Non-Trivial Quotes

Daniel Berrigan

General Omar Bradley

Winston Churchill

Anatole France

Ken Livingstone

President Abraham Lincoln

General Douglas MacArthur

General David M. Shoup

Sir Josiah Stamp

Tacitus

Charles Wilson


 

"I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed."

Daniel Berrigan


 

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

General Omar Bradley


 

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

Winston Churchill


 

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread -- the rich as well as the poor."

Anatole France


 

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood ... It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

President Abraham Lincoln

The passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.


 

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

Ken Livingstone, Member of Parliament


 

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency ... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

General Douglas MacArthur, 1957


 

"In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemoller


 

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans.

General David M. Shoup, May 14, 1966

Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63,
and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor


 

The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases.

Sir Josiah Stamp


 

"They made it a desert and called it peace."

Tacitus


 

"The revulsion against war ... will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy."

Charles Wilson, head of General Electric, internal memo, 1944




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