Quotes

This month’s blog is simply a collection of outstanding quotes. Feel free to comment/send in your quotes.

Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism:

• “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Bill Hicks:

• “Here is my final point. About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography and smoking and everything else. What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I f***, what I take into my body – as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet! I’m not scary. I’m basically just a joke-blower. That’s basically all I am, a joke-blower on the back of some Mexican gardener, blowing jokes all over the driveway, a fairly harmless guy, believer in love and truth, anti-war, believer in the values under which this country was originally founded: Freedom of f****** expression.”
• “And for those of you out there who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about this, I’ll answer it for you. It’s none of your f****** business! Take that to the bank, cash it, and take it on a f****** vacation out of everybody’s life.”

Lucie Aubrac:

• “Resistance is not just something locked away in the period 1939-45. Resistance is a way of life, an intellectual and emotional reaction to anything which threatens human liberty.”

Immanuel Kant:

• “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!] Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”
• “The public use of a man’s reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men…”
• “By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.”
• “Do what is right, though the world may perish.”
• “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”
• “To be is to do.”

 Edward R. Murrow:

• “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility.”
  - From the March 9, 1954, “See It Now” television broadcast on Senator Joe McCarthy.
  
• “A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.”
• About television: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”
  – RTNDA Convention Speech, October 15

John F. Kennedy:

• To Senator Mansfield: “after I am re-elected I will smash the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter them to the wind.”

Abraham Lincoln:

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

President Eisenhower:

• Eisenhower made his last speech as president on 17th January, 1961. Probably the most controversial speech of his career he gave the American people a serious warning about the situation that faced them:
  “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

David Rockefeller:

• David Rockefeller Statement to the United Nations Business Council in September 1994:
  “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
• “For David Rockefeller, the Presidency of the United States would be a demotion.”
  - The standard joke in America for a time in the 1970’s, as quoted in Harr & Johnson The Rockefeller Conscience; An American Family in Public and in Private, 1991, (p.217).
  
• The journalist Bill Moyers, a former speechwriter for president Johnson, in his 1980 TV special, The World of David Rockefeller, described the plutocrat respectively as “the unelected if indisputable chairman of the American Establishment” and “one of the most powerful, influential and richest men in America”, who “sits at the hub of a vast network of financiers, industrialists and politicians whose reach encircles the globe.”
  - Will Banyan, 2006, (p.9).
  
• “For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
  - From Rockefeller’s “Memoirs”, (p.405).