Thought for Today
Collected by Wes Penre, August 2007

 

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Thoughts Archives

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August 31.

 

"No government which governs by the use of force can survive except by force. There is no going back because force begets force and the perpetrators of crimes live in fear that they might become victims in their turn."
Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo (b. 1948) - Reconciliation Speech of 24/2/99 at St Mary's Cathedral Hall, Sydney, NSW
 

August 30.

 

"It is far easier to fight for principals than to live up to them."
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

August 29.

 

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate

August 28.

 

"The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world."
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) American political leader, orator

August 27.

 

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
 

August 26.

 

"If exposed long enough to the tomtoms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with savages. Assemble a mob of men and women, treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the inside cover of "The Devils of Loudun" from 1952

August 25.

 

"The loud sounds and the bright lights of today are tremendous indoctrination tools."
Frank Zappa (1940-1993), world-famous musician and entertainer

August 24.

"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people."
David Edwards (b. 1962) - British columnist - Source: Burning All Illusions, 1996

August 23.

"In the last analysis we must be judged by what we do and not by what we believe. We are as we behave"
Geoffrey L. Rudd, The British Vegetarian, September/October 1962

August 22.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any"
Alice Walker (b. 1944)

August 21.

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961

August 20.

"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."
Stephen King (b. 1947)

August 19.

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak" Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961)

August 18.

"America Has Never Left Nov. 22, 1963 [The Kennedy assassination. editor's note]. And until they continue to "beat around the Bush," so to speak, America will always remain in that cursed day."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

August 17.

"[t]he Reds have been working around the clock in this study of the scientific manipulation and control of information. It is based on the findings of Pavlov which say that a man, like an animal, conditioned to respond to certain impulses, can be conditioned to respond to words, phrases and symbols. [Rock music and "rap "- the rage of the current young - immediately come to mind.] Therefore you pour in the words, phrases and symbols to which he will respond without thinking. And then you withhold other certain words which will cause him to respond in a way which you may not desire. It is the scientific control of human beings by means of control information."
Speech by Herbert Philbrick (1915-1993), Ex-Communist who wrote "I Led Three Lives"

August 16.

"We are meat in which habits have taken up residence. We are a result of the way other people have acted to us. We are the reactions. Having conditioned reflexes means carrying about pieces of past realities . . . We think with our habits, and our emotional training determines our thinking. Where there is a conditioned reflex, there is no will. Our "will power" is dependent on our previously learned reflexes."
Andrew Salte, from "Conditioned Reflex Therapy", published in 1949

August 15.

"In the Land of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King"
Desiderius Erasmus (1466 - 1536), Adagia (III, IV, 96), Dutch author, philosopher, & scholar

August 14.

"Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected "radicals" without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity..."
Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. (1855-1925) U.S. Senator - Source: The Progressive, March 1920

August 13.

"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it"
Arabic Proverb

August 12.

 

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), British novelist and author of the "The Chronicles of Narnia"

August 11.

"And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war."
Aristotle (384BC-322BC)

August 10.

"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime."
Olavo de Carvalho (1949-)

August 09.

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him"
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

August 08.

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing tactics, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception"
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

August 08.

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.'"
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1923-1968), "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963

August 07.

"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years"
Lysander Spooner - (1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist

August 06.

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may"
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

August 05.

"The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press." . . . . "If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." "At the Audubon, December 13, 1964."
Malcolm X (1925-1965) In Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman, 96-114. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964, 101

August 04.

Good men will never lack good laws nor allow bad ones
 William Penn (1644-1718) in 1681, America, Character Counts
 

August 03.

"When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and defending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most people choose the later course"
W. Lance Bennett
 

August 02.

"The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."
George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author Source: Inside the Whale, 1940
 

August 01.

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
 Howard Zinn, (1922-), U.S. historian, 1993