Quotations: October 2004 Archives

" ... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but
opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S.
benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-
means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the
specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in
the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just
America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected
in secret. "

Robert Parry
Investigative reporter and author

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be
indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity."

George Bernard Shaw

The flame of a lamp lights up countless lamps. The touch of a great personality wakes up innumerable sleeping hearts. In the same way, the eternal glow of the boundless elan vital of Cosmic Consciousness has been illuminating the life-lamp of universal humanism since time immemorial, is illuminating it, and in future will do so even more intensely. That is why I say, the future of the human race is not dark, rather it is strikingly resplendent. So proceed on, ignoring the frowns of darkness.

Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrtijii
1 January 1978

"A time comes when silence in betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world....

"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us....

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves in the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world...."

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Whenever 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."

Carl Gustav Jung

"My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its
officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the
eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to;
institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear
out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from
winter, disease, and death."

Mark Twain

"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion."

James Russell Lowell
(1819-1891)
American author and diplomat

"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better."

Fredrich August von Hayek
(1899-1992)
Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails,
and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

Frederick Douglass