Decentralize.tv

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a point when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.”

~Albert Einstein

“Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.”

~George Bush Senior (speaking in an interview with Washington Journalist, Sarah McClendon, in December 1992)

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.”

~Bill Hicks

“Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.”

~Senator J. William Fulbright

“We weren’t raised to protest. We weren’t raised to question. We were raised to wave the flag. To pledge allegiance. ‘My country, right or wrong.’ It’s a terrible, terrible trap.”

~Phil Donahue

“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crime. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity…will respect the less important and arbitrary ones… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

~Thomas Jefferson, quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria

“The United States is evolving into a corporate oligarchy that merely wears the trappings of a democracy.”

~Robert Kaplan

“The truth hurts, but denial is what will kill you.”

~Anonymous

“No people can be both ignorant and free.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“What’s public opinion? It’s the education system plus the media.”

~Mark Green (President of Air America radio)

“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

“Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed.”

~I.F. Stone

“This is how veal gets produced: A [male dairy] calf is taken from his mother, placed in a small pen, tethered so that movement is impossible, then fed a bland no-protein diet. He becomes anemic and diseased. Then he is drained of his blood and killed … there is simply no way to produce veal without torture.”

~Ken Midkiff

“Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.”

~Joseph Stalin

“There have been times, living in America of late, when it seemed I was back in the Communist Moscow I left a dozen years ago. Switch to cable TV and reporters breathlessly relay the latest wisdom from the usual unnamed ‘senior administration officials… Everyone, it seems, is on-side and on-message. Just like it used to be when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin.”

~Rupert Cornwell (In a London-based Independent newspaper)

“[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don’t let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?”

~New York Times reporter John Hess

“The country is governed for the richest, for the corporation, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the expoiters.”

~Helen Keller

“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.”

~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“[Ronald] Reagan … was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy… He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government – men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire.”

~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

~International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany – 1946

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? – stupid.”

~Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965

“This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism… when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

~Benjamin Franklin

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

~Abraham Lincoln

“Fascism – A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

~The American Heritage Dictionary, 1983