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.
The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.
It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.
I don’t fight fascists because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.
The arts often realize human truths well before other branches of human endeavor.
We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.