Protestation

Isaac Newton: Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.

Isaac Newton: What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

Isaac Newton: Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

Isaac Newton: No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

Isaac Newton: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Isaac Newton: If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

Isaac Newton: And to every action there is always an equal and opposite or contrary, reaction.

Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

Friedrich Engels: All revolutions up to the present day have resulted in the displacement of the rule of one class by the rule of another; but all ruling classes up to now have been only small minorities in relation to the ruled mass of the people. One ruling minority was thus overthrown; another minority seized the helm of state in its stead and refashioned the state institutions to suit its own interests. Thus on every occasion a minority group was enabled and called upon to rule by the given degree of economic development; and just for that reason, and only for that reason, it happened that the ruled majority either participated in the revolution for the benefit of the former or else simply acquiesced in it. But if we disregard the concrete content in each case, the common form of all these revolutions was that they were minority revolutions. Even when the majority took part, it did so — whether wittingly or not — only in the service of a minority; but because of this, or even simply because of the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority, this minority acquired the appearance of being the representative of the whole people.

Tony Benn: The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.

Thomas Sowell: When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Ursula K. Le Guin: To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Alessandro Manzoni: Bullies, oppressors and all men who do violence to the rights of others are guilty not only of their own crimes, but also of the corruption they bring into the hearts of their victims.

Harriet Jacobs: Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

Walter Rodney: All of the countries named as "underdeveloped" in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation.

Stalin: In our opinion, what has been said needs no proof, for it is self-evident that, so long as the capitalist system exists, with its inevitably attendant poverty and backwardness of the masses, the proletariat as a whole cannot rise to the desired level of class consciousness, and, consequently, there must be a group of class-conscious leaders to enlighten the proletarian army in the spirit of socialism, to unite and lead it in its struggle. It is also clear that a party which has set out to lead the fighting proletariat must not be a chance conglomeration of individuals, but a united centralised organisation, so that its activities can be directed according to a single plan.

Dwight Eisenhower: If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.

Woody Guthrie: War is a game played by maniacs, who kill each other. It is murder, studied and prepared by insane minds, and followed by a bunch of thieves. You can’t believe in life, and wear the uniform of death. There are certain men who never think of any other thing besides slaughter. They are blood soaked butchers and they are believed to be heroes. Three fifths of the people decide to murder the other two fifths, who must take up killing in order to stay alive. Locate the man who profits by war — strip him of his profits and war will end.

Carl Jung: Wherever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings, fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Enver Hoxha: In Europe and throughout the world there are innumerable philosophers and men of letters that have made a myth of the superiority of men over women. For them man is strong, courageous and a fighter, therefore, he is wiser and predestinated to dominate, to direct, whereas woman, on her part, is by nature weak, defenseless, timid, therefore she must be ruled and directed. Bourgeois theoreticians like Nietsche and Freud, uphold also the theory that the male is active while the female is passive. This reactionary, anti-biologic theory leads, in politics, to nazism, in sexology, to sadism. Our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers have languished under this harsh bondage, they have borne these corporeal and spiritual pangs on their own sore shoulders. Now when the revolution has triumphed, when socialism is being successfully built in our country, the Party sets forth for us the complete and final liberation of woman from the fetters of the bitter past as a major, as one of the greatest tasks, it sets forth for us the complete emancipation of women.

Stalin: The glorious work of Soviet women, builders of socialist industry, collective farming, socialist culture, will go down in history forever. With every year the role of women in all spheres of life of Soviet society increases.

Stalin: Soviet women are active leaders in Soviet socialist culture, the most advanced in the world. Together with the men, they work untiringly to increase the spiritual wealth of our people. Widely exercising their right to education, women have grown Into a great cultural force of Soviet society.

Nikolai Alekseivich Valerianov: Worker and peasant women - all should go to the polls! Gather under the Red Banner along with men. We bring fear to the bourgeoisie!

Inessa Armand: If women's liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women's liberation.

Alexandra Kollontai: The work of destroying the social slavery of women as it was then, was carried through by the great workers’ revolution. Women workers and peasants participated in the great liberating struggle on an equal footing with men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Enver Hoxha: The Party of Labor of Albania, which has always consistently abided by the Marxist-Leninist line and principles, and has waged and is waging a resolute fight against modern revisionism headed by the Soviet renegade leadership, will mercilessly unmask the present Khrushchevite revisionists, or to be used by them as a camouflage to conceal their revisionist treachery. Stalin belongs to the Marxist-Leninists, to the proletarian revolution.

Hitler: What India was for England the territories of Russia will be for us.

Stalin: The German invaders want a war of extermination with the peoples of the U.S.S.R. Well, if the Germans want to have a war of extermination, they will get it.

Paul Goodman: In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

Enver Hoxha: Marx and Engels created the proletarian science of the revolution and scientific socialism. They founded the International Workingmen's Association, known as the First International. The fundamental principles of this first international association of workers were formulated in its Constitutional Manifesto, which defined the road of the proletariat for the liquidation of private ownership of the means of production, for the creation of the party of the proletariat to seize state power on the revolutionary road, as well as for the struggle the proletariat had to wage against capitalism and opportunism, which presented itself in different "theoretical" forms in different countries. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the brilliant continuer of the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, basing himself on their major works and defending them with rare mastery, waged the struggle against the trends of revisionists, opportunists, and other renegades.

Karl Marx: The surplus value, or that part of the total value of the commodity in which the surplus labour or unpaid labour of the working man is realized, I call profit. The whole of that profit is not pocketed by the employing capitalist. The monopoly of land enables the landlord to take one part of that surplus value, under the name of rent, whether the land is used for agricultural buildings or railways, or for any other productive purpose. On the other hand, the very fact that the possession of the instruments of labour enables the employing capitalist to produce a surplus value, or, what comes to the same, to appropriate to himself a certain amount of unpaid labour, enables the owner of the means of labour, which he lends wholly or partly to the employing capitalist — enables, in one word, the money-lending capitalist to claim for himself under the name of interest another part of that surplus value, so that there remains to the employing capitalist as such only what is called industrial or commercial profit.

Carl Jung: The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

Erich Fromm: The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Thomas Merton: The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Otto Weininger: It is not the fear of death which creates the desire for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes the fear of death.

Enver Hoxha: The entire Party and country should wake up, throw into the flames and twist the neck of any one who tramples underfoot the sacred law of the Party in defense of the rights of women and girls.

Stalin: Commodity production must not be regarded as something sufficient unto itself, something independent of the surrounding economic conditions. Commodity production is older than capitalist production. It existed in slave-owning society, and served it, but did not lead to capitalism. It existed in feudal society and served it, yet, although it prepared some of the conditions for capitalist production, it did not lead to capitalism. Why then, one asks, cannot commodity production similarly serve our socialist society for a certain period without leading to capitalism, bearing in mind that in our country commodity production is not so boundless and all-embracing as it is under capitalist conditions, being confined within strict bounds thanks to such decisive economic conditions as social ownership of the means of production, the abolition of the system of wage labour, and the elimination of the system of exploitation? It is said that, since the domination of social ownership of the means of production has been established in our country, and the system of wage labour and exploitation has been abolished, commodity production has lost all meaning and should therefore be done away with. That is also untrue. Today there are two basic forms of socialist production in our country: state, or publicly-owned production, and collective-farm production, which cannot be said to be publicly owned. In the state enterprises, the means of production and the product of production are national property. In the collective farm, although the means of production (land, machines) do belong to the state, the product of production is the property of the different collective farms, since the labour, as well as the seed, is their own, while the land, which has been turned over to the collective farms in perpetual tenure, is used by them virtually as their own property, in spite of the fact that they cannot sell, buy, lease or mortgage it.

Fidel Castro: When the Great Patriotic War broke out, Russian citizens defended their country like Spartans; underestimating them was the worst mistake of the United States and Europe. Their closest allies, the Chinese, who like the Russians won their victory on the same principles, are today the most dynamic economic force on earth. Countries want yuan and not dollars to acquire goods and technologies and increase their trade.

Voltaire: Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

Gramsci: The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

Adam Smith: The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.

Plutarch: I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

Bertrand Russell: Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Edward Bernays: It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Edward Bernays: No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

Edward Bernays: The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.

Edward Bernays: The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda.

Edward Bernays: Men (people) are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.

Edward Bernays: If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn.

Edward Bernays: As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

Edward Bernays: In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.

Edward Bernays: In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.

Edward Bernays: Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.

Edward Bernays: Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. But there are usually proponents and opponents of every propaganda, both of whom are equally eager to convince the majority.

Noam Chomsky: He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.

Noam Chomsky: The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

Noam Chomsky: The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Noam Chomsky: Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Noam Chomsky: The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

Noam Chomsky: Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

Noam Chomsky: It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you.

Noam Chomsky: The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.

Noam Chomsky: A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied, and continued: “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.

Noam Chomsky: The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.

Noam Chomsky: It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

Noam Chomsky: The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

Noam Chomsky: If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong.

Noam Chomsky: If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

Noam Chomsky: Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

Noam Chomsky: The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

Noam Chomsky: Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.