroy all opposition within the party; fourth; to concentrate all
power in the party in himself and those he chose to associate with him.... Once
Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to 'exterminate'
(a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation or
parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. Might not
entire categories of people be classified as 'enemies' and condemned to imprisonment or
slaughter merely on account of the colour of their skin, or their racial origins or,
indeed, their nationality? There is no essential moral difference between class- warfare
and race-warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the modern
practise of genocide was born."
- Maximillien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, Address, National
Convention, 1794: "Terror is nought but prompt, severe,
inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a
particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to
the most pressing needs of the fatherland."
- Paul Johnson, The Spectator:
"Robespierre, with his cruel moral relativism, embodied the cardinal sin of all
revolution, the heartlessness of ideas."
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon:
"He [the revolutionary] is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him:
to become a slaughterer, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be
slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let
themselves by whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher
scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it -- an
abstract and geometric love."
- Paul Johnson, Modern Times: "The
French Revolution had opened an era of intense politicization. Perhaps the most
significant characteristic of the dawning modern world, and in this respect it was a true
child of Rousseau, was the tendency to relate everything to politics. In
Latin America, every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself 'a
liberator;' murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people."
- Prince Petr Kropotkin, Russian naturalist, author and soldier,
writing in 1909 on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution: "What we learn
from the study of the Great [French] Revolution is that it was the source of all the
present communist, anarchist and socialist conceptions."
- Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, De schismate libri
III, A.D. 1411: "When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is
released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of
every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For
all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed for the
common good."
- John Jay Chapman: "There was never a moment
in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent; it lay coiled under the table
during the Constitutional Convention. Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, if not
always on his tongue."
- Paul Craig Roberts, November 15, 2000: "Karl
Marx said it best: Audacity is 90 percent of the battle. Lenin showed that he had
learned this Marxist lesson well when he declared his tiny band 'the majority' and seized
power in Russia in the name of a non-existent proletariat."
- Alexander Stevens, Vice-President of the Confederate States of
America, 1861: "Our new government is founded upon the great truth that
the Negro is not equal to the White Man."
- Al Capone: "You can get a lot further with a
kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone."
- Lord
Acton: "Power
tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
- James Madison, 1788: "I believe there are
more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent
encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
- H.L. Mencken: "The whole aim of practical
politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
- Stalin: "He who votes decides nothing. He
who counts the votes decides everything."
- Plato: "A tyrant... is always stirring up some
war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
- George Will, Feb. 4, 2001: "A few years ago
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wrote to the Catholic archbishop of
Los Angeles concerning federal aid received by his St. Vincent de Paul Shelter for the
homeless. HUD asked whether it would be possible to rename it the Mr. Vincent de
Paul Shelter.''
- Confucius:
"The
end of the day is near when small men make long shadows."
- Denis Diderot: "Watch out for the fellow who talks
about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people
under your control."
- Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice, Dissenting, Olmstead
v. US, 277 US, 438 (1928): "Experience should teach us to be most on our
guard to protect liberty when the govenment's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom
are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest
dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without
understanding."
- James Fenimore Cooper: "It is a governing
principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its
proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore,
vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that
which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the
wrong."
- Napoleon Bonaparte: "If I were to give
liberty to the press, my power could not last three days."
- Brian Josephson, Times Higher Education Supplement,
12 Aug. 1994: "For the last six weeks, BBC2 TV has been running a series
called Heretic, detailing the responses of the scientific community to ideas
generally considered unacceptable by scientists, and the treatment given to those
advocating such ideas... In every case a similar story unfolded:
dismissal of the claims as being nonsense or impossible, generally without any serious
attempt to look at the evidence or the arguments; the non-materialisation of the honours,
promotions, invitations to give public lectures and so on that such individuals might have
been expected to receive given their past achievements; violent attacks by other
scientists; and, for some, demotion or withdrawal of research facilities."
- Vladimir I. Lenin: "One man with a gun can
control 100 without one ... Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms."
- Joseph Sobran: "The framers, as The
Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be
summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical."
- Henry St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries on the
Laws of England, 1768: "The right of self-defense is the first law
of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right
within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the
right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever,
prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
- Frederick Douglass: "Find
out just what the people will submit to and you will have found out 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 both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by
the endurance of those whom they oppress."
- James Monroe, First Inaugural Address, 1817: "It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they
degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty.
Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves
become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
- Joseph Sobran: "Tyranny
seldom announces itself. ...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A
whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical."
- Thomas Sowell: "Compassion is the
use of public funds to buy votes."
- Thomas Sowell: "Fair is one of the
most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is
'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power -- the government -- to
impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with fairness."
- Dean Koontz, The Face of Fear :
"Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race. They think they're it. They
believe they're more intelligent than the general run of mankind, better suited than the
little people are to manage the little people's lives. They think they have the one true
vision, the ability to solve all the moral dilemmas of the century. They prefer big
government because that is the first step to totalitarianism, toward unquestioned rule by
the elite. And of course they see themselves as the elite."
- Oliver Cromwell: command to Parliament to remove
the Mace, symbol of the King in Parliament: "Take away these baubles" (circa.
1654).
- Frederick Douglass: "In
thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old
woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star-crowned
mountains; but, my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the
infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong. When I remember the waters of her noblest
rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, that
her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters -- I am
filled with unutterable loathing."
- UPI, March 21, 2003: "A group of American
anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human-shield volunteers made it
across the border today... Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian
Church of the East, told UPI the trip 'had shocked me back
to reality.' Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera 'told me they would commit
suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished
to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam
was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and
his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as
people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their
screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.'"
- Matt Drudge, Sunday, March 23, 2003: "The
microphone reads 'IRAQ TV.' The screen shows supposed stock market arrows. The station is
Al-Jazeera, a mock of Ted Turner's CNN. And on Sunday satellite news turned nightmare as
Arab television aired footage of dead American soldiers, some sprawled in a room, and
interviews with five U.S. prisoners... The 6-minute video which beamed on Sunday showed
mankind at its worse -- and Iraqi fighters at their most animalistic...
One Iraqi man is captured smiling over dead Americans. Soldiers pants are pulled down, the
camera zooms in for a close up of bullet holes in heads as 'Al-Jazeera Exclusive' is
stamped on the screen."
- Judyth Vary Baker, mistress of Lee Harvey Oswald: Baker
was interviewed on a new episode of the BBC's The Men Who Killed Kennedy. She
asserts that LBJ was the key figure in the assassination plot; that Lee Oswald was, in
fact, a patriot, trying to thwart the killing, but unable to do so. She recounts her last
telephone conversation with the soon-to-be-slain Oswald a few days before Kennedy's death:
- Baker: "Just go... Get out -- it's too late to help
him."
-
- Oswald: "...I couldn't. They'd come after my family. They'd
find you. You'd all die... If I stay, that will be one less bullet aimed at Kennedy...
They're going to pin it one me anyway... I can still do something. I might be able to fire
a warning shot. That's what I intend to do... The Secret Service will react..."
- Charles A. Beard: "...one of the best ways to get yourself
a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases
which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
- Adolph Hitler, Edict of March 18, 1938: "The most foolish
mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms.
History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms
have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the
underdog is a sine qua non ["something essential," lit.
"without which not"] for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not
have any native militia or police."
- SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933: "All military type
firearms are to be handed in immediately ...The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every
respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does
not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless
keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."
- Bill Clinton, 3-22-94: "When we got organized as a country
and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical
amount of individual freedom to Americans ... And so a lot of people say there's too much
personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you
have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made
last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps
and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities."
- Seneca, letter to Lucilius: "A sword never kills anybody;
it is a tool in the killer's hand."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: "In political
speculations 'the tyranny of the majority' is now generally included among the evils
against which society requires to be on its guard. Society.... practices a social tyranny
more formidable than many kinds of political oppression,... penetrating much more deeply
into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against
the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the
tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose,
by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on
those who dissent from them."
- Harry Truman: "When even one American – who has done
nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all
Americans are in peril."
- Thomas Paine, Rights of Men, 1791: "Moderation in
temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always
a vice."
- Senator
and Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, 1964: "I would remind you
that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
- Juvenal, Roman rhetorician, c. 100 AD: "Who will watch the
watchers?"
- Prince Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism, 1884: "Freedom
of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of
the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged
class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are thrown
overboard."
- Woodrow Wilson, 1912: "Liberty has never come from
government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of
liberty is the history of resistance."
- Wendell Phillips, American abolitionist, 1848: "The powers
that have ruled long and learned to love ruling, will never give up that prerogative until
they must, till they see the certainty of overthrow and destruction if they do not."
|
New York Times Magazine , Jan. 25, 2004:
In the harrowing cover story, Peter Landesman investigates the global trade that
brings some 20,000 young girls and women into the United States each year as sex
slaves. Powerful organized crime networks kidnap girls from Eastern Europe and Latin
America, then ship them to Mexico, from where they
are smuggled across the porous U.S. border only after their
overseers, usually women because they "can more easily gain
the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them,"
beat and abuse them. Heartbreaking first-person accounts of
unthinkable depravity include stories of the importation of
toddlers, basements full of teenagers forced to perform
countless sex acts each day, and rendezvous points at
Disneyland... |
- Daniel Webster, 1820: "In the nature of things, those who
have no property and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need,
cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes
numerous, it becomes clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is
naturally ready, at times, for violence and revolution."
- Benjamin Disraeli: "Wherever is found what is called a
paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best
way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
- Elizabeth Fry, testimony from the Other Side: Fry speaks via Leslie Flint, direct-voice medium:
"... Here no one glories in being a leader – whereas in your world [in various
organizations] you do get this sort of glorification of the
individual [leader]; the first thing a person must learn
here, if they are to progress, is to lose this idea of self-importance. Those who
are really progressed on This Side never, never, give that impression -- because it is not
even in their nature to appear, or want to appear, important… I think that people
will only recognize [who] Christ really was, when they begin to discount a lot of untoward
creeds and dogmas, tacked on over the centuries by men who desired
power and position – I would say to you, above all things, if you want to
discover truth, avoid men of power and position, because … [they desire] power and
position because of their material perception of things..."
read more here
- Marvin Kalb, August, 2006: "Today,
the media appears to be broken down into camps where Fox prides itself on being
pro-America, pro-democracy, pro-freedom..."
- 8-27-06: John Adams, 1780: His leaking ship having made an
emergency stop at El Ferrol; crossing the Pyrenees on mule-back en route 1000 miles to
Paris; resting in a Spanish village; newly-appointed US Ambassador to France, John Adams,
records in his diary: "Nothing [in Spain] appeared rich but the
churches, nobody fat but the clergy... We saw the procession of the Bishop and of
all the Canons, in rich habits of silk, velvet, silver and gold. The Bishop ... spread out
his hands to the people ... [they] prostrated themselves on their knees as he passed. Our guide told us we must do the same, But I contented myself with a bow. The eagle eye of the Bishop did not
fail to observe an upright figure amidst the crowd of prostrate adorers: but no doubt
perceiving in my countenance and air, but especially in my dress, something that was not
Spanish, he concluded I was some travelling heretic and did not
think it worth while to exert his authority to bend my stiff knees."
- C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: "Of all tyrannies, a
tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better
to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for
they do so with the approval of their consciences."
- "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and
oppressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
-
- Thomas Jefferson,
- letter to Du Pont de Nemours,
- April 24, 1816
|
