Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe.
Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.
There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.
It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.
One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible...
The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth.
Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.
The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.
Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.
Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.
What kind of a world are we going to leave the next generation? I, at least, want my children to look back and say, “My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages. He was trying.”
War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.