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Quotations Database
16 years in the making, this 36,000 motivational quote search engine can identify quotations by the name of the author, keyword, gender, general ethnicity, and by phrase. It’s yours to use for free. I think it is the most diverse, deep, and far-reaching quotation search engine on values, ethics, and wisdom anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy! – Jason
Noam Chomsky, a most distinguished intellectual and moral dissident, once wrote the old motto about “speaking truth to power is overrated.” Power, he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something — half the population. You just don’t find things like that in other industrialized societies. The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That’s never been impossible and never been easy. …if there’s a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you’ve got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect — it creates global tension and a mood of fear. The person who claims the legitimacy of authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that…people have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you’ve got to justify them. We have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, for one thing — because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race is not going to survive very much longer. …over time there’s measurable progress: it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. I can’t think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence [as Howard Zinn]. His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past. New York is like living in a feudal system, with a lot of wild barbarians outside — except if you’re rich, you don’t ever have to see them, you just move between your castle and your limousine. And if you’re poor, you’ve got the castle to protect you. We’re all so isolated: if we had live, ongoing, popular organizations, this wouldn’t be so true. The history of the labor movement in the United States is interesting in this respect, actually; when people were really working together organizing, that overcame the isolation. In fact, it even overcame things like racism and sexism to a great extent. That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital. It’s extremely rare even for an S.S. guard or a torturer to say, “I’m doing this because I like to be a son of a bitch.” We all do bad things in our lives, and if you think back, it’s very rare that you’ve said, “I’m doing this just because I feel like it.” — people reinterpret things in order to fit them into a basic framework of moral values, which in fact we all share. It’s very rare in most human situations that there’s a clear and simple answer about what’s right, and sometimes the answers are very murky, because there are different values and values do conflict, which often leads us to different answers — maybe because we don’t understand all the values well enough yet, or maybe because they really are in conflict. What I feel should drive a person to work for change is certain principles you’d like to see achieved. The reality is that under capitalist conditions — meaning maximization of short-term gain — you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when …dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. The operational criterion for what counted as a war crime at Nuremberg was a criminal act that the West didn’t do: in other words, it was considered a legitimate defense if you could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing. That’s actually true. The kinds of things that any sort of science can shed light on are pretty narrow: when you start moving to complicated systems, scientific knowledge declines very fast. And when you get to the nature of human beings, the sciences have nothing to say. American bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None; but if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail. We have to develop stable popular organizations, and a culture of concern, and commitment, and activism, and solidarity, which can help to sustain us in these struggles, and which can help break down some of the barriers that have been set up to divide and distract us. It’s true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities — but they’re destroying them because of a social structure that we’ve got to change, from the bottom up. You couldn’t have predicted in 1775 that there was going to be an American Revolution, it would have been impossible to have predicted it. But there was. You couldn’t have predicted in 1954 that there was going to be a Civil Rights Movement. You couldn’t have predicted in 1987 that there was going to be an uprising on the West Bank …nobody understands how change happens. If you say, “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of a domestic power, then it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it. There were no financial crashes in the ‘50s and ‘60s because the regulatory apparatus of The New Deal was still in place. As it began to be dismantled under business pressure and political pressure, however, we began to get more crashes. …if you want to destroy a system, first defund it. Once it’s defunded, the system won’t work, people will be angry and they will want something else. It’s a standard technique for privatizing some system. We see it in the attack on public schools. Public schools are based on the principle of solidarity…: “I happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street can go to school”. That’s normal human emotion. You have to drive that out of people’s heads. “I don’t have kids in school. Why should I pay taxes? Privatize it”, so on. The public education system – all the way from kindergarten to higher education – is under severe attack. I mean, that is one of the jewels of American society! Public schools are based on the principle of solidarity…: “I happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street can go to school”. That’s normal human emotion. You have to drive that out of people’s heads. “I don’t have kids in school. Why should I pay taxes? Privatize it”, so on. The public education system – all the way from kindergarten to higher education – is under severe attack. I mean, that is one of the jewels of American society! Solidarity is quite dangerous; from the point of view of the masters, you’re only supposed to care about yourself (and not about other people). This is quite different from the people they claim are their heroes, like Adam Smith, who based his whole approach to the economy on the principle that sympathy is a fundamental human trait. …It’s taken a lot of effort to drive these basic human emotions out of people’s heads, and we see it today in policy formation — for example, in the attack on Social Security, which is based on the principle of solidarity — caring for others. By the 1970s, large corporations like General Electric could make more profit playing games with money than they could by producing in the United States. You have to remember that General Electric is primarily a financial institution today; it makes half it profits just by moving money around in complicated ways, and it’s very unclear that they’re doing anything that’s of value to the economy. Mass public education first was introduced in the United States in the nineteenth century as a way of training the largely rural workforce here for industry … I don’t think that any sane human being can look around at the world and not figure that things have to be done — take a walk through the streets, you’ll find plenty of things that have to be done. So get started doing them. But you’re not going to be able to do them alone. It’s certainly true that as the threats mount, it may energize people — but you don’t wait for that to happen: first you have to prepare the ground. One of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government’s the power. The government’s not the power; the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants. There’s a popular perception certainly that violence is greater today — but that’s mostly propaganda: it’s just part of the whole effort to make people frightened, so that they’ll abandon their rights. And of course it all has a real racist undertone to it; there are little code words that are used — “Willie Horton” for example, to try to get everyone to think there’s some black man out there trying to rape their daughter. More democratic societies, including the United States, instituted measures to impose discipline on the domestic population and to institute unpopular measures under the guise of “combating terror,” exploiting the atmosphere of fear and the demand for “patriotism” — which in practice means: “You shut up and I’ll pursue my own agenda relentlessly.” The Bush administration used the opportunity to advance its assault against most of the population, and future generations, in service to the narrow corporate interests that dominate the administration to an extent even beyond the norm. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued — they may be essential to survival. You should start by being skeptical about anything that comes to you from any sort of power system — and about everything else too. You should be skeptical about what I tell you — why should you believe a word of it? I got my own ax to grind. So figure it out for yourself. There really is no other answer. There’s a fair possibility — certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it — that within a couple hundred years the world’s water level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed. All right, if we don’t start to do something about that now, it’s not impossible that that’ll happen. In fact, it’s even likely. Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical. If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. The other interesting aspect of Sanders’s positions is that they’re quite strongly supported by the general public, and have been for a long time. That’s true on taxes. It’s true on healthcare. So, take, say, healthcare. His proposal for a national healthcare system, meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has, at half the per capita cost of the United States and comparable or better outcomes, that’s considered very radical. But it’s been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time. So, you go back, say, to the Reagan—right now, for example, latest polls, about 60 percent of the population favor it. When Obama put through the Affordable Care Act, there was, you recall, a public option. But that was dropped. It was dropped even though it was supported by about almost two-thirds of the population. You go back earlier, say, to the Reagan years, about 70 percent of the population thought that national healthcare should be in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious right. And, in fact, about 40 percent of the population thought it was in the Constitution, again, because it’s such an obvious right. The same is true on tax policy and others. So we have this phenomenon where someone is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years, that are supported by a large part, often a considerable majority, of the population, but he’s dismissed as radical and extremist. That’s an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period, so far to the right that the contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. The assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on. I mean, there’s no big secret about that — the media won’t tell you and scholarship won’t tell you, but all you have to do is look at declassified government documents and this is all explained very frankly and explicitly. It is worth remembering — particularly since it has been so uniformly suppressed — that the U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. There’s a streak of independence and opposition to authority in the United States which probably is unique in the world. Obviously it can show up in anti-social ways, like running around with assault rifles and so on. But it can show up in very healthy ways too, and the trick is to make it show up in healthy ways, like opposition to illegitimate authority. We have more wealth and income inequality today than we’ve had since the 1920s. We have all of these enormous issues. And what big money can do is put an unbelievable amount of TV and radio ads out there to deflect attention from the real issues facing the American people. Ask yourself a simple question: how come marijuana is illegal but tobacco is legal? It can’t be because of the health impact, because it’s exactly the other way around — there has never been a fatality from marijuana use among sixty million reported in the United States, whereas tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. … The Southern intellectuals were very supportive of our version of apartheid. Either they openly supported it, or they kept quiet. [Spectator sports] occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that’s part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by dominant institutions. It’s extremely hard to lead a deeply committed life in several different areas and have them all work. Why do I live in the suburbs? Because my wife and I wanted our kids to go to a good school — first person to tell you. Of course I did that, and people who have that option will do it — but the idea is to set up a system in which people don’t ever have to face that narrow set of alternatives, all of them awful. In Reagan’s America, the jail population in the U.S. more than tripled – tripled – and it’s been going up very fast ever since.
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The ideals that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth.
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