America Falling Quotes
If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream
and never be our destiny.
-- Ren'e de Visme Williamson
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"If America ever falls, it will be an inside job". (Paul Harvey)(It's happening now.)
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"... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those
who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent,
and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." -- Voltarine de Cleyre (Wake up sleepy Americans!)
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"Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we've been very successful." - John Perkins
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"Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?" Kahlil Gibran
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A great wave of oppressive tyranny isn't going to strike, but rather a slow seepage of oppressive laws and regulations from within will sink the American dream of liberty: George Baumler
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The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home: James Madison: US fourth president, 1751-1836
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This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector: Plato: Ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
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The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience: Albert Camus: French novelist, essayist, and playwright.1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. 1913-1960
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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged Noam Chomsky -
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"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.": Howard Zinn, historian and author
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"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments". Michael Parenti
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"Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future." - Adolf Hitler
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"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." - Robert M. Hutchins
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"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now" - J. G. Ballard
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"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."-- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author
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When people ask me, 'Why can't labor organize the way it did in the thirties?' the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal. ~ Thomas Geoghegan
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Many of the most serious dangers facing Americans today stem from our "special relationship" with Israel. CNI
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"Since 9/11 2011, America has become a police state." Amitai Tsedek
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"The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate.. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred..." Franklin D. Roosevelt
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"We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love." Whitney Moore, Jr.
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"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." - Noam Chomsky (Note: This not outside terrorists who are doing this, it is people in high places within the system.)
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"I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." - George W. Bush, September 11, 2001, quoted in Clarke, Against All Enemies (2004), p. 24
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"For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit." - Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
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"The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever." - Federico Garcia Lorca - Spanish Poet and Playwright - 1898-1936
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". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. " Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery.
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"What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a 'philosophy of futility' and 'lack of purpose in life' to 'concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption'. Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry, and, in the political realm, to the self described 'intelligent minorities' who administer power." - Noam Chomsky
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All that is left of America is banality and self-delusion."- Noam Chomsky
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"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility." - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." William Casey, CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)
"It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them." -Adolph Hitler
We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Katherine Graham
"We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained." - Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
"The two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a 'gentleman's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote ... May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties." - W.E.B. DuBois
"Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price-individually and collectively-for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene." Chalmers Johnson
"The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them-violence." Chris Hedges
"How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?" Howard Zinn
The state-corporate fraudsters, murderers and liars who wrap themselves in the language of freedom and democracy have been getting away with it for so long. Colin Todhunter
"Some of the character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed in many within the political arena... [They] share the traits of psychopaths who are not sensitive to altruistic appeals, such as sympathy for their victims or remorse or guilt over their crimes. They possess the personality traits of lying, narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. These are the people to whom we have entrusted our fate. Is it any wonder that America is failing at home and world-wide?" - Jim Kouri
Any president engaged in lying and empire-building must have some of the traits of a psychopath ... To murder innocent people in order to aggrandize the American Empire would be extremely difficult if not impossible for someone who feels empathy, remorse and guilt and who is incapable of lying. It might even be suggested that having at least some psychopathic traits is a qualification for the job."
- David Model, "Lying for Empire"
"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society - one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security." - Michael Lerner, journalist
"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." - William Blum
"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair." - William Blum
"If the assessments of such historians are correct, it should be clear that cultures whose foundations are deeply set in violence, war, centralized power, fear, disrespect for life, along with the looting and scavenging which, alone, can sustain a privileged caste of cannibals, are fated for collapse. When cannibals have finally despoiled the well-conditioned zombies of the life-force and other energies upon which all of life depends, they will, like other parasites, have to look for new hosts upon which to feed their voracious appetites." -Butler Shaffer
"The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they - the herd, that is - are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's called an election." - Noam Chomsky
"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." - Sydney Schanberg
"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world. Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees." - Tom Fenton
"Americans are wonderfully courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools. They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American is what they live for. " - Brian Reade, London columnist
The USA is best characterized as a decomposing corpse of a nation lorded over by a tiny clique of oligarchs who control the herd by wielding Orwellian methods of mind control. So far gone is the populace that most of them think that things are just peachy—there is an economic recovery, don't you know—but a few of them do realize that they all have lots of personal issues with things like violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and gluttony. But don't call them a nation of violent, drug-abusing gluttons, because that would be insulting. In any case, you can't call them anything, because they aren't listening, for they are too busy fiddling with their electronic life support units to which they have become addicted. Thanks to Facebook and the like they are now so far inside Plato's cave that even the shadows they see aren't real: they are computer simulations of shadows of other computer simulations. Dmitry Orlov (From article Extinct-Extincter-Extinctest)
"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Under Republican Bush and Democrat Obama more and more of America's children are going hungry, 2015)
Let America Be America Again
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
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"When the West collapses from its own evil, peace will return to the world." Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy