Quote Only Thread

[Elihu]

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
Those who hope that we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed. Every part of our program of perestroika … is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy. ... I would like to be clearly understood ... we, the Soviet people, are for socialism. ... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. ... More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life. … We will proceed toward better socialism rather than away from it. We are saying this honestly, without trying to fool our own people or the world. Any hopes that we will begin to build a different, non-socialist society and go over to the other camp are unrealistic and futile. Those in the West who expect us to give up socialism will be disappointed. ... It’s my conviction that the human race has entered a stage where we are all dependent on each other. No other country or nation should be regarded in total separation from another, let alone pitted against another. That’s what our communist vocabulary calls internationalism and it means promoting universal human values.

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
In our discussions here at the forum there was no trace of the futile debate about what is better, capitalism or socialism...We should seek a synthesis of ideas and values that have proven their viability...

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.

Mikhail Gorbachev quotes:
I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

[Elihu]

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

[Jeff]

A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism.

[dada]

It is impossible to appreciate the genius of the world's greatest rabbit without understanding Fudd: this bald-headed, slow-witted, hot-tempered, timid, petty-bourgeois dwarf with a speech defect, whose principal activity is the defense of his private property. Fudd is the perfect characterization of a specifically modern type: the petty bureaucrat, the authoritarian mediocrity, nephew or grandson of Pa Ubu. If the Ubus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin) dominated the period between the two wars, for the last thirty [sixty] years it has been the Fudds who have directed our misery: Fudds and more Fudds in the White House; Fudds on the Central Committees of the so-called Communist parties; all the popes have been Fudds; the best-selling novelists are all Fudds; Louis Aragon and Salvador Dali, beginning as anti-Fudds, degenerated into two of the worst of all possible Fudds. Almost alone against them all, Bugs Bunny stands as a veritable symbol of irreducible recalcitrance.

If the Bunny/Fudd choreography reflects a particular historic moment in the class struggle - a period of class "Symmetry" in which the workers here and there win a few of their demands, only to be chased back into their holes in the ground - nonetheless the mythic content of this drama exceeds its original formal limitations. The very appearance on the stage of history of a character such as Bugs Bunny is proof that some day all of the Fudds will be vanquished - that some day all the carrots in the world will be ours.

Until then, one can scarcely imagine a better model to offer our children than this bold creature who, with his four rabbit's feet, is the good luck charm of total revolt. Confronted by any and all apologists for the status quo, Bugs Bunny always has the last word: "Don't think it hasn't been lovely, because it hasn't"

-Franklin Rosemont

[Nordic]

Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.

-- "The Dictator", movie, 2012

[Nordic]

"There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hens lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need."
-Alan Moore

[Elihu]

Patrick Henry :

“Consider what you are about to do before you part with the government. Take longer time in reckoning things; revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe; similar examples are to be found in ancient Greece and ancient Rome — instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few…

But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire..."

[Ben D]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken

[Elihu]

“It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live.”

Mark Twain - 1896

[brainpanhandler]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all most of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken


In Defense of Women

Chapter 13. Women and the Emotions


The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling and concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one's self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.

...

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1270/127 ... #2H_4_0016

[brainpanhandler]

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us. - Chris Hedges

[Allegro]

From American Dream’s Economic Aspects of “Love” image post

• The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
  - Helen Keller REFER.

[Inkwhyring]

"Ah do what ah want" Cartman,from South Park

[chump]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... mself.html

Aaron Swartz is a difficult puzzle. He was a programmer who resisted the description, a dot-com millionaire who lived in a rented one-room studio. He could be a troublesome collaborator but an effective troubleshooter. He had a talent for making powerful friends, and for driving them away. He had scores of interests, and he indulged them all. In August 2007, he noted on his blog that he’d “signed up to build a comprehensive catalog of every book, write three books of my own (since largely abandoned), consult on a not-for-profit project, help build an encyclopedia of jobs, get a new weblog off the ground, found a startup, mentor two ambitious Google Summer of Code projects (stay tuned), build a Gmail clone, write a new online bookreader, start a career in journalism, appear in a documentary, and research and co-author a paper.” Also, his productivity had been hampered because he’d fallen in love, which “takes a shockingly huge amount of time.”

[MacCruiskeen]

Ever since Reagan, it’s become de rigeur to conclude the State of the Union with a “God bless America,” as if the nation were experiencing a recurrent sneezing fit.