Thought For Today
- Collected by Wes Penre, Webmaster of Illuminati News -

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Thoughts Index

December 2004:

December 31, 2004

"Human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our own ignorance about ourselves."
Carl Sagan

December 30, 2004

"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty."  
Anne Louise Germaine de Stael - (1766-1817) French author

December 29, 2004

"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 of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti, political scientist, author

December 28, 2004

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."
Eugene Victor Debs

December 27, 2004

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Arthur Miller playwright

December 26, 2004

"They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."
U.S. Brig. General William Looney Washington Post, August 30, 1999

December 25, 2004

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

December 24, 2004

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

December 23, 2004

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service."
General Smedley Butler. USMC (Ret.)

December 22, 2004

Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind:
George Orwell

December 21, 2004

"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal. "
John F. Kennedy

December 20, 2004

"It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return."
 Socrates 469 - 399 BC

December 19, 2004

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951

December 18, 2004

The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience." :
Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government

December 17, 2004

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses."
Edward Abbey

December 16, 2004

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice:
John Adams

December 14, 2004

Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away."
Immanuel Kant

December 12, 2004

Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress:
Frederick Douglass

December 11, 2004

The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.
- Joseph Mengele

December 10, 2004

" ... 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

December 9, 2004

The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent:
Charles Eliot Norton

December 8, 2004

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

December 7, 2004

COWARDICE, n. A charge often leveled by all-American types against those who stand up for their beliefs by refusing to fight in wars they find unconscionable, and who willingly go to prison or into exile in order to avoid violating their own consciences. These 'cowards' are to be contrasted with red-blooded, 'patriotic' youths who literally bend over, grab their ankles, submit to the government, fight in wars they do not understand (or disapprove of), and blindly obey orders to maim and to kill simply because they are ordered to do so-all to the howling approval of the all-American mob. This type of behavior is commonly termed 'courageous.'"
Chaz Bufe

December 6, 2004

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.":
Paul Wolfowitz, USA Deputy Defence Secretary in an interview in the July 2003 issue of magazine Vanity Fair

December 5, 2004

"War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder."
 Alexander Berkman

December 4, 2004

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."
-John Adams

December 3, 2004

"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.":
David Frum, speachwriter for USA president, George W Bush

December 2, 2004

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side:
Aristotle

December 1, 2004

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." 
William Blake