Political Quotes

[Snoopy]

Many people have found in Buddhism – and in its suspicion of mental and intellectual abstractions – a practical way to resist the “power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.” But such is the hold of secular ideologies in the modern West that a mainstream intellectual invoking Buddhism would more often than not provoke the kind of derision reserved for anything vaguely religious or spiritual. It is a grim reflection on the life of the mind in the new century that while apparently respectable intellectuals recycle selective historical “facts” and line up to serve the manipulators of reality in the trahison des clercs, a subtle moral philosophy such as Buddhism cannot speak its name in the public sphere.

Pankaj Mishra.

[Tao_Equus]

Those are my principles!... and if you dont like them...well I have others.

Groucho Marx

[Pathless]

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

--Thomas Jefferson

and

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."

--Thomas Jefferson, 1787

and

"But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years?"

--Thomas Jefferson, 1789

and

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny."

--Thomas Jefferson

[Pathless]

"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

--John Quincy Adams

[Pathless]

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

--Samuel Adams

[Pathless]

"Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"

--Alexander Hamilton

[Pathless]

Another quote that evidences how far "Americans," with our complacent lives of comfort and instantly gratified whims, have strayed from the early visions of "Americans" :

"Born often another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistable torrent which draws all about him, the American has not time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him."

--Alexis de Tocqueville

[Snoopy]

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

- VP Henry Wallace.

Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic Or Republican Fascism?

[Pathless]

good one Snoop.

[Pathless]

“The question is, ‘Who ought to make that decision, the Congress or the commanders?' As you know, my position is clear – I’m the commander guy.”

--Dubya. May 2, 2007

He'll be here all week, folks.

[Pathless]

"And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

--Anais Nin

[Pathless]

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

--Noam Chomsky

[Pathless]

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

--Anne Lamott

[Pathless]

"I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And I know and love my own people too, the swine. I'm a patriot. I'm a dangerous man."

--Edward Abbey

[Pathless]

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bull-!-!, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

--Hunter S. Thompson
"The Wave Speech" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas