Country quotes
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"The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on."
"I think this country and the world would be far better off if the US is not an outlaw state."
"In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia."
"If you listen to the talk shows, which are rabid right-wing, and very interesting, an important fact about the United States, they reach a huge audience. And they're very uniform. So right wing, I don't think you can even find an analog in your, but they reach a mass audience, and their view is that the corporations are liberal. Their appeal to the population is, "the country is run by liberals, they own the corporations, they run the government, they own the media, and they don't care about us ordinary people.""
"I know of only one country, at least to my knowledge, which has a dissident culture where leading figures, I mean, the most famous writers, journalists, academics and so on, are not only critical of state policy, but are constantly carrying out civil disobedience and risking imprisonment and often being imprisoned, standing up for people's rights. That's Turkey."
"Iran has been calling for it for years, and the Arab countries support it. Everyone except the United States and Israel support it. The U.S. won't allow it because it means inspecting Israel's nuclear weapons. The U.S. has continued to block it, and in fact blocked it again just a couple of days ago; it just wasn't widely reported. Iran's nuclear program, as U.S. intelligence points out, is deterrent, and the bottom line is that the U.S. and Israel don't want Iran to have a deterrent."
"Most of the population in America is disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. Just look at the passionate rhetoric about how we can't stand by when a country uses weapons to kill innocent civilians."
"The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important."
"Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions."
"Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial."
"In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society."
"Kaplan can't understand trivialities. The triviality here is that nobody except the ultra right-wing jingoists like Kaplan are comparing atrocities by various countries. What honest people are saying seems to be incomprehensible: that we should keep to the elementary moral level of the gospels. We should pay attention to our own crimes and stop committing them. This would be true even if we were killing one person, OK? And it's even more true when we're killing millions of people."
"Let my country die for me."
"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight."
"The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls - the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."
"It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate."
"But obviously, we can't afford to make some bad long-term decisions with regard to basic commitments our country has - trade those away for some short-term assistance that may or may not be there a month from now."
"People in Michigan are good at separating fact from fiction. They know, better than most of the country, what happens to the economy and jobs when the scales are tipped too far in favor of one group over another."
"You know, the interesting thing about having traveled around the country as much as I have, and I think it's sort of inadvertently what made me come out or at least begin doing things within the community and thinking more about that, was that I get to travel quite a bit."
"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."
