These are some of my favorties. In no particular order....
Each civilization has its own methods of suicide - Harold Innis
In an absolutism the autocrat is visible and tangible.
The real despotism of republican institutions is far
deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the
popular delusion of self-government and independence.
That is the source of democratic tyranny, and as such
it cannot be reached with a bullet. In modern
capitalism, economic exploitation rather than
political oppression is the real enemy of the people.
Politics is but its handmaid.
-Alexander Berkman
From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast has become its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, expoits itslef and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself.
- Fredy Perlman (Against His-story, Against Leviathan!)
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
-Benjamin Harrison
Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge- Albert Einstein
Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom? - Raoul Vaneigem, The West
"The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." - George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia
"We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require"
- British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill's policy towards Iraq, 1913
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."-Albert Einstein
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
-Woodrow Wilson [U.S. President]
"in the long run, we are all dead" -John Maynard Keynes
"Adam Smith said the best outcome for the group comes from everyone trying to do what's best for himself. He was wrong. The best outcome comes from everyone trying to do what's best for himself and the group."- John Nash/Russ Crow (A Beautiful Mind--the film)
"Labor wants also pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful - to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister"- Thorstein Veblen (American Economist, 1857-1929)
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
-Benjamin Harrison
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking."
Alfred Korzybski-
"If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable."
Murray Bookchin
Whoever puts a hand on me to govern me is an usurper and
a tyrant; I declare him my enemy."
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" - Romain Rolland/Popularized by Gramsci (?)
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books. - Walt Whitman
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.-Albert Einstein
If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill;
Fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still - Joe Hill
"When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,
has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield,
That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves,
And call the sad work glory..."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882)
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. -Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
Mourn not the dead
that in the cool earth lie...
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
the cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish
and its wrong and dare not speak- Ralph Chaplin
The ultimate bitterness is this: to have consciousness of much; but control over nothing."-Herodotus