What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force.
When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.
I had volunteered for the Air Force and was an enthusiastic bombardier. While dropping bombs on Europe, I generally didn’t understand what I was doing.
The term ‘just war’ is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.
The only hope lies in the fact that the American people – like people everywhere – are basically decent people with common sense.
Are terrorists going to be deterred – are terrorists going to be scared if we react violently? No. They love it. That’s what they dote on. They dote on violence. They dote on having more reasons to commit more terrorism.
But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.
When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.
What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but “who is sitting in” – and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.
The fact that war belongs to the past, does not mean it has to be part of the future.
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.
Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.
Strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer.
The cry of the poor is is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.
The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.
The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.