Protestation

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.

Noam Chomsky: Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Noam Chomsky: Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.

Noam Chomsky: For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.

Karl Marx: In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Saramago: Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

Karl Marx: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx: Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Karl Marx: Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval.

Karl Marx: Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Karl Marx: The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Karl Marx: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law."

Karl Marx: The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

Karl Marx: Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Salvador Allende: To be young and not a revolutionary is a biological contradiction.

Saramago: People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it’s only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

Saramago: What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

Saramago: The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them.

Saramago: Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

Saramago: I’m not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?

Saramago: God, the devil, good, evil, it’s all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.

Saramago: The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

Saramago: It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

Saramago: Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.

Saramago: The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Saramago: The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Saramago: One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

Saramago: Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

Henry Kissinger: In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them.

Rachel Corrie: When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I've ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

Lenin: We must take as our point of departure the universally recognised Marxist thesis that a programme must be built on a scientific foundation. It must explain to the people how the communist revolution arose, why it is inevitable, what its significance, nature, and power are, and what problems it must solve. Our programme must be a summary for agitational purposes, a summary such as all programmes were, such as, for instance, the Erfurt Programme was. Every clause of that programme contained material for agitators to use in hundreds of thousands of speeches and articles. Every clause of our programme is something that every working man and woman must know, assimilate and understand. If they do not know what capitalism is, if they do not understand that small peasant and handicraft economy constantly, inevitably and necessarily engenders this capitalism—if they do not understand this, then even if they were to declare themselves Communists a hundred times and flaunt the most radical communism, it would not be worth a brass farthing, because we value communism only when it is based on economic facts.

Ayn Rand: (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

Sally Kempton: It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

Thích Nhất Hạnh: One included all, and all were contained in one.

Alexandra Kollontai: We must therefore not only confront the problem of prostitution but seek a solution that is in line with our basic principles and the program of social and economic change adhered to by the party of the communists.

Rosa Luxemburg: The friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realised within the frame-work of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialistic conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state.

Issac Asimov: Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

Rosa Luxemburg: Socialism is inevitable, not merely because the proletarians are no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but, further, because if the proletariat fails to fulfill its duties as a class, if it fails to realize socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom.

Rosa Luxemburg: Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.

Aaron Bushnell: My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the US Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.

Benjamin Franklin: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Benjamin Franklin: I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

Arthur James Balfour: Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Muammar Gaddafi: Israelis and Palestinians live on the same piece of land namely; Palestine that is located between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. This is a disputed land. In 1948 the majority of the population, three quarters of the population were Palestinians. Less than a quarter of the population were Israelis. They managed to expel the Palestinians from their homes and unilaterally declared a state called Israel. This is inadmissible under international law. No one can legally declare a state on a disputed territory.

Saddam Hussein: We salute the Palestinian people of heroic mujahideen as well as every hero and heroine amongst the champions of self-sacrifice who confront the Zionist aggression with their lives and thus foil the wrong ideas of the American administrations which have acted in alliance with their artificial Zionist creation in the crimes they perpetrate and the shame they reap.

Jawaharlal Nehru: During the World War the British armies invaded Palestine and, as they were marching on Jerusalem, the British Government made a declaration in November 1917, called the Balfour Declaration. They declared that it was their intention to establish a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. This declaration was made to win the good will of international Jewry, and this was important from the money point of view. It was welcomed by most Jews. But there was one little drawback, one not unimportant fact seems to have been overlooked. Palestine was not a wilderness, or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else's home. So that this generous gesture of the British Government was really at the expense of the people who already lived in Palestine, and these people, including Arabs, non-Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and, in fact, everybody who was not a Jew, protested vigorously at the declaration. These people felt that the Jews would compete with them in all activities and, with the great wealth behind them, would become the economic masters of the country ; they were afraid that the Jews would take the bread out of their mouths and the land from the peasantry.

Arnold J. Toynbee: Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.

Gabriel García Márquez: Remembering is easy for anyone who has memory, forgetting is difficult for those who have a heart.

Henry Petroski: No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.

Ghassan Kanafani: Zionism as a reactionary ideology fitted exactly the ambitions of British colonialism in that period and later with American imperialism.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

George Orwell: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

Mussolini: Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

John Davison Rockefeller: If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.

Edward Bernays: Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.

Edward Bernays: A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.

Edward Bernays: If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

Will Rogers: The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.

Marie-Louise von Franz: It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.

Oscar Wilde: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde: A good friend will always stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde: A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde: Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Deng Xiaoping: Class struggle exists objectively in socialist society. It should be neither underestimated nor exaggerated. Otherwise, as practice has shown, we shall make serious mistakes.

Bertrand Russell: The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. - anonymous