Quote collection
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"Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy."
"Somebodys paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. Theyre getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations."
"We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid."
"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."
"Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'."
"One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc."
"These are questions for action, not speculation, which is idle."
"Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena."
"It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them."
"I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to."
"Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg."
"It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open."
"In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress 'suspects.'"
"The money in politics is a cash cow for the media."
"In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years."
"In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962."
"The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched."
"Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy."
"Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy."
"John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale."