Sonali's Subversive Thoughts for the Day:
Click here for 2003 Archived Subversive Thoughts
Click here for 2004 Archived Subversive Thoughts
November 15, 2005
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” - Florynce R. Kennedy, 1973
November 14, 2005
A quote from “All Alone in the World,” by Nell Bernstien, “We are able to lock people up in the numbers that we do only so long as we see them as useless – extraneous individuals whom our society simply does not need. But the majority of prisoners are mothers and fathers: they are needed in the most fundamental way. The parent-child bond, beyond its private importance to the individuals who share it, is a social asset that must be valued and preserved.”
November 11, 2005
From Mark Ames book, “Going Postal,”
“The whole country is infested with this meanness and coldness, and no one is allowed to admit it. Only the crazy ones sense that it is wrong--that what is “normal” is not all that normal--and some of them, adults and kids alike, fight back with everything they have.”
November 10, 2005
Mohammed Abdulla, executive director of the Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Fallujah said: "The Americans have committed a very big massacre to the people of Fallujah. The crime of Fallujah is the greatest crime ever…This will remain as a black spot in American history forever. Whatever the American people will do, even if they get rid of those liars who are in their government, they will need a long time for people to forget what they have done in Iraq and in Fallujah in order for us to deal with them as a civilized people who have humanity."
November 9, 2005
Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature – Orson Wells
November 8, 2005
"Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." - Chief Seattle
November 7, 2005
If you are lucky enough to have the right to vote, please do exercise it. If Proposition 73 passes, it will be the beginning of the end of reproductive justice in California.
November 4, 2005
A poem from Luis Rodriguez’s new collection, “My Nature is Hunger” entitled “Believe me when I say,” Water is the skin of the Earth/ Trains are the arteries with corpuscles of people/ A sigh is an ancestor praying/ Woman’s body is suspended over the land/ Tears come from clouds in your head/ Writing a poem is like fathering a river/ Waiting is the art of desire/ Something about a city makes you want to kill/ Fetuses scribble on the walls of wombs.
November 3, 2005
From the national bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen once wrote; "Citizens who are their own historians, willing to identify lies and distortions and able to use sources to determine what really went on in the past, become a formidable force for democracy."
November 2, 2005
Referring to the Pakistan earthquake, Tariq Ali said in an interview, “Help is needed for the poor of this country. The rich always are fairly unaffected. But even when they are, they are the ones, like in New Orleans, who manage to survive and get away. It is the poor who suffer, and it is the poor who need the help of the world, and they need help, not just with food and blankets, but we also need doctors here, and we need them urgently.” - Tariq Ali
November 1, 2005
“I was sure that I was being imprisoned in large part because I had fought so hard to ensure the detainees at Guantánamo were given the things they needed to practice their religion, yet here I was being denied those things myself.'' – James Yee, from his book, “For God And Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.”
October 31, 2005
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so.” - Voltaire
October 27, 2005
When asked by the magazine "El Navegante", what "autonomy" means for the indigenous population, the Zapatistas of the Ocosingo region replied, "In its very basic form, autonomy consists in recapturing and restoring the culture and self-determination taken away over the last 504 years. That is, in terms of territory, that the people that live in a region administer their own economy, their own politics, their own culture and their own resources"
October 26, 2005
“The anti-apartheid movement did not begin from the government. It started from the civil society in Ireland with some very brave sales women on the floor who refused to the bidding of the South Africans and handle their goods. We have to start somewhere.” – Ilan Pappe
October 25, 2005
Pope John Paul the second, whatever your opinion of him, once said, “In reality, the Holy Land doesn't need walls, but bridges."
October 24, 2005
“We are the ones responsible to determine whether the war that our marines, soldiers and airmen are fighting in is worth the cause.” – Scott Ritter
October 21, 2005
“Truth will rise above falsehood as oil above water.” Miguel de Cervantes
October 20, 2005
“We have just begun to tap our potential for transformation and liberation. This is not the end of history, but another beginning.” ~ Vandana Shiva
October 19, 2005
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. And if we do act, however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” – Howard Zinn.
October 17, 2005
A thirteen year old student who saw the documentary Arlington West said, “Only one Congressman has a child in the military? That SUCKS!”
October 14, 2005
“RFID will have a pervasive impact on every aspect of civilization, much the same way the printing press, the industrial revolution and the Internet and personal computers have transformed society…RFID is a big deal. Its impact will be pervasive, personal and profound. It will be the biggest deal since Edison gave us the light bulb.” – Rick Duris, Frontline Solutions Magazine, December 2003.
“Technology…is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” – C.P. Snow, New York Times, 1971
October 13, 2005
“Now we got weapons/ Of the chemical dust/ If fire them we're forced to/ Then fire them we must/ One push of the button/ And a shot the world wide/ And you never ask questions/ When God's on your side.” - Lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side”
October 12, 2005
Jesse Jackson, speaking at an event with Venezuelan Hugo Chavez in New York, once said:
"[The Venezuelan] government's priorities are to invest in its people. They subsidize oil, gas, health care and education and that's civil. We cannot subsidize our oil and education because we are investing in tax cuts for the wealthy and a war that does not make sense in Iraq. We need new values, we need to go another way."
October 11, 2005
“To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, whether working people, people of color, or women – once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress.”- An excerpt from the introduction to “Voices of a People’s History” by Howard Zinn
October 10, 2005
“To dignify Columbus and his legacy with parades, holidays and other celebrations is repugnant. As the original peoples of this land, we cannot, and we will not, tolerate social and political festivities that celebrate our genocide. We are committed to the active, open, and public rejection of disrespect and racism in its various forms - including Columbus Day and Columbus Day parades.” – An open letter from the American Indian Movement of Colorado.
October 7, 2005
“Abdul Rasul Sayyaf inspires violence in others: Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine terrorist organization was named for him… The CIA’s intelligence was so flawed that it wrongly said that the Taliban brough bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and that the Taliban’s leader Mullah Mohammed Omar knew bin Laden before he came to Afghanistan in 1996. He didn’t. It was Abdul Sayyaf, America’s ally, who had welcomed bin Laden.” – From the Prologue of “I is for Infidel” by Kathy Gannon.
October 6, 2005
Congressman John Lewis once said. “How long will it be before America will be an integrated nation, a ‘beloved community’ at last? How long will it be before our politicians and our other leaders even dare to speak of this again? I don’t think that either of us knows the answer, but I do know it will take another struggle first. Of that, I’m very sure.”
October 5, 2005
Saint Augustine said "Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."
October 4, 2005
I AIN'T A GONNA KILL NOBODY
"I took a bath this morning in six war speeches, and a sprinkle of peace. Looks like ever body is declaring war against the forces of force. That's what you get for building up a big war machine. … I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns." -from WOODY SEZ, a collection of articles written by Woody for the PEOPLE'S WORLD
October 3, 2005
“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” – Nietzsche.
September 30, 2005
Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician.
September 29, 2005
In his book, War Made Easy, Norman Solomon writes: “When the huge news outlets swing behind warfare, the dissent propelled by conscience is not deemed to be very newsworthy. The mass media are filled with bright lights and sizzle, with high production values and lower human values, boosting the war effort. And for many Americans, the gap between what they believe and what’s on their TV sets is the distance between their truer selves and their fearful passivity.”
September 28, 2005
“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” ~Donald Rumsfeld
September 27, 2005
A quote by Tim Weiss who said, “Few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition as if somehow we invented the concepts. We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity; housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We ignore the fact that at almost every turn our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of others. Privilege to us is like water to the fish; Invisible precisely because we can not imagine life without it.”
September 26, 2005
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, one of the founding fathers of Pakistan said in 1948, “We do not cherish aggressive design against any country or nation. We believe in the principle of honesty and fairplay in national and international dealings and are prepared to make our utmost contribution to the promotion of peace and prosperity among the nations of the world.”
September 23, 2005
George Galloway’s testimony to U.S. Senate in May:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/msnbc_uk_galloway_blisters_us_on_iraq_050517-01.mp3
September 22, 2005
A reading from “Steal this Vote”
“Just as the United States uses its geopolitical weight to enforce its will in strategic regions of the world, so too, political parties understand the power they wield within their own domestic fiefdoms and are generally unafraid to use it. If they want to stack, rig, or steal an election, and they have the means and the infrastructural control necessary to pull it off, they will almost certainly do so, whatever rules are in place. After all, they’ve been doing it for two hundred years.
September 21, 2005
Hippocrates once said, “Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food.”
September 20, 2005
One of my favorite bumper sticker quotes, from George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
September 19, 2005
, “The existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority.”
-Franz Boas
September 15, 2005
US Military Officer Referring to the threat of nuclear weapons:
Look, if you think the mere threat of the end of the world is going to change thinking in Washington and Moscow, they you haven't spent much time in either of those cities.
September 8, 2005
If we wish to create a lasting peace we must begin with the children.
—Mahatma Gandhi
September 7, 2005
“We dropped several hundred thousand packets of food to the people of Afghanistan, even as we bombed them back to the Pleistocene era. Indeed, we patted ourselves on the back for the magnanimity ostensibly evidenced by such generosity. And yet, in New Orleans we drop nothing but vicious admonitions to poor and desperate people, about how looting is wrong. We drop nothing but cliched and empty platitudes, like "help is on the way," and "hold on, we're coming to the rescue." – Tim Wise, Of Disasters, Natural and Otherwise.
September 6, 2005
Paul Robeson said, “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
September 2, 2005
“There will always be a place for us somewhere, somehow, as long as we see to it that working people fight for everything they have, everything they hope to get, for dignity, equality, democracy, to oppose war and to bring to the world a better life.” – Harry Bridges
September 1, 2005
“Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and comfortable.” – Edward Said
August 31, 2005
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglas.
August 30, 2005
“The L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center Survey in 2004 show that nearly one third of men testing positive for HIV report having used crystal meth since their last test, and gay men in California who use meth are more than twice as likely to be HIV-positive than those who don't.”
August 29, 2005
On the question of the Chicano identity, Ruben Salazar once wrote, “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.”
August 26, 2005
“Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination.” - Anonymous
August 25, 2005
Henry Miller once said, "Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal."
August 24, 2005
"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall." – Che Guevara.
August 23, 2005
Thomas Jefferson once said, “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”
August 22, 2005
“The best remedy for leaving the old racial politics on the pages of history is a successful hip-hop political movement. Now more than ever, we don’t have to buy into the old racial politics. We no longer have to settle for democracy for the few. This generation, as its cultural movement turns to politics, is creating for us all, another choice.” – Bakari Kitwana.
August 19, 2005
“In its 1998 annual report the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) calculated that it would take less than four percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest individuals in the world to achieve and maintain access to basic education, basic health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, safe water, and adequate sanitation for all living on the planet.”
August 18, 2005
“We're not perfect, but we do have democracy”. – President Hugo Chavez.
August 17, 2005
“Cultural imperialism emphasizes the segmentation of the working class: stable workers are encouraged to dissociate themselves from temporary workers, who in turn separate themselves from the unemployed, who are further segmented among themselves within the "underground economy." – James Petras.
August 16, 2005
"One of the reasons so many people end up going to prison is because the resources that would keep them from going to prison are being devoured by the building of prisons." – Angela Davis.
August 15, 2005
Journalist Robert Fisk in conversation with an Iraqi friend, on the topic of the Iraq constitution and talk of a Federal government for Iraq: "Sure, it’s important," he said. "But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I’m too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can’t even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can’t eat federalism and you can’t use it to fuel your car and it doesn’t make my fridge work."
August 12, 2005
Albert Borgmann once said, “Why are we so zealous, then, about the private sector? We persist in designating a large part of the economy as private so that we can disavow public responsibility for its evils and claim individual merit for its blessings. As a civic body, we are reluctant to countenance and cure the deprivations of the poor, the damage to the environment, and the trivialization of culture that are the depressing concomitants of our advanced industrial economy.”
August 11, 2005
D. A. Clarke, in her essay "Prostitution for everyone: Feminism, globalisation, and the 'sex' industry," writes: “The essential issues which traditionally inspired feminists to challenge and criticize the sex industry have not changed despite decades of effort. It has been remarkably difficult for feminists to make any progress on these issues. It is very difficult to get these issues taken seriously. Obviously one reason for that is that feminist activity has not changed the fundamentals of social power. Men still control decisive power blocs such as the armed forces, the higher levels of government, big business and media -- and the 'sex industry' is a service industry for men.”
August 10, 2005
On Thursday August 11th, Part two of our special on pornography and prostitution: Making the connections between pornography and prostitution – how impoverished indigenous women are pushed into prostitution, and how immigration pressures Latinas into the industry, and sex and the military, and how men can resist pornography and prostitution.
August 9, 2005
“It was glorious for Americans to drench the soil and crimson the sea with blood to escape payment of threepenny tax upon tea; but it is a crime to shoot down a monster in defense of the liberty of a black man and to save him from bondage one minute of which (in the language of Jefferson) is worse than ages of that which our fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.”--Frederick Douglass
August 8, 2005
“Regardless of who tries to enslave my body, my soul will taste freedom forever… I am a follower of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. I am against all kinds of violence - violence from the oppressors and violence from the oppressed.” - Father Jean Juste, during his earlier imprisonment in 2004, quoted in a report by William Quigley.
August 5, 2005
“There is no West versus East, no Christians and Jews versus Muslims, there is only the government of George W. and what's left of his allies trying to dominate the world in order to benefit economically and politically...” – Judy Rebick
August 4, 2005
Bertrand Russell once said, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
August 3, 2005
“Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.”
An excerpt from Ka’ba by Amiri Baraka
August 2, 2005
“The best remedy for leaving the old racial politics on the pages of history is a successful hip-hop political movement. Now more than ever, we don’t have to buy into the old racial politics. We no longer have to settle for democracy for the few. This generation, as its cultural movement turns to politics, is creating for us all, another choice.” – Bakari Kitwana.
August 1, 2005
Mark Twain once said, “In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
July 29, 2005
Eduardo Galeano once said, “Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.”
July 28, 2005
Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian activist and writer said: “We are not fond of mass suicide, but we want the right to resist occupation and injustice. Then the moment we say 'resist', the Israelis pull out the word 'terrorist'--so a child with a stone becomes the 'legitimate' target for Israeli sniper fire and a high velocity bullet.”
July 27, 2005
"When governments state that certain events have not happened, and yet we have the victims before us to testify that they did, government loses its credibility, and it loses its authority.” - Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo
July 26, 2005
“The solutions to repression in prisons lies, not within the prison, but without. It lies with organizing support groups, and with educating people about the real class functions of these joints. It must be broad, and it must be deep; only then can we begin to transform the repressive nature of these gulags.” – Mumia Abu Jamal
July 25, 2005
C.Wright Mills once said, “Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them--and then, the opportunity to choose.”
July 22, 2005
Speaking on art and freedom, the late wobbly artist Carlos Cortez said: “I think that is one of the obligations the creative artist has, because art can only flourish under freedom. If art flourishes under freedom, or the artists who are strong enough and courageous enough can fight, can use their art to fight tyranny, repression and that. Of course an artist, his obligation, a creative artist, whether it’s a visual artist or a non-visual artist has to express what he or she feels the strongest about.”
July 21, 2005
Barbara Ehrenreich, once said “What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no - not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”
July 20, 2005
“There is a love of wild nature in everybody an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or not, and however covered by cares and duties.” – John Muir
July 19, 2005
Albert Einstein once said, “Private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”
July 18, 2005
Joseph Stiglitz, the former world bank deputy director said in 2002, “It is now a commonplace [fact] that the international trade agreements about which the United States spoke so proudly only a few years ago were grossly unfair to countries in the third world.
July 15, 2005
Writer and poet, Stephen Vincent Benet said, “Remember that when you say "I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.”
July 14, 2005
Ani Difranco said “...the mainstream is so polluted with lies, once you are wet it's so hard to get dry, we are all taught, how to justify, history, as it passes by...”
July 12, 2005
“The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.” ~ Bertrand Russell
July 11, 2005
Thomas Jefferson once said “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
June 24, 2005
Conrad Lynn once said “Millions of words are printed each month on the doings of high society, the devious machinations of their politicians, the cultural concerns of the middle class and on their sports heroes. Seldom is an attempt made to give voice to the longings, the anguish, and the desperation of the deprived.”
June 23, 2005
“Hip-hop has always been about having fun, but it’s also about taking responsibility. And now we have a platform to speak our minds. Millions of people are watching us. Let’s hear something powerful. Tell people what they need to hear. How will we help the community? What do we stand for? What would happen if we got the hip-hop generation to vote, or to form organizations to change things? That would be powerful.” – DJ Kool Herc, in the introduction to “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.”
June 22, 2005
Robert McNamara once said: “Vital decision-making...must remain at the top...the real threat to democracy comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement.”
June 21, 2005
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “The secret in education lies in respecting the student.”
June 20, 2005
"The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder" -Former Chicago mayor Daley during the infamous 1968 convention
June 17, 2005
Ambrose Bierce from The Devil’s Dictionary:
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
June 16, 2005
Starhawk said in an essay in “Stop the Next War Now” : “…real security can only come when we weave a new global web of mutual aid and support. We need women’s actions, to make these larger connections, to assert that compassion is not weakness and brutality is not strength.”
June 15, 2005
The great world power has not yet found the weapon to destroy dreams. - Subcomandante Marcos
June 14, 2005
“In early 2005, it remained unclear what kind of hold the US would have over the newly elected government. The ability of Iraq to recover, to attain freedom, and to restore the stability of its daily rights, hinged on the Bush administration’s willingness to accept that the will of the Iraqi people might be different from its own.” – Aaron Glantz, “How America Lost Iraq.”
June 13, 2005
Scott Norvell, London bureau chief for Fox News admitted Fox’s right wing bias on May 20th to Wall Street Journal Europe: “Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly… Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting.”
June 10, 2005
Alice Walker: “Not Buying War – Grief Remains Unsold.”
June 9, 2005
Noam Chomsky said in 1979, “The beauty of the democratic systems of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis--aided by the force of nationalism and media control … --presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate.”
June 8, 2005
Vine Deloria Jr. said “Indians always have been politically savvy – what’s changed is their resources.”
June 7, 2005
Allen Ginsberg once said: “Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture.”
June 4, 2005
Jason Mark in the Multinational Monitor sums up the MST’s approach in these words: “The twin injustices of land concentration and idle farms are largely responsible for the poverty and chronic malnutrition that plague Brazil. The MST battles these injustices through a novel fusion of direct action and self-reliance. First, it seizes unused land, then it uses that land to provide real, workable alternatives to the corporate globalization sweeping the world.”
June 3, 2005
Michael Eric Dyson quoted Bill Cosby himself from a 1969 interview: “I find it hard to believe that white people don’t know what life is like for the average American black. Did his mother have to pay more than $200 for a couch that costs white people $125? A guy in the slums buys a car for $150 and has to pay $400 a year insurance on it. The ghetto supermarkets sell food you can’t find anywhere else; did you ever eat green meat and green bread? How many winters have white people spent with rats scurrying around their apartments at night, with windows boarded up but not keeping out the cold, and with no heat? Try to get a ghetto slumlord to fix up an apartment and you’ll know what frustration and bitterness is.”
June 2, 2005
From Patwant Singh’s The World According to Washington: “Asian antipathy to what was once seen as the colonial west is almost entirely focused on America – for its lack of statesmanship, especially in West Asia; for its disrespect for other cultures, traditions and beliefs; for its unconcern for Asian lives; for its messianic faith in military power; for its self-indulgence in the face of the everyday struggle for survival in four-fifths of the world; and for its increasing espousal of Christian fundamentalism.”
June 1, 2005
Maggie Kuhn, from the National Women’s Hall of Fame said: “Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. And do your homework.”
May 31, 2005
From his book, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, Stanley “Tookie” Williams said “I was beginning to understand that my experiences with the dysfunctional status quo of the prison culture - as well as drug addiction, poverty, gangsterism, racism, and other roadblocks - had become the excuses that defined my life. But no longer would my life, my being, be dictated by blind ignorance. Nor would I ever again allow the excuse of circumstance to dictate who I should be. It was daily studying and questioning that prompted my soul searching. I began to develop a sense of critical reasoning from which sprang the first stirrings of conscience. This was the moment when redemption infused itself into my life.”
May 30, 2005
"It's the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose." – Imelda Marcos quoted in Fortune, 1979
May 27, 2005
Michael Albert once said: “History is not over. It is, instead, ours to make.”
May 26, 2005
Steve Biko once said: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
May 25, 2005
Big Bill Haywood once said: “For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it.”
May 24, 2005
Isiah Bear (Muskoday), a Cree Indian once said: “In the old days we used to respect everything… This isn’t done today, that’s why we are lost.”
May 23, 2005
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look on uneasily upon the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Martin Luther King Jr. said at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
May 20, 2005
"If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
--Lila Watson
May 19, 2005
Malcolm X once said: “Beware of the newspapers. They will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing.”
May 18, 2005
What's done to children, they will do to society.—Karl Menninger
May 17, 2005
“None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.” - Pearl S. Buck, from “What America Means to Me” - quoted on the website of A New Way of Life.
May 16, 2005
In an interview on Venezuelaanalysis.com, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said:
“The essence of democracy should be participation...that is what we believe, not representation.”
May 13, 2005
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once said: “You have to be the change you want to see in the world”
May 12, 2005
Lewis Thomas once said “We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.”
May 11, 2005
Paulo Freire once said “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom - the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with the reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
May 10, 2005
Richard Feynman once said “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
May 9, 2005
“Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press.” – Open Letter by Assata Shakur
May 6, 2005
Mumia Abu-Jamal once said “Governments often offer up pretexts to cover the real reasons for war. Those who fight the wars, or even those who support the wars for patriotic reasons, rarely know the real reasons.”
May 5, 2005
Arthur Stanley Eddington once said “It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.”
May 4, 2005
The philosopher George Santayana once said “A country without a memory is a country of madmen.”
May 3, 2005
“The United States, at the dawn of the twenty first century, is not exactly the most beloved nation on earth. What if the profitable export of our much vaunted technology has led to the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of children? What then?” – David Kirby, from "Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: a Medical Controversy."
May 2, 2005
Senator Joseph McCarthy once said: “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.”
April 29, 2005
“Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.” – John L. Lewis, president of United Mine Workers of America from 1920 – 1960.
April 28, 2005
Douglas Morris once said: "Sprawl isolates people in their own homes in the suburbs. Sprawl has turned America into a society of strangers. This society of strangers -- because no one knows anybody else -- has helped to create a culture of incivility," says
April 26, 2005
Arundhati Roy said: “Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated.
April 25, 2005
Tony Benn once said: "The nature of the economic system should be a matter for public choice, and free market capitalism should not be accepted without any discussion of the rich variety of alternatives ... Unlike civil laws, economic laws are imposed on people with all the authority of immutable laws of nature. But the economy is created by people, supported by government intervention, regulation, statute and subsidy, and implemented in such a way that it gives substantial wealth and power to a privileged few, while the majority faces a life of relentless work, stress and periodic financial insecurity."
April 22, 2005
Buenaventura Durruti once said “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, that we can also build palaces and cities, here in spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least bit afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that.”
April 21, 2005
Film maker and writer, John Pilger once said “Blaming the public for its "lack of interest in politics" is the self-deluding excuse of media executives who claim an insight into the popular mood, yet are contemptuous of it. In truth, the public has never been more interested
April 20, 2005
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.” -- Frederick Douglass
April 19, 2005
“Prop. 36 does not give drug offenders a free pass—it allows judges to sanction clients for missed appointments or early signs of relapse to drug use, but it does not allow them to be jailed … It’s the drug war mentality all over again—wasting money and lives on punishment while letting more dangerous offenders go free” – Glen Backes, Health Policy Director of Drug Policy Alliance Network.
April 18, 2005
Subcomandante Marcos once said “Only for the powerful is history an upward line, where their today is always the pinnacle. For those below, history is a question which can only be answered by looking backwards and forwards, thus creating new questions”.
April 15, 2005
Subcomandante Marcos once said “Only for the powerful is history an upward line, where their today is always the pinnacle. For those below, history is a question which can only be answered by looking backwards and forwards, thus creating new questions”.
April 15, 2005
Emma Goldman once said, “If I can't dance I won't be part of your revolution.”
April 14, 2005
“Someone must take strong action to expedite an otherwise endless bureaucratic process of committee meetings and rhetoric. Since Georgetown refuses to take such action and commit to a Living Wage, it forces the Living Wage Coalition to do so.” - Liam Stack and Ginny Leavell, members of the Living Wage Coalition at Georgetown University, which organized a successful hunger strike for workers rights.
April 13, 2005
“We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past. Now is the last chance to get the future right.” – Ronald Wright, author of “A Short History of Progress”.
April 8, 2005
Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton once said: “The media not only continue to affirm the status quo but, in the same measure, they fail to raise essential questions about the structure of society. Hence by leading toward conformism and by providing little basis for a critical appraisal of society, the commercially sponsored mass media indirectly but effectively restrain the cogent development of a genuinely critical outlook.”
April 7, 2005
“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” - General Omar Bradley speech to West Point cadets, 1952.
April 6, 2005
The Austrian artist Egon Schiele once said, “It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something”.
April 5, 2005
Howard Zinn once said “A bit of historical perspective reminds us that governments which seem to be in total control, of guns, of money, of the minds of the population, find that all their power is futile against the power of an aroused citizenry.”
April 1, 2005
El Salvador’s Beloved Oscar Romero once said: "Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty."
March 31, 2005
This culture too often treats political opinions as if they were merely subjective judgments. Certainly some component of our political decision-making includes statements that are subjective in some sense -- they are about principles that cannot be proved by reason and evidence, such as the answer to the question “what does it mean to be a human being?” But statements of such first principles are the beginning of a coherent political argument, notthe end. The formation and articulation of political viewpoints requiresintellectual work if those viewpoints are to be of value in public dialogue.
March 30, 2005
Charles Bukowski once said “The difference between a Democracy and a Dictatorship is that in a Democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a Dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.”
March 29, 2005
“The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference”. – Ralph Nader
March 28, 2005
Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said “The way the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in apartheid South Africa.”
March 25, 2005
“Any rational man who looks at human society, and sees our enormous, unlimited powers of production at the present time, can find it absolutely inconceivable that we can permit slums to exist and people to live in the degradation and poverty that they do in our great cities” – Upton Sinclair in an interview near the end of his life.
March 24, 2005
“Justice is incidental to law and order” - J. Edgar Hoover.
March 23, 2005
Preventive policing is a great idea, especially if applied to abusive and racist police. Why not use a carrot and a very hard stick approach to police abuse? Police abuse, one may argue, is one of the worst crimes in society – abuse by those who claim to protect and serve.
March 22, 2005
“If we must die, let it not be like hogs haunted and penned in
an inglorious spot, while round us bark the mad and hungry
gods, making their mock at our accursed lot. Like men we'll face
the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but
fight back!”
-- Claude McKay
March 21, 2005
Thomas Jefferson once said “A society that will trade a little order for a little freedom will lose both, and deserve neither”.
March 18, 2005
Two students, Hadas Thier and Katrina Yeaw, writing for Counterpunch.org, said “Getting the military out of our schools and replacing them with real educational opportunities is our generation's fight. No one will do it for us. We owe it to ourselves, the Iraqis, and the American soldiers dying for a lie.”
March 17, 2005
Professor Harry Brod, from UC San Diego has said: “We need to be clear that there is no such thing as giving up ones privilege to be outside the system. One is always in the system – the only question is whether one is part of the system in a way that challenges or strengthens the status quo. Privilege is not something I take and which therefore I have the option of not taking it is something that society givens me and unless I change the institutions which give it to me, they will continue to give it and I will continue to have it, however noble and egalitarian my intentions.”
March 16, 2005
Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South said in Cancun, “Society, not economics, must drive the market. Profitability must be subordinate to community, life and solidarity.”
March 15, 2005
In an interview with CNN, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale said “They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.”
March 14, 2005
Former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Wilma Mankiller said “Contrary to today’s stereotypes, racists do not always chew tobacco and drive pickup trucks with gun racks. They wear silk shirts, treat women as possessions, and talk about human rights at cocktail parties far from communities of people of color. The men in pickup trucks are just as likely to be as warm and caring as the high minded liberals are to be racists.”
March 11, 2005
James Baldwin once said “One day, perhaps, unimaginable generations hence, we will evolve into the knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate and will permit this knowledge to become the ruling principle of our lives.”
March 10, 2005
Edward Said once said, “American politics are deeply contradictory of course, but anti-intellectualism . . . is the common strain. This includes a deep suspicion of anything that isn't simple, fundamental, traditional, down-to-earth and "American" in the ideological sense, and can be exploited easily by demagogues and cynical politicians of the right. The key word is "freedom", which includes the freedom to own and use firearms, the freedom to trade and use the marketplace without restraint even if it means serious injury to health and decency, the freedom above all to make America's will rule all over the earth.”
March 9, 2005
Mark Twain once said, “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than other savages.”
March 8, 2005
Thomas Jefferson, in 1786 said, “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
March 7, 2005
“The most serious threat to democracy is the notion that it has already been achieved” –Anonymous.
February 14, 2005
” Only by rebelling against [white privilege] and insisting on our own freedom from the mental straightjacket into which we have been placed as whites by this system, can we hope to regain our full humanity, and be of any use as allies to people of color in their struggle against racism.” – Tim Wise.
February 9, 2005
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Voltaire
February 8, 2005
"What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish."
James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers," 1963
February 3, 2005
Ward Churchill, Native American activist, intellectual and professor once said: “I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well .. that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property…They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one”.
February 2, 2005
Michael Albert, author of “Parecon: Life After Capitalism” once said: “To win we need to generate a trajectory of activism that elites cannot repress away or manipulatively derail, and which they also can't calmly abide. That is the logic of social change.”
February 1, 2005
Henry David Thoreau once said “Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law”.
January 31, 2005
Jack Johnson’s ads to African Americans in the early 20th century said: “Colored People: You who are lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against the boasted ‘Land of Liberty … own a home in Mexico where one man is as good as another and it is not your nationality that counts but simply you!” – from Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, by Gerald Horne.
January 28, 2005
Confucius once said “In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
January 27, 2005
Bertrand Russell once said, “I believe there is in each of us a certain energy which must find vent in art, in passionate love, or in passionate hate, according to circumstances. Respectability, regularity, and routine -- the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society -- have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love …”
January 26, 2005
“We still are part of the struggle. I will be part of it as long as there is breath in me. I still live life to the fullest, but things have quieted down. The days of armed confrontation are over, at least for now. Many young kids nowadays have never heard of Wounded Knee. We try to keep the memories alive.” – Dennis Banks, from “Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement”
January 25, 2005
The last words of Hochschild’s book, Bury the Chains: “The way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings. The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy. We live with that hope still.”
January 24, 2005
...Charles Darwin
For my part I would as soon be descended from a baboon...as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies…”
January 19, 2005
Franklin Delanore Roosevelt once said, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves, and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not President, and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.”
January 18, 2005
Mahatma Gandhi once said “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems"
January 14, 2005
In celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. we have a quote of his from 1967, where he said “I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side fo the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people; the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies.” That’s Martin Luther King Jr. from a speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967.
January 13, 2005
From his 1985 book, The Real Terror Network, Ed Herman says, “If we assume that the purpose of the economy is to serve and improve the welfare of the entire body of citizens, the U.S. model has clearly been a major failure. It has served a minority, and the majority have not only failed to share in the income gains yielded by the model, they have suffered from reduced benefits, greater job instability and stress, and a diminution of expectations and sense of hope for the future”.
January 12, 2005
Michael Albert once said, “Capitalism is a thug's economy, a heartless economy, a base and vile and largely boring economy. It is the antithesis of human fulfillment and development. It mocks equity and justice. It enshrines greed... Capitalism sucks. Does anyone seriously want to contest that?”
January 11, 2005
"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery - not over nature but of ourselves" – Rachel Carson
January 10, 2005
“..beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.” – Howard Zinn.
