Some Favorite Quotes

INTERNAL LINKS top Author Index Subject Index Top Ten Quotes 25 More Top Quotes Alphabetic by Author Alphabetic by Subject AUTHOR INDEX (click for Subject Index) Afghan Proverb Fouad Agbaria Christine Ahn Haibatullah Akhundzada Shulamit Aloni Clayton Page Aldern Philip Alston Robert Alvarez Moath al-Alwi Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani Tarik Cyril Amar Aimee Ambrose Anonymous (hacker collective) Rustom Antia Nandini Archer Arhuaco saying John Arquilla Maher al-Asbahi Julian Assange William Astore John Atcheson Michael Avenatti Katia Avilés-Vazquez Imam Farisullah Azhari Nicholson Baker Katherine Ball Banksy Sofia Barnett Ramzi Baroud Champe Barton Joe Bassey Diana Beresford-Kroeger The Holy Bible Joe Biden Black Hawk (Sauk Tribe) Napoleon Bonaparte George Box Peter Brannen Chris Bretherton Rick Bright Will Bunch Peter van Buren William deBuys Berta Cáceres Giorgio Cafiero Helen Caldicott Michael Calore Rando Calrissian Lewis Carroll Matt Cartmill Kathy Casillas Eric Champagne Athena Chavarria Xenia Cherkaev Belle Chesler Tim DeChristopher Ta-Nehisi Coates Judith Coburn Codepink Judah Cohen Leonard Cohen Juan Cole Charles Caleb Colton Joseph Conrad Jonathan Cook Acy Cooper John Cory Cosmic Charlie Stormy Daniels Ron David Nicolas JS Davies Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean Eugene V. Debs Chief Joey Dearling Dagomar Degroot Jared Diamond Miguel Diaz-Canel Digby E.L. Doctorow Frederick Douglass Rex Douglass Steve Downs Andrea Dworkin Jen Easterly Erik Edstrom Marc Edwards Tryon Edwards Albert Einstein Johan Isak Eira Charles Eisenstein Nada Elia Tom Engelhardt Richard Eskow Megan Evans FAIR William Faulkner Tim Faust Jeff Faux John Feffer Leslie Feinberg Richard P. Feynman Jane Field Robert Fisk Whitney Flynn / Jesse Sendejas Pope Francis Pope Francis Joshua Frank Benjamin Franklin Sidney Fussell Mohandas Gandhi Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Chip Gibbons Lizzey Gibbons John Glubb Gregg Gonsalves Jeff Goodell Paul Goodman Ira Graham III John Grat Glenn Greenwald Che Guevara Gerardo Guillén António Guterres Steve Guttenberg Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler Haitian Proverb Denis Halliday Conn Hallinan Galen Halverson Michael Hanes Blaine Harden Nir Hasson Zeke Hausfather Stephen Hawking Chris Hedges Richard Heinberg Bob Henson Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Anthony T. Hincks Buzz Hollander Tim Hollo Eric Holthaus Gavin Van Horn Idle No More Sean Illing Daniel Immerwahr Osama abu Irshaid Italian Proverb Janine Jackson Subrahmanyam Jaishankar Dahr Jamail William James Thomas Jefferson Ashish Jha Steven Johnson Dave Jorgenson Ramzan Kadyrov Peter Kalmus Kathy Kelly Petra Kelly Lutfullah Khairkhwa Tetiana Khimion Jonathan Kimmelman Robin Wall Kimmerer Michael Kinch Martin Luther King Jr. Paul Kingsnorth Stephen Kinzer John Kiriakou Naomi Klein Verlyn Klinkenborg Robert C. Koehler Carolyn Kormann David Korten Lindsay Koshgarian Lee Lakeman Tommy Lam Rob Larter Tom Lehrer Primo Levi Liang Wenfeng Anatol Lieven Eugene Linden Ian Lipkin Brad Lister Mike Lofgren Luis Inacio Lula da Silva Mathew Maavak Nicolás Maduro Steve Makungwa Nelson Mandela Michael Mardar Rachel Marsden Ryan Martin Karl Marx Jeff Masters Alfred McCoy TJ McGovern Bill McKibben Guy McPherson Dmitry Medvedev Golda Meir Tom Mitchell Michael Mobbs Andres Mogro George Monbiot Stefano Montanari The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) Jon Murad Ralph Nader Kumi Naidoo Robert Naiman Vanessa Nakate Näkkäläjärvi Ogden Nash Thomas Neuburger Reinhold Niebuhr Alon Nimrodi Yoko Nomura David Novak Phil Ochs Teddy Ogborn Jay Olshansky Abdaljawad Omar Ilhan Omar Deborah Orr George Orwell Michael Osterholm Michael Osterholm Patrick O'Neill John Owen Robert Parry Trita Parsi Janos Pasztor Nathaniel Persily Gustavo Petro John Pilger C.J. Polychroniou William Van Poyck Panganga Pungowiyi Vladimir Putin Stephen Pyne The Holy Qur'an John Raby Christian Randle K Sujatha Rao Diane Ravitch Fred Reed Robert Reich Rethinking Schools Malvina Reynolds Anne Rimoin Jerry Robinson David Rolnick Joseph Roth Mark Rudd Donald Rumsfeld Bertrand Russell Joe Sacco Jeffrey D. Sachs David Sackett Murad Sadygzade Abdul Hadi Safi Atef Abu Saif Steven Salaita Zuhair Salman Bernie Sanders Kshama Sawant Jeremy Scahill Gavin Schmidt Shakespeare Billy Joe Shaver Jim Shultz Haroon Siddiqui Karin Sigloch Jeremy DeSilva Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Ghassan Abu-Sittah Danny Sjursen Holly Goldberg Sloan Donna Smith Edward Snowden Norman Solomon Damien Spleeters Jill Stein and Gloria Steinem Joseph E. Stiglitz Jonathan Stoye Molly Taft Matt Taibbi Zhu Tao Tao te Ching Gene Tate Brian Terrell Günther Thallinger Ashlee Thompson Greta Thunberg Frans Timmermans Tim Tinker Mary Todd Ernst Toller Donald Trump Jim Tull Mark Twain Mitchell Valdés-Sosa Yanis Varoufakis Voltaire Asmaa Wael Jim Wallis Chip Ward Matthew Watson Kevin Williams Paul Williams Phil Wilson Peter Wohlleben James Woods World Beyond War Gary Younge Hamza Yusuf Zaigul Maria Zakharova Javad Zarif Howard Zinn James Zogby Author Unknown SUBJECT INDEX (click for Author Index) Business / Economics Capitalism Civilization Climate Change Coal Collapse Covid19, Sars-CoV-2 Democracy Diplomacy Ecology Education Elitism Empire / Colonialism / Hegemony Entomology Evil / Corruption / Oppression Evolution Extinction / Destruction Feminism Fire Freedom / Liberty / Rights Health History Humanity Imagination Indigenous Wisdom Intelligence / Wisdom Journalism Justice / Rights Knowledge / Understanding Law Leadership Morality Nature / Environment Non-violence / Peace Nuclear Palestine / Israel Police Politics and Social Sciences Prisons Problem Solving Progress Prophecy Proverbs Psychology Reality Reason / Rationality Regime Change Religion Sanctions Science, Math, Technology Security Speech Survival Terrorism Truth United States Violence War Wealth Youth (top)

TOP TEN QUOTES “To rely on the wisdom of the people in power is the worst thing you can do.”           — Howard Zinn “Resist writing off absurdities and horrors as normal, as business-as-usual, as just-the-way-the-world-is. ... Allow yourself to witness and feel the effects of a desperate and dying culture.”           — Jim Tull “The most eco-friendly thing you can do is be anti-war.”           — Katherine Ball “When you go to dig your fields, or make a pot from clay, you are disturbing the balance of things. When you walk, you are moving the air, breathing it in and out. Therefore you must make payments.”           —Arhuaco saying “Each time you refuse the invitation onto the warpath, you become more powerful. Those who can stay peaceful in the face of any terror or threat become virtual miracle-workers.”           — Charles Eisenstein “I've long since accepted that being an activist and a writer, futile though it may be, is who I am. The ship may be going down, but like the orchestra on the Titanic, I keep playing.”           — Sandy LeonVest “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”           — Mark Twain “We are living in a time that's so extreme that if it doesn't drive you mad, you are not sane.”           — Hamza Yusuf “Public compliance is crucial to the waging of war. The power we commoners wield is enormous, if only we knew it.”           — Robert C. Koehler “Research in nature’s laboratory never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.”           —Verlyn Klinkenborg 25 MORE TOP QUOTES “War is always a defeat – always, always,”           —Pope Francis “Popular revulsion for the ruling elite ... is nearly universal.”           — Chris Hedges “But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain.”           — Chris Hedges “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,”           —Lutfullah Khairkhwa (the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister) “The notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent.”           —Paul Kingsnorth “War always creates consequences well beyond the imaginations of its planners.”           —Robert C. Koehler “it’s possible to be both armed and disempowered, ... perhaps the most dangerous state of all.”           — Robert C. Koehler “In the real world, attempting to dominate a situation at gunpoint seldom results in a happy ending. Far more often, it results in tragedy.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood”           —George Monbiot “Fear the cry of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God.”           — The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Watch out for what you can’t stop.”           —Ralph Nader “Free your mind from the disabling assumption that someone is in charge of this: no one is in charge.”           — Robert Naiman “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”           —George Orwell “God is with those who patiently persevere.”           — The Holy Qur'an 8:66 “I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.”           — Fred Reed “I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.”           —Bertrand Russell “You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side.”           —Bernie Sanders “I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.”           — Edward Snowden “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosytems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”           —Greta Thunberg “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”           — Mark Twain “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”           —Voltaire “The established order is never as secure and impervious to change as those who preside over it believe it to be.”           — Jim Wallis “You cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one.”           — Chip Ward “It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state.”           —Brad Wolf “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person”           —Anonymous ALPHABETIC ORDER BY AUTHOR Afghan Proverb “Blood doesn’t wash away blood.”           —Afghan Proverb “In a Couple of Years There Will Be Nothing in Israel, Neither Arab nor Jewish.”           —Fouad Agbaria “To convince somebody to put down a gun, you first have to convince them they will not be harmed.”           —Christine Ahn and Gloria Steinem “Foreigners should not give orders.”           —Haibatullah Akhundzada “The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward.”           —Clayton Page Aldern “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, since the US now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.”           —Philip Alston “It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a deal, if he is certain you’re planning to kill him, no matter what he does.”           —Robert Alvarez “I wonder now if the U.S. follows any rule of law at all: the Geneva Conventions or even its own Constitution.”           — Moath al-Alwi (held without charge in Guantánamo since 2002) “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”           —Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country (USA) people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic…. and that justifies everything we do to the Palestinians”           —Shulamit Aloni “A house so divided against itself is not a safe place to own nukes.”           —Tarik Cyril Amar “On any given day, it’s more likely than not that the US is bombing – someone, somewhere, for some bad reason or another.”           —Tarik Cyril Amar, “addressing excessive personal consumption is something that isn’t on the agenda for the government and policymakers.”           —Aimee Ambrose “You call it war; we laugh at your battleships.”           — Anonymous (hacker collective) Rustom Antia “The key is to be ready to change one’s mind as the data comes out.”           —Rustom Antia “When warmongerers and imperialists claim to care for women's rights—don't believe them.”           —Nandini Archer “When you go to dig your fields, or make a pot from clay, you are disturbing the balance of things. When you walk, you are moving the air, breathing it in and out. Therefore you must make payments.”           —Arhuaco saying “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it.”           —John Arquilla “Death from hunger is better than humiliation... We will not bow to anyone.”           —Maher al-Asbahi (Yemeni) “You can’t build a just civilization out of ignorance and lies.”           — Julian Assange “Loaded with loot and praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has no discipline and no direction.”           — William Astore “U.S. special ops touched down in 150 countries between 2011 and 2014. And the results of all this activity have been remarkably repetitive and should by now be tragically predictable: lots of chaos spread, lots of casualties inflicted, and in every case, mission unaccomplished.”           —William Astore “There is something paternalistic and elitist about this desire to spare the poor ignorant masses the gory details. It is condescending at best, self-defeating at worst. After all, if the full nature of the challenge we face is not known, we cannot expect people take the measures needed to meet it.”           —John Atcheson “Sometimes, reality outraces our capacity for satire.”           —John Atcheson “You can't have an agreement when one party claims to know nothing about it.”           —Michael Avenatti “1.1 degree is already killing us.”           —Katia Avilés-Vazquez “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day. God will ask: ‘How did you make your money?’ And then he will ask: ‘How much suffering did you cause in the process?’”           —Imam Farisullah Azhari Nicholson Baker “Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation.”           —Nicholson Baker “Things can go wrong in a hundred different ways.”           —Nicholson Baker “The most eco-friendly thing you can do is be anti-war.”           — Katherine Ball “There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”           —Banksy “From a teen’s perspective, society has largely set youth up to fail.”           —Sofia Barnett “Religious prophecies are particularly dangerous when they are embraced by unhinged extremist politicians who wield the political clout and military power to put them into action.”           —Ramzy Baroud “The colonizer, oppressor, invader is always blind to his crimes. He sees only the violent reaction – however minuscule – of the people whom he subjugates.”           —Ramzi Baroud “Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.”           —Champe Barton “You will never understand the pains, the agony, the fear and the suffering until war comes to your doorstep.”           —Joe Bassey “And so the comic opera runs to an end. The branch is about to give. The blind man in costume looks up, not down, because he has heard the breaking of wood underneath his backside. He looks up to the sky quickly again and wonders ... ‘Is it too late to learn to fly?’”           —Diana Beresford-Kroeger The Holy Bible “How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”           —2 Samuel 1:27 (KJV) “Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself”           —Jeremiah 20:4 (KJV) “Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.”           —Isaiah 24:1 (KJV) “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. ... Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. ... Thy kingdom is divided,”           —Daniel 5:26-28 (KJV) “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.”           —Genesis 19:28 (KJV) Joe Biden “We’re always open to additional sanctions.”           —Joe Biden “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”           — Black Hawk (Sauk Tribe) “Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”           — Napoleon Bonaparte “Every model fails; but some are useful.”           —attributed to George Box “Earth’s history is very starkly telling us ... that we have been missing something crucial in the models we use to predict the future.”           —Peter Brannen “these worst-case [climate] projections have continued to prove stubbornly accurate in the 21st century so far.”           —Peter Brannen “No amount of clever technology can cover the gap that is forming. Artificial intelligence cannot compensate for a lack of human intelligence.”           —Chris Bretherton Rick Bright “Yes, a lot of data are now being generated, but I liken it to severed arteries: There is just blood spurting everywhere.”           —Rick Bright “So who are the 'good guys'? There may not be any.”           —Will Bunch “Four American presidents have made war in the region [Middle East] without success, and whoever follows Obama into the Oval Office will be number five.”           —Peter van Buren “when you have to repeatedly explain how much you're winning, you’re likely not winning much of anything at all.”           —Peter van Buren “More Americans died of alcohol poisoning (booze terror!) on New Year's Eve than terrorism.”           —Peter Van Buren “We may have dodged a bullet, but climate change has unlimited ammo.”           —William deBuys Berta Cáceres “You have the bullet … I have the word. The bullet dies when detonated, the word lives when spread.”           —Berta Cáceres “Those in the West who voiced so much concern about the lack of freedom for Afghan women under the Taliban ought to also care about their survival this winter.”           —Giorgio Cafiero “How come the physicists, engineers, and military personnel who have laced the world with nuclear weapons ready to launch never factored into their equations the probability that an immature, petulant man-baby could hold the trigger for our destruction in his hands?”           —Helen Caldicott “The human race is clearly an evolutionary aberrant on a suicidal mission.”           —Helen Caldicott “I often get the urge to just throw the phone across the room and never look at it again, but then I always end up picking it up and getting back on.”           —“Michael Calore “Happily for private profits, the votes of American politicians can be purchased very economically.”           —Rando Calrissian “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”           —Lewis Carroll “Evolution doesn’t act to yield perfection, It acts to yield function.”           —Matt Cartmill “Sometimes, God uses unusual people, people that are not exactly on the straight and narrow. And I believe God is using Mr. Trump. Like I said I don’t like his style, but I believe God is using him. He doesn’t answer to people, he does whatever.”           —Kathy Casillas “For each person in jail, a community suffers.”           —Eric Champagne “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”           —Athena Chavarria “laws are to be reckoned with, even when they are irrational.”           —Xenia Cherkaev Belle Chesler “What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?”           —Belle Chesler “When you narrow achievement to what's quantifiable, you miss so much.”           —Belle Chesler “Knowledge is rarely neat and tidy.”           —Belle Chesler “Classrooms were the duct tape securing the smashed bumper on the wreck of a car that was our public education system.”           —Belle Chesler Tim DeChristopher “an unwanted protest is far more powerful than a sanctioned one.”           —Tim DeChristopher “Protests are always criticized as being at the wrong time because those who need to protest are never the people writing the agenda. That’s the value of protest.”           — Tim DeChristopher “An inhuman system demands inhumans.”           —Ta-Nehisi Coates “I'm a good shot, but I don't carry a gun because that's the best way to get shot.”           —Judith Coburn “War doesn't save women — it kills women.”           —Codepink “science often advances slowly on issues with great complexity and large variability.”           —Judah Cohen “Sounded like the Truth; Seemed the better way; Sounded like the Truth; But it's not the Truth today.”           —Leonard Cohen “Oil is behind both catastrophes, war and the climate disaster.”           —Juan Cole “Money increasingly sets the terms for debate in the Trump era, not law or ethics.”           —Juan Cole “Overthrowing a dictator is very difficult, but it is no guarantee of liberty.”           —Juan Cole “It is an easy and a vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them, is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.”           —Charles Caleb Colton Joseph Conrad “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “And outside, the silent wilderness ... struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension.”           —Joseph Conrad (Typhoon) “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.”           —Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent) “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “They [Africans] were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “Yes, I would give the stuff [high explosives] with both hands to every man, woman, or fool that likes to come along.”           —Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent) “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

“the noblest aspirations of humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of an uneasy despotism.”           —Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes) “They [Africans] were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “They [Europeans] were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) Jonathan Cook “A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.”           —Jonathan Cook “Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community's failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.”           —Jonathan Cook “those who profit from disease have no incentive to protect health.”           —Jonathan Cook “Mother Nature been changing the geography of this country for millions of years. You think man is going to step in here and change it? Are we that naive?—that the same son of a bitch that messed it up is going to come fix it?”           —Acy Cooper “War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed.”           — John Cory “we advocate to deaf ears who tell us all not to believe your eyes.”           —Cosmic Charlie Stormy Daniels “Standing up to bullies is kind of my thing, They started it.”           —Stormy Daniels “One of the dirty little ironies of war is that it matters less who wins the war than where it was fought.”           — Ron David (Arabs & Israel for Beginners) “The ambition for a U.S. global empire is an incredibly dangerous pipe-dream.”           —Nicolas JS Davies “The political, economic and military system we live under is not only genocidal at this point, but also suicidal.”           —Nicolas JS Davies “I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.”           —Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean “Money divides communities and does not satisfy the needs of the people.”           —Chief Joey Dearling (KhoiSan tribe) “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.”           —Eugene V. Debs “It so rarely is what you’d expect.”           —Dagomar Degroot “History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly.”           — Jared Diamond “Those who try to stop love with violence are wasting their time.”           —Miguel Diaz-Canel “it is almost inevitable that military force will, at best, end up solving nothing. In fact, it almost always makes thing worse."           —Digby “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”           —attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain “History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”           —E.L. Doctorow “It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family.”           —Frederick Douglass Rex Douglass “Political parties, government agencies, the media, and most other institutions are perfectly willing to meet the market demand for confident answers, whether they're warranted or not.”           —Rex Douglass “How long can civilization survive, if we cannot learn to give up war and work cooperatively?”           —Steve Downs “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”           —Andrea Dworkin Jen Easterly “[We’re] highly digitized, highly interdependent, highly connected, and highly vulnerable.”           —Jen Easterly “The most intimate betrayal is to be sent to kill or die for nothing by your countrymen.”           —Erik Edstrom “When was the last time you heard anyone in academia publicly criticize a funding agency, no matter how outrageous their behavior?”           —Marc Edwards “Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.”           —Tryon Edwards Albert Einstein “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”           —Albert Einstein “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”           —Albert Einstein “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”           —Albert Einstein “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”           —Albert Einstein “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”           —Albert Einstein "Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water!"           — Albert Einstein Johan Isak Eira “It is idiotic we are going to destroy nature for the climate.”           —Johan Isak Eira, a reindeer herder Charles Eisenstein “Each time you refuse the invitation onto the warpath, you become more powerful. Those who can stay peaceful in the face of any terror or threat become virtual miracle-workers.”           —Charles Eisenstein “victories in war so often lead to just more war. The war is won, but the ideals for which it was fought remain as distant as ever.”           —Charles Eisenstein “If this planet and our civilization is to heal, it cannot be through winning a contest of force.”           —Charles Eisenstein “It is not easy to stay off the warpath. Each new atrocity and outrage renews the invitation into hatred.”           —Charles Eisenstein “the purpose of nonviolent action is not to make the other side look bad. That would be a kind of attack, a kind of violence, and a tactic of war. No, the purpose is to invite the other side and onlookers alike to join you in courage.”           —Charles Eisenstein “We have tried being reasonable. Perhaps it is time to be unreasonable”           —Charles Eisenstein Nada Elia “There is nothing feminist about genocide.”           —Nada Elia “The bombs may be smart, but the acts couldn’t be dumber.”           —Tom Engelhardt “And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. ... It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.”           —Tom Engelhardt (on the War against Iraq) “In America the Vengeful, even the philosophers of health can preach death.”           —Richard Eskow “the principles we support at home apply equally to human beings everywhere.”           —Richard Eskow “[Carbon] Offsetting should only be used as a last resort, and not to justify projects that should be avoided,”           —Megan Evans FAIR “Silence is not acceptable journalism.”           -FAIR “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”           —William Faulkner “In America, sickness makes you poor; poorness makes you sick; then you die.”           —Tim Faust “Wars of aggression never were and never will be free of atrocities. The decision to invade another nation is a decision to kill those who resist and get in your way — soldiers or civilians.”           — Jeff Faux John Feffer “Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the pundits warn. The Democrats brought a computer to a gunfight. Those computer models of how to win an election now lie in ruins.”           —John Feffer “The United States won't achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease.”           —John Feffer “Many states are held together by little more than surface tension.”           —John Feffer “The history of population transfers is not a pretty one.”           — John Feffer “Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.”           —John Feffer “Cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories.”           —John Feffer “Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock.”           — John Feffer “How quickly dreams can segue into nightmares.”           —John Feffer “It doesn’t take much to turn a well-armed population into a mob.”           —John Feffer “Mutual exhaustion is one of the best signs of a cease-fire that can endure.”           —John Feffer “Surrender is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.”           —Leslie Feinberg Richard P. Feynman “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”           —Richard P. Feynman “To have religion used as a pawn in the service of deceit is deeply offensive to us.”           —Jane Field “Who’s ever heard before of a ‘moderate’ with a Kalashnikov?”           — Robert Fisk “We're all compost in training.”           —Whitney Flynn / Jesse Sendejas Pope Francis “Authentic religion is a source of peace and not of violence! No one must use the name of God to commit violence! To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege. To discriminate in the name of God is inhuman.”           —Pope Francis (2014) “Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations.”           —Pope Francis “Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our re­lationship with others and with God.”           —Pope Francis “Where are you sailing, if you do not offer peace processes, creative paths to end the war in Ukraine and so many conflicts that bloody the world?”           —Pope Francis [to European Union] “War is always a defeat – always, always,”           —Pope Francis “This is cruelty, not war”           —Pope Francis (about Gaza) “And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children who are machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals—how much cruelty.”           —Pope Francis “[A] person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”           —Pope Francis “It’s difficult to believe that devastating the ocean’s depths in search of minerals for electric batteries and other technologies could offer a sustainable way to fend off climate change.”           —Joshua Frank Benjamin Franklin “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”           —Benjamin Franklin “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.”           — Benjamin Franklin “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”           — Benjamin Franklin “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”           —Benjamin Franklin “The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished.”           —Benjamin Franklin “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”           —Benjamin Franklin “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”           —Benjamin Franklin “It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.”           —Benjamin Franklin “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”           —Benjamin Franklin “I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.”           —Benjamin Franklin “There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”           —Benjamin Franklin “He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”           —Benjamin Franklin Sidney Fussell “Truly, no idea is too absurd for the surveillance state.”           —Sidney Fussell Mohandas Gandhi “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “Divisions between and within countries have provided fertile ground for this fast-moving virus to grow and gain the upper hand.”           —Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “The right to protest is both a fundamental right, and it is a core tool for achieving other fundamental rights.”           —Chip Gibbons “Most things fail most of the time.”           —Lizzie Gibney “the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse.”           —John Glubb “Men can scarcely be blamed for not learning from the history they are taught. There is nothing to learn from it, because it is not true.”           —John Glubb “No one is marshaling the world's resources [or] providing global leadership.”           —Gregg Gonsalves “In the end, pandemics are a political problem, not a scientific one.”           —Jeff Goodell Paul Goodman “One should always be suspicious of people who tell you what you want to hear.”           —Paul Goodman “I say you never call the police for anything, you call your daddy. And this is exactly why I said that, because you can call the police and then all of a sudden you’re dead.”           —Ira Graham III (to his 18 year old son on witnessing a police shooting) “Among bored consumers in post-military societies, [war] has become another entertainment. As for real war, that is like smoking, a habit of the poor.”           — John Gray (Straw Dogs) “To invade a country, dismantle its institutions, create a failed state, exit from the ensuing chaos, and then return with unending bombing campaigns is imbecility of an order that has few historical parallels.”           —John Gray “In all the many years I’ve worked in defense of free speech, I’ve never seen the principle so blatantly exploited for other ends by people who plainly don’t believe in it as was true of the Hebdo killings.”           —Glenn Greenwald “Having people devoted to attacking you [verbally] – even in unfair, invalid or personal ways – is actually valuable for keeping one honest and self-reflective.”           — Glenn Greenwald “The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.”           —Glenn Greenwald “digital lynch mobs offer no due process or appeals.”           —Glenn Greenwald “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”           —Che Guevara Gerardo Guillén “When you have everything, you don’t have to think so much. But when you have difficulties, you have to think up new ways to innovate.”           —Gerardo Guillén “Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation is not a step over a line, it is a dive over a cliff.”           —António Guterres “To think that we can preserve the rich people, and let the poor people suffer, is a stupid mistake.”           —António Guterres “We have a choice, collective action or collective suicide. It's in our hands.”           —António Guterres “There is a lack of ambition. A lack of trust. A lack of support. A lack of cooperation. And an abundance of problems around clarity and credibility. It’s time to wake up and step up.”           —Antonio Guterres “It’s like when someone dies suddenly. It’s like when someone gets hit by a car. You never expect that to happen. That’s how shocking it was.”           —Steve Guttenberg (Jan. 2025 Los Angeles area fires) Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler “In 2024 we have unconsciously or consciously given up a president for a king.”           —Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler “The higher up the tree the monkey climbs, the more all you can see of the monkey is his ass.”           — Haitian Proverb “We kill people with sanctions. They’re not a substitute for war—they are a form of warfare.”           —Denis Halliday “The UN has no capacity to stop the difficulties we’re faced with around the world.”           —Denis Halliday “Being policeman to the world was a bad decision.”           —Denis Halliday “Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.”           —Conn Hallinan “Nothing can be understood in isolation.”           —Galen Halverson “We’re sold the idea of—we’re going to liberate people, we’re fighting terrorism. Then we realize we’re the ones terrorizing people. That torments you psychologically. I’ve lost a few friends to suicide.”           —Michael Hanes “Paying attention in a democracy is a moral obligation. It is also a way to avoid repeating immoral mistakes.”           —Blaine Harden “I Wake Up and Don't Understand How I'm Still in the Same Nightmare.”           —Nir Hasson “We were really far off, and we don’t know why.”           —Zeke Hausfather (climate models) “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”           —Stephen Hawking “The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas.”           —Stephen Hawking Chris Hedges “Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption”           —Chris Hedges “militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.”           —Chris Hedges “The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.”           —Chris Hedges “Evil is protean. It mutates.”           —Chris Hedges “One day, we will all be Palestinians.”           —Chris Hedges “The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to ߠdefendߡ themselves.”           —Chris Hedges “The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.”           —Chris Hedges “We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.”           —Chris Hedges “The problem is not messaging. The problem is the messenger.”           —Chris Hedges “History may not repeat itself, but it echoes.”           —Chris Hedges “The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.”           —Chris Hedges “There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion.”           —Chris Hedges “Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war.”           —Chris Hedges “without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.”           —Chris Hedges “All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy.”           —Chris Hedges “Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception.”           —Chris Hedges “Popular revulsion for the ruling elite ... is nearly universal.”           — Chris Hedges “But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain.”           — Chris Hedges “when dying regimes collapse, they do so with dizzying speed.”           —Chris Hedges “Justice, like truth, is no longer relevant.”           —Chris Hedges “The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.”           —Chris Hedges “We too go to war to fight phantoms of our own creation.”           —Chris Hedges If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed.           --Chris Hedges Politics is a game of fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.           --Chris Hedges There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification.”           --Chris Hedges “it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.”           —Chris Hedges Pity our prophets ... Pity Julian Assange ... He committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity.           --Chris Hedges the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home           --Chris Hedges “War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences.”           —Chris Hedges “The more the empire deteriorates, the more the impetus to kill grows.”           —Chris Hedges “The only thing the ruling oligarchy truly cares about is unfettered exploitation and profit.”           —Chris Hedges “Dividing the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a tactic used to justify our crimes and demonize our enemies.”           —Chris Hedges “all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice”           —Chris Hedges Richard Heinberg “In effect, we have collectively bet our fate on the vague hope that somebody will come up with something.”           —Richard Heinberg “If we adopt a cynical attitude and do nothing, we guarantee the worst possible outcome for future generations.”           —Richard Heinberg “two-thirds of the commercially available solar panels are made with electricity generated from Chinese coal.”           —Richard Heinberg “[build] personal and community resilience ahead of what's coming. Ease the suffering. Save what can be saved.”           —Richard Heinberg “They [economists] are our modern priesthood, setting the rules of the game and creating justifications for growth-at-any-cost. They call themselves scientists, when in fact they mostly just cram data into unexamined and untested models.”           —Richard Heinberg “It's difficult to convey the degree and depth of elites' failure without descending into lurid disaster porn.”           —Richard Heinberg “Remember that we are all just frightened animals trying to survive. Help those in need. Be a good neighbor. Educate, don’t disinform.”           —Richard Heinberg “There’s no lack of information to confirm any bias we may have.”           — Richard Heinberg “Cultic thinking is habit-forming, because it fills human needs for meaning and belonging. It takes effort to break the habit.”           — Richard Heinberg “All worldviews have blind spots, and, partly because challenges to the dominant view are usually systematically discouraged, more blind spots tend to accumulate over time.           — Richard Heinberg Bob Henson “[J]ust because the models are in unison doesn’t mean they are correct!”           —Jeff Masters and Bob Henson “In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible.”           — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel “God's garden has become man's junkyard.”           —Anthony T. Hincks “We have to be willing to adapt to new data, even when it does not fit neatly into prior messaging.”           —Buzz Hollander “Resilience, not dominance, is the real strength, especially in hard times. And the secret to resilience is connected diversity, cohesion, cooperative coexistence.”           —Tim Hollo “There is no 'firefighting' in these kinds of conditions. There is only saving as many lives as possible and getting the heck out of the fire's way.”           —Eric Holthaus (Jan. 2025 Los Angeles area fires) “The National Weather Service has a higher favorability rating than Taylor Swift.”           —Eric Holthaus “the mental boundaries we keep—between the human and the wild—are more porous than we may have ever imagined.”           —Gavin Van Horn Idle No More “There have been talks of getting leaders to lead, however, we are the leaders. Remember that!”           — Idle No More “What you see quite clearly today, is the wealthy undermining the very system that made them wealthy, and a total failure to see how ruinous that is in the long term.”           —Sean Illing “the best advice would seem to be: slow down.”           —Daniel Immerwahr “What used to be a harmonious relationship between humanity and fire has become a hostile one.”           —Daniel Immerwahr “The history of humanity is the history of fire”           —Daniel Immerwahr “We used to burn what grew around us, with effects largely limited to our own day. Now we excavate plant matter from the deep past, burn it in the present, and send its byproducts wafting into an uncertain future.”           —Daniel Immerwahr “Their [the Biden Administration's] excuses don’t just ring hollow—they expose their complicity. History will not be kind to those who enabled this slaughter.” (Gaza)           —Osama abu Irshaid “After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.”           — Italian Proverb Janine Jackson “it’s important to contextualize the death penalty. It’s not like it’s the one bad thing the system does.”           —Janine Jackson “Europe should grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems.”           —Subrahmanyam Jaishankar “It isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic.”           —Dahr Jamail “The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.”           —Dahr Jamail “The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”           —William James “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”           —Thomas Jefferson “Sure you're a professor at Harvard, but you're speaking a lot of nonsense...”           —Ashish Jha “being open and honest is actually a pretty strong tool against misinformation.”           —Ashish Jha “How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? ... And, indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.”           — Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map) “Greed and stupidity make a lethal cocktail.”           — Dave Jorgenson (quoted in Empire of the Beetle) Ramzan Kadyrov “Do they really fear backlash and American and European sanctions more than the wrath of Allah Almighty?”           — Ramzan Kadyrov “Capitalism tends to elevate the worst among us into the seats of power.”           —Peter Kalmus “Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?”           —Kathy Kelly “Earth's military crisis, its climate crisis, and the paralyzing economic inequalities that burden impoverished people are linked.”           —Kathy Kelly “The enormous expenditure of energy, scientific sophistication and wealth on the military is the main cause of poverty, inflation and despair in the world.”           —Petra Kelly “Experts certainly create a formidable barrier to change.”           —Malcolm Kendrick “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,”           —Lutfullah Khairkhwa (the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister) “It can be like this: For the first time he comes, smiles widely, he can even be shy. The next time he comes, and there is emptiness in his eyes, He has been through something, and he is different.”           —Tetiana Khimion “We’ve discovered how piss-poor we are at answering certain kinds of questions that are of paramount importance for public health.”           —Jonathan Kimmelman “I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity.”           —Robin Wall Kimmerer "biology does a great job of showing the limitations of logical thought.”           —Michael Kinch “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”           — Martin Luther King Jr. Paul Kingsnorth “The notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent.”           —Paul Kingsnorth “earth-shaking events often happen slowly and quietly.”           —Stephen Kinzer “History does not repeat itself, but it delights in patterns and symmetries.”           — Stephen Kinzer “More Americans seem afraid of taking the COVID vaccine than are afraid of nuclear war.”           —Stephen Kinzer “Anarchy is a poor answer to tyranny.”           —John Kiriakou “The changes are subtle—until they’re not.”           —Naomi Klein “Research in nature’s laboratory never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.”           —Verlyn Klinkenborg Robert C. Koehler “Our need to understand never stops.”           —Robert C. Koehler “lasting solutions evolve nonviolently.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Once you start killing, it’s hard to stop.”           —Robert C. Koehler “War, in other words, does nothing but create the certainty of more war.”           —Robert C. Koehler “War will always come home, whether as loners with AK-47s or as nuclear winter.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Why are guns so damn sacred... not to mention fighter jets, nuclear weapons, our annual military budget?”           —Robert C. Koehler “The rich and powerful are clueless about change.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Just war theory makes the world numb to human slaughter.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The path to war is easy and smooth, and nuclear war is easiest of all.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Public compliance is crucial to the waging of war. The power we commoners wield is enormous, if only we knew it.”           —Robert C. Koehler “You cannot bomb and slaughter your way to security any more than you can kill your way to the truth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The one thing we do not need is another war, certainly not against Planet Earth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Far more children are killed in today's wars than combatants. War has become the killing of children.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Guns are the speech of the inarticulate.”           —Robert C. Koehler “War always creates consequences well beyond the imaginations of its planners.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Living is a collective, and sacred, endeavor.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The human condition seems as malleable as a lump of clay. Yeah, the world is changing and I'm a participant. This is evolution.”           —Robert C. Koehler “When it comes to politics, narrow thinking rules!”           —Robert C. Koehler “the planet is, in essence, an elementary school playground: an ‘anarchic realm’ full of other kids, none of whom you can really trust, some of whom are out to get you.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We lose every war we fight. Actually, ‘lose’ does not adequately describe the nature of our ongoing defeat. Every war we wage implodes, destroying the integrity that sustains us.”           — Robert C. Koehler “it’s possible to be both armed and disempowered, ... perhaps the most dangerous state of all.”           — Robert C. Koehler “War is evoked with such brainless ease.”           — Robert C. Koehler “The world hemorrhages. Refugees flow from its wounds.”           — Robert C. Koehler “We bomb civilians, killing them by the thousands, by the millions, to fight wars we do not win – because winning is not the point, or even possible. ”           —Robert Koehler “The collapse is underway, one broken soul at a time.”           — Robert C. Koehler “To long for lasting, transcendent peace — to imagine that it’s possible — is to marginalize yourself.”           —Robert C. Koehler “‘Love’ is still the religious rule, but it compliantly steps aside when it becomes time to conquer and kill.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Our real threats will not be solved, but they will certainly be amplified, by militarism.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The nature of war is to beget war: to magnify trouble, to make matters worse. War always comes home.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Good violence is no better than bad violence. Our violence is no better than theirs. Murder is murder.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Trump merely puts a face on America’s out-of-control militarism. He didn’t create it.”           —Robert Koehler “In the real world, attempting to dominate a situation at gunpoint seldom results in a happy ending. Far more often, it results in tragedy.”           —Robert C. Koehler “This is America, where we have the freedom to manifest our lethal fantasies.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We sold our soul to the devil and got nothing at all in return.”           —Robert C. Koehler “There is only moral breakdown everywhere you turn.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Engaging in the game of war is always an act of defeat.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Gun control isn’t enough. We also need hatred control.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Shockingly, ‘“climate’ doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.”           —Robert C. Koehler Carolyn Kormann “What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything?”           —Carolyn Kormann “We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement.”           —David Korten “There’s no such thing as sustainable fast fashion. And there’s no such thing as sustainable global military hegemony.”           —Lindsay Koshgarian “Militarism hasn't protected us from a pandemic that at its worst took the toll of a 9/11 every day, from poverty and instability driven by staggering inequality, or from hurricanes and wildfires made worse by climate change.”           —Lindsay Koshgarian Lee Lakeman “Everything you and I have spent our life fighting for is worse,”           —Lee Lakeman “The problem with the left is it is afraid of words like ‘morality.’ The left does not know how to distinguish between right and wrong. It does not understand what constitutes unethical behavior.”           —Lee Lakeman “Those who are not patient are not really interested in the truth.”           —Tommy Lam “things have gone further and faster than we expected. That's an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be.”           —Rob Larter “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”           —Tom Lehrer “Members of the [US Marine] Corps All hate the thought of war. They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.”           —Tom Lehrer “They can snow all their clients By calling it (hah) Science.”           —Tom Lehrer “From violence only violence is born, following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”           —Primo Levi “Basic science research has a very low return-on-investment ratio.”           —Liang Wenfeng “War is sloppy and unpredictable.”           —Anatol Lieven “We see what we want to see and assume that what we see is reality.”           —Eugene Linden “The pathetic refrain of recent years—'Nobody saw this coming'—is always a self-serving lie.”           —Eugene Linden “At an estimated cost of $25 billion, vaccinating the world [against COVID-19] is a bargain and an ethical imperative.”           —Ian Lipkin “Nature’s resilient, but we’re pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system.”           — Brad Lister “democracies, like civilization itself, are inherently fragile”           —Mike Lofgren “if there's one thing we don't want here in South America, it's war.”           —Luis Inacio Lula da Silva “We don't need conflict. We need to build peace.”           —Luis Inacio Lula da Silva Mathew Maavak “A nation cannot be sovereign if it is beholden to Big Tech!”           —Mathew Maavak “We are going for a win-win situation; we are not going to produce weapons or nuclear bombs, we are going to produce food.”           —Nicolás Maduro “Most farmers cannot do what the government says, they just rely on God,”           —Steve Makungwa “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.”           —Nelson Mandela “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”           — Nelson Mandela “Borders are porous by definition; no matter how fortified, they are more like living membranes than inorganic walls.”           —Michael Mardar “Maybe there’s something worse than a Russian ‘win’ for Ukraine: Permanent occupiers who use friendship as a pretext to stick around and suck the country dry.”           —Rachel Marsden “Americans don't really like each other very much right now.”           —Ryan Martin “Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.”           —Karl Marx “The ‘magic of the marketplace’ cannot solve the climate crisis; saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable.”           —Jeff Masters “I have become increasingly mistrustful of the stability of our climate in recent years.”           —Jeff Masters “[J]ust because the models are in unison doesn’t mean they are correct!”           —Jeff Masters and Bob Henson Alfred McCoy “empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in any foreign military deployment, a surprisingly fragile form of government.”           —Alfred McCoy “We don't have a fire season, It's year-round now.”           —TJ McGovern “The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller. ”           — Bill McKibben “Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.”           — Bill McKibben “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.”           — Guy McPherson “Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism.”           —Guy McPherson “In human history, economic wars often turned into real ones.”           —Dmitry Medvedev “In our small, controversial but highly interdependent world there can be no chief country or planetary ruler.”           —Dmitry Medvedev “after the Holocaust Jews can do whatever they want”           —Golda Meir “Fundamentally, language is still a very subtle thing”           —Tom Mitchell “I’ve given up political strategising. The political process is just too slow for the problems we face.”           —Michael Mobbs “It’s like setting a building on fire and then selling the fire extinguishers outside.”           —Andres Mogro George Monbiot “There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad.”           —George Monbiot “There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn.”           —George Monbiot “burning food is the definition of decadence.”           —George Monbiot “It is not just denial we’re up against. It’s a belief in magic.”           —George Monbiot “The idea that the global south, looted and enslaved for centuries, should owe money to its exploiters is grotesque.”           —George Monbiot “The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood”           —George Monbiot “It is certain that nature is wiser than our statesmen and many doctors. Besides, it is not corrupt.”           —Stefano Montanari The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Your actions will determine the kind of rulers that govern you.”           — The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Fear the cry of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God.”           — The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Ask God for beneficial knowledge and seek refuge with God from knowledge that is of no benefit.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Whoever travels a path in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him a path to Paradise.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “God helps the servant as long as he helps his brother.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “If you hear of a plague in a land, then do not go into it. If it happens in land where you are, then do not go out of it.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “The people before you were destroyed because they inflicted legal punishments on the poor and forgave the rich.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Verily, among the greatest acts of jihad is a word of justice in front of a tyrannical ruler.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Indeed, when people see an oppressor but do not prevent him from (doing evil), it is likely that Allah will punish them all.”           —Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) Jon Murad “Good policing is expensive. Reform can’t happen by merely saying, ‘We’re just not going to have police anymore.’”           —Jon Murad Ralph Nader “The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.”           —Ralph Nader “History teaches that Empires always devour themselves.”           — Ralph Nader “The supply chain enchains.”           —Ralph Nader “Watch out for what you can’t stop.”           —Ralph Nader “This [Donald Trump] is not a man who can learn from the bitter lessons of history.”           —Ralph Nader “Our country has more problems than it should tolerate and more solutions than it uses.”           —Ralph Nader Kumi Naidoo “Nature does not negotiate, it responds to our intransigence”           —Kumi Naidoo “Free your mind from the disabling assumption that someone is in charge of this: no one is in charge.”           — Robert Naiman “[W]e are not missing. We are just unheard.”           —Vanessa Nakate “Indigenous peoples have inherent rights. We’ve always had them. We will have them after the nation-states fail,”           —Näkkäläjärvi “We adults should be doing the work and carrying the responsibility, but then on the other hand, we have to listen to what our children and youngsters say because they understand everything so much better than many of us.”           —Näkkäläjärvi “How can you talk about sustainability if you end up violating human rights?”           —Näkkäläjärvi “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.”           —Ogden Nash “Everything in the climate prediction world is wrong to the slow side. Things are happening sooner than anyone thought they would.”           —Thomas Neuburger “every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”           —Reinhold Niebuhr “Netanyahu is the coldest and most out of touch person I have ever met.”           —Alon Nimrodi (father of Israeli hostage) “[E]verybody has a breaking point.”           —Yoko Nomura “Just like the model learns from us, we learn from the model.”           —David Novak Phil Ochs “Oh, where, oh, where are the white silver tongues, who forgot to listen to the warnings?”           —Phil Ochs (In the Heat of the Summer) Environmentalists and climate change activists must make a commitment to peace explicitly. Our planet depends on it.           --Teddy Ogborn “Financial regulators have billionaire friends who want to watch the world burn from space.”           —Teddy Ogborn “Our bodies don’t operate well when you push them beyond their warranty period.”           —S. Jay Olshansky “They [the Biden administration] chose monstrosity [in Gaza] and they leave office knowing full well that it could have been otherwise.”           —Abdaljawad Omar “Israel’s most exceptional achievement lies not in securing victory but in showcasing unrelenting devastation—a capacity to destroy on an immense scale.”           —Abdaljawad Omar “Israel has condemned itself to perpetual war.           —Abdaljawad Omar “Courage is being scared to death, but remaining resolute.”           —Ilhan Omar “A monopoly on violence is a terrifying monopoly to hold.”           — Deborah Orr George Orwell “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”           —George Orwell “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”           — George Orwell (Animal Farm) “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”           —George Orwell “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing,”           —George Orwell “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”           — George Orwell “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”           — George Orwell “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”           — George Orwell Michael Osterholm “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the [SARS-CoV-2] virus,”           —Michael Osterholm “We’re not in nearly as much control as we think.”           —Michael Osterholm “The pandemic clock is ticking. We just don’t know what time it is.”           —Michael Osterholm “To reverse climate change we must abolish war; to abolish war we need humanity and especially people of faith to reject violence and war-making.”           —Patrick O'Neill “strangers to the Spirit of God ... they combat without victory, have war without peace, and are in slavery all their days. They spend their strength for that which is not bread and their labor for that which profits not.”           —John Owen Robert Parry “the State Department has become a collective insane asylum where the inmates are in control.”           —Robert Parry “Israel should care that an entire generation of youth in the West will forever see Israel as a pariah.”           —Trita Parsi “The insurance sector is a canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate impacts.”           —Janos Pasztor “The perception of a problem can be as bad as the problem itself.”           —Nathaniel Persily “The times of genocide and extermination of an entire people cannot return. If Palestine dies, humanity dies.”           —Gustavo Petro “Gaza is the mirror of our immediate future.”           —Gustavo Petro “The real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia.”           —John Pilger “When all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds.”           —C.J. Polychroniou “‘We were just following the law’ is a lame excuse when you are the one writing the laws in the first instance.”           — William Van Poyck (murdered, June 12, 2013 by State of Florida) “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. ... We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”           —Vladimir Putin “Boundless ambition, arrogance and permissiveness inevitably lead to tragedy.”           —Vladimir Putin “We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.”           —Stephen Pyne “Mass shootings and mass burnings. Welcome to the new America.”           —Stephen Pyne The Holy Qur'an “Assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is a greater (matter) than the creation of men: Yet most men understand not.”           — The Holy Qur'an 40:57 “Verily God is full of Bounty to mankind, but most of them are ungrateful.”           — The Holy Qur'an 10:60 “And the servants of (Allah) most gracious are those who walk on the earth in humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say, ‘Peace!’”           — The Holy Qur'an 25:63 “God is with those who patiently persevere.”           — The Holy Qur'an 8:66 John Raby “What your leaders call national security makes you sick, and your taxes pay for it, in spite of yourselves.”           —John Raby “They take us away from our parents for things that they’re not doing, but then y’all not doing the things you’re supposed to do. Who’s going to take us from you?”           —Christian Randle “Once trust is broken, it’s not easily regained.”           —K Sujatha Rao “We will someday view this era as one in which the nation turned its back on its public schools, its children, and its educators.”           — Diane Ravitch Fred Reed “America crumbles economically, politically, culturally, but has the very best bombers.”           —Fred Reed “Militaries have a very poor record of predicting outcomes of wars.”           —Fred Reed “An isolated incident is business as usual that has been detected.”           —Fred Reed “I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.”           — Fred Reed “Killing lots of people and winning a war are not the same thing.”           —Fred Reed “American leadership is of dangerously low quality.”           —Fred Reed “By comparison, Alice in Wonderland seems brutally realistic.”           —Fred Reed “Hatred is not a policy.”           —Fred Reed “Surprisingly, scientists proved as susceptible to herd-think as everyone else, and equally unaware of it.”           —Fred Reed “The most tedious thing about atheists is how proud they are of themselves.”           —Fred Reed “Advertising thus became more important to the economy than anything it advertised.”           —Fred Reed Robert Reich “Most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens.”           —Robert Reich “A politics based on resentment can lurch in any direction at almost any time.”           —Robert Reich “Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on.”           —Rethinking Schools “Just a little rain; Just a little rain; What have they done to the rain?”           — Malvina Reynolds “Statistics is a cruel science.”           —Matt Reynolds “An infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere, and we’ve seen this idea come to bear many times.”           —Anne Rimoin “Empires do not have friends… they have subjects.”           —Jerry Robinson “When it is convenient for companies to focus on green commitments, then they will focus on green commitments. It's incumbent upon society not to assume that a company will pursue public benefit over profit.”           —David Rolnick “One must write, even when one realizes the printed word can no longer improve anything,”           —Joseph Roth “As intellectuals, we can talk ourselves into anything.”           —Mark Rudd “Look for what's missing. ... Few are able to see what isn't there.”           —Donald Rumsfeld Bertrand Russell “Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.”           —Bertrand Russell “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”           —Bertrand Russell “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”           —Bertrand Russell “I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.”           —Bertrand Russell “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”           —Bertrand Russell “To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.”           —Bertrand Russell “War does not determine who is right — only who is left.”           —Bertrand Russell “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”           —Bertrand Russell “The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”           —Bertrand Russell “I know a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found he was planting trees in his garden.”           —Bertrand Russell “The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”           —Bertrand Russell “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”           —Bertrand Russell “Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”           —Bertrand Russell “In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”           —Bertrand Russell “There can't be a practical reason for believing something that is not true.”           —Bertrand Russell “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”           —Bertrand Russell Joe Sacco “Perhaps the Lesser of Two Evils argument is the conversation a rotting republic deserves.”           —Joe Sacco “Democracies commit atrocities.”           —Joe Sacco “Friends do not let friends commit crimes against humanity, much less provide them with the finances and arms to do so.”           —Jeffrey D. Sachs “There are still far more experts around than is healthy for the advancement of science.”           —David Sackett “the shift from the old to the new is rarely smooth.”           —Murad Sadygzade “Making it rain even when Google says the sky should be sunny is God’s way of saying: I’m the boss,”           —Abdul Hadi Safi “Memories of war can be strangely positive, because to have them at all means you must have survived”           —Atef abu Saif “I end devoted to the same goal I had when I started: not to settle anything, but to unsettle everything”           —Steven Salaita “The world is a small village. The infection that happens in Delhi can have consequences in America and vice versa. So, your measures, however perfect they are, they are useless if they are not applied in all of the world at the same time.”           —Osama Zuhair Salman “Wars can kill thousands, but bacteria kills millions.”           —Osama Zuhair Salman Bernie Sanders “Nobody in this room or in this country has a right to say ‘I give up.’ You’ve got to jump in and start fighting.”           —Bernie Sanders “You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side.”           —Bernie Sanders “If you think it's too expensive to take care of veterans, then don't send them to war.”           — Bernie Sanders “Not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. That will change under my administration.”           —Bernie Sanders “I say we keep fighting. Are you with me?”           —Bernie Sanders “Never, ever lose your sense of outrage.”           —Bernie Sanders “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.”           —Bernie Sanders “War is never quick, and it is never easy.”           —Bernie Sanders “People in my country, the United States, and all over the world are sick and tired of spending billions and billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, war planes, missiles, bombs, and tanks.”           —Bernie Sanders “You can't be on the side of the wealthy and the powerful if you're going to really fight for working families.”           —Bernie Sanders “Americans must resist the temptation to try to forge national unity through hostility and fear.”           —Bernie Sanders “I find it somewhat amusing that you [Donald Trump] are attacking the establishment when the establishment is sitting right behind you.”           —Bernie Sanders “The threat of climate change is a very clear example of why we all need to pull together, we are in this together. The United States can't do it alone, Europe can't do it alone, China can't do it alone, and no one country can do this alone.”           —Bernie Sanders “If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist”           —Bernie Sanders Kshama Sawant “If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line.”           —Kshama Sawant “if you were a Palestinian refugee in Gaza or the family of a drone strike victim in Yemen, you’d be hard-pressed to see any difference between Republicans and Democrats at all.”           —Jeremy Scahill “You don’t get an accurate number by adding an inaccurate one to an accurate one.”           —Gavin Schmidt “'Tis the times' plague when madmen lead the blind.”           —Shakespeare “it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun”           —Billy Joe Shaver, sung be (Bobby Bare and Kris Kristofferson) “What is truly possible never reveals itself until we take the risk to seek it.”           —Jim Shultz “We have lost our capacity to think straight — a grievous self-inflicted wound.”           —Haroon Siddiqui “Variation should always be expected.”           —Karin Sigloch “Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips.”           —Jeremy DeSilva Leanne Betasamosake Simpson “Societies based on conquest cannot be sustained”           —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson “You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?”           —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson “If you dismantle the health infrastructure of urban life, you can take more lives than bombs could ever do.”           —Ghassan Abu-Sittah “infections of war can’t be contained to war zones”           —Ghassan Abu-Sittah “empires come home, folks, even if the troops never seem to.”           —Danny Sjursen “The world of plants is a slippery slope. It's hard to care just a little.”           —Holly Goldberg Sloan “There is nothing boring about going broke in 2019."           —Donna Smith “I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.”           — Edward Snowden “The best way to protect somebody is to protect everybody—especially the most vulnerable among us.”           —Edward Snowden Norman Solomon Far from being a "Jewish democratic state," Israel has evolved into a Jewish supremacist state. In the real world, "Israeli democracy" is an oxymoron. Denial does not make that any less true.           --Norman Solomon “It’s a long way from their [Pentagon Contractors'] glassed-in office suites to the places where the bombs fall.”           —Norman Solomon “The last 20 years have shown that you can't stop on-the-ground terrorism by terrorizing people from the air. Sooner or later, what goes around comes around.”           —Norman Solomon “We live in a post-truth era, where facts don’t matter anymore.”           —Damien Spleeters “What goes down in Gaza is not going to stay in Gaza.”           —Jill Stein “Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job.”           —Jill Stein “To convince somebody to put down a gun, you first have to convince them they will not be harmed.”           —Christine Ahn and Gloria Steinem “[W]hen others bear the costs of mistakes, the incentives favour self-delusion. A system that socialises losses and privatises gains is doomed to mismanage risk.”           — Joseph E. Stiglitz “Unfettered capitalism, unfettered innovation, does not lead to the general well-being of our society.”           — Joseph E. Stiglitz “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”           —Jonathan Stoye Molly Taft “[T]here’s a sense of fragility in the air.”           — Molly Taft “our job was to listen, and we talked instead.”           —Matt Taibbi “Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.”           —Matt Taibbi “we should not blindly follow experts.”           —Zhu Tao “Victory is not a pleasant thing. Those who are pleased by victory Are pleased with the slaughter of others. Those who are pleased with the slaughter of others Have no just place in this world.”           —Tao te Ching “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”           —Gene Tate “What the U.S. State Department calls 'diplomacy' is actually aggression by another name and it is questionable whether the U.S. is capable of true diplomacy.”           —Brian Terrell “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”           —Günther Thallinger “Proficiency is not contagious.”           —Ashlee Thompson Greta Thunberg “Asperger is not a disease, it's a gift.”           —Greta Thunberg “If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist”           —Greta Thunberg “‘We need to step up our game’ all our leaders keep saying. Well then, please go ahead! You don’t need UN summits, treaties or ‘deals’ to start lowering emissions. Nor do you need to wait for anyone else. You can start right this second! No-one is stopping you.”           —Greta Thunberg “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosytems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”           —Greta Thunberg “There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”           —Greta Thunberg “Our leaders are not leading. This is what leadership looks like.”           —Greta Thunberg “I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”           —Greta Thunberg “I think it's very insane and weird that people come here [Davos] in private jets to discuss climate change. It's not reasonable.”           —Greta Thunberg “I don’t care if what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is hopeful. We need to do it anyway. Even if there’s no hope left and everything is hopeless, we must do what we can.”           —Greta Thunberg “The Audience Has Grown Weary. The Show is Over”           —Greta Thunberg “This is what betrayal looks like. Whatever our so-called ‘leaders’ are doing, they are doing it wrong.”           —Greta Thunberg Frans Timmermans “We all know that European wealth was built on coal. And if we don't get rid of coal, European death will also be built on coal.”           —Frans Timmermans “Scientists are subject to perception bias.”           —Tim Tinker “History should make you uncomfortable.”           —Mary Todd “Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.”           —Ernst Toller “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.”           —Donald Trump “We had real brilliant thinkers that didn't know what the hell they were doing.”           —Donald Trump “I want people to stop dying over this ridiculous [Ukrainian] war.”           —Donald Trump Jim Tull “our culture and our survival as a species have become incompatible.”           —Jim Tull “[our culture's] compulsion is to consume and waste, grow and expand, dominate, control and compete at a speed and intensity that is destroying the societies we assume it has evolved to serve.”           —Jim Tull “while bad people exacerbate social problems, they are not the problems. Likewise, good people are not the solutions. Though individuals make consequential choices, systems rule for the most part.”           —Jim Tull “We will never get our current systems to work by trying to make people in them better, as many of us have been struggling to do.”           —Jim Tull “How we perceive and how we think are powerful forces of change.”           —Jim Tull “A new deal with the old dealers won’t save us. New dealers in the same game won’t either. A new game, or an assortment of new games, might.”           —Jim Tull “Resist writing off absurdities and horrors as normal, as business-as-usual, as just-the-way-the-world-is. ... Allow yourself to witness and feel the effects of a desperate and dying culture.”           —Jim Tull Mark Twain “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”           — Mark Twain “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”           — Mark Twain “A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”           — Mark Twain “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”           — Mark Twain “It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”           — Mark Twain “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”           — Mark Twain “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”           — Mark Twain “All generalizations are false, including this one.”           — Mark Twain “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”           — Mark Twain “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”           — Mark Twain Mitchell Valdés-Sosa “Public health in Cuba is free for everyone. We have family doctors in every neighborhood. People trust their doctors. So, we’re very puzzled when we see the news abroad that there are people that distrust the vaccines, that there are people that don’t want to get vaccinated.”           —Mitchell Valdés-Sosa “Medicines and vaccines are not a commodity. It’s not something to get rich with. It’s something to save people’s lives.”           —Mitchell Valdés-Sosa “How many times have an attempt by the American government to effect regime change anywhere in the world worked out well? Ask the women of Afghanistan. Ask the people of Iraq. How did that liberal imperialism work out for them? Not very well. Do they really propose to try this out with a nuclear power?”           —Yanis Varoufakis “Universal human rights are either universal or they mean nothing.”           —Yanis Varoufakis “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”           —Voltaire Asmaa Wael “Arabs are fearful and incapable of taking meaningful action. They’re preoccupied with oil, agreements, and business deals. Our children are slaughtered in their infancy, and these countries respond with empty slogans because they’re not the ones suffering.”           —Asmaa Wael “The established order is never as secure and impervious to change as those who preside over it believe it to be.”           — Jim Wallis “You cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one.”           — Chip Ward “If there was a decision to do geoengineering tomorrow, it would be done by white western men, and that isn't good.”           —Matthew Watson “It sounded like a war zone.”           —Kevin Williams (Jan 2025 Los Angeles area Fires) “It is remarkable that we are still discovering new aspects of climate change after decades of research. It makes me wonder what other changes our emissions are inflicting on the atmosphere that we haven’t discovered yet.”           —Paul Williams “The fiercest fighters might well be those who have no chance to succeed.”           —Phil Wilson “anyone who does not consider that hopelessness may be a rational response to current reality is living in a fantasy world.”           —Phil Wilson “hopeless people are as likely to respond with violent rage as with passivity”           —Phil Wilson “Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses.”           —Phil Wilson “In the U.S. the pundits and politicians blame the victims as a matter of choreographed practice.”           —Phil Wilson “It’s always better to let nature do the job. I don’t know any place on Earth where a planted forest is better than a native forest.”           —Peter Wohlleben “It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state.”           —Brad Wolf “One day you're swimming in the pool, and the next day it's all gone.”           —James Woods (Jan 2025 Los Angeles area Fires) “Due to travel restrictions, the U.S. will be attempting coups only in its own capital. Normal worldwide services will resume shortly.”           —World Beyond War Gary Younge “The fact that the messenger is deranged doesn’t mean the message itself contains no significant truths.”           —Gary Younge “We are living in a time that's so extreme that if it doesn't drive you mad, you are not sane.”           —Hamza Yusuf Zaigul “You can live without freedom, but you can’t live if you have nothing to eat.”           —Zaigul ““Everything has gone haywire in the White House.”           —Maria Zakharova “Betting on outsiders to provide security is never a good gamble.”           —Javad Zarif “To rely on the wisdom of the people in power is the worst thing you can do.”           — Howard Zinn (quoted in Salt Lake Tribune, 6 Apr. 2004 “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”           —Howard Zinn “Bad behavior left unchecked will grow and fester.”           —James Zogby “Israel may be feared, but it is hated more than ever.”           —James Zogby Author Unknown “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person”           —Anonymous “The whole world is responsible for these murders, and a day will come that we say to the world, ‘You supported Americans who killed us.’”           — Anonymous Iraqi (quoted by Ali al-Fadhily, 10 July 2007) “Science stops where politics begins.”           —Anonymous “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”           —Anonymous (often attributed to Albert Einstein) “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”           —Anonymous (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain) “history is studded with unreported holocausts.”           —Anonymous “We cannot bomb our way to peace.”           —Anonymous “It’s easier to break things than it is to fix them,”           —Anonymous ALPHABETIC ORDER BY SUBJECT Business / Economics “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “An isolated incident is business as usual that has been detected.”           —Fred Reed “Advertising thus became more important to the economy than anything it advertised.”           —Fred Reed “Most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens.”           —Robert Reich “When it is convenient for companies to focus on green commitments, then they will focus on green commitments. It's incumbent upon society not to assume that a company will pursue public benefit over profit.”           —David Rolnick “Not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. That will change under my administration.”           —Bernie Sanders “[W]hen others bear the costs of mistakes, the incentives favour self-delusion. A system that socialises losses and privatises gains is doomed to mismanage risk.”           — Joseph E. Stiglitz “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”           —Günther Thallinger Capitalism “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “Capitalism tends to elevate the worst among us into the seats of power.”           —Peter Kalmus “The supply chain enchains.”           —Ralph Nader “Unfettered capitalism, unfettered innovation, does not lead to the general well-being of our society.”           — Joseph E. Stiglitz “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosytems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”           —Greta Thunberg Civilization “You can’t build a just civilization out of ignorance and lies.”           — Julian Assange “How long can civilization survive, if we cannot learn to give up war and work cooperatively?”           —Steve Downs “The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”           —William James “Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception.”           —Chris Hedges “God's garden has become man's junkyard.”           —Anthony T. Hincks “democracies, like civilization itself, are inherently fragile”           —Mike Lofgren “The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller. ”           — Bill McKibben “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.”           — Guy McPherson “In our small, controversial but highly interdependent world there can be no chief country or planetary ruler.”           —Dmitry Medvedev “every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”           —Reinhold Niebuhr Climate Change “addressing excessive personal consumption is something that isn’t on the agenda for the government and policymakers.”           —Aimee Ambrose “1.1 degree is already killing us.”           —Katia Avilés-Vazquez “Earth’s history is very starkly telling us ... that we have been missing something crucial in the models we use to predict the future.”           —Peter Brannen “these worst-case [climate] projections have continued to prove stubbornly accurate in the 21st century so far.”           —Peter Brannen “We may have dodged a bullet, but climate change has unlimited ammo.”           —William deBuys “What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?”           —Belle Chesler “Oil is behind both catastrophes, war and the climate disaster.”           —Juan Cole “[Carbon] Offsetting should only be used as a last resort, and not to justify projects that should be avoided,”           —Megan Evans “It’s difficult to believe that devastating the ocean’s depths in search of minerals for electric batteries and other technologies could offer a sustainable way to fend off climate change.”           —Joshua Frank “We were really far off, and we don’t know why.”           —Zeke Hausfather (climate models) “In effect, we have collectively bet our fate on the vague hope that somebody will come up with something.”           —Richard Heinberg “If we adopt a cynical attitude and do nothing, we guarantee the worst possible outcome for future generations.”           —Richard Heinberg “two-thirds of the commercially available solar panels are made with electricity generated from Chinese coal.”           —Richard Heinberg “[build] personal and community resilience ahead of what's coming. Ease the suffering. Save what can be saved.”           —Richard Heinberg “It isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic.”           —Dahr Jamail “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,”           —Lutfullah Khairkhwa (the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister) “I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity.”           —Robin Wall Kimmerer “The notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent.”           —Paul Kingsnorth “Shockingly, ‘“climate’ doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The ‘magic of the marketplace’ cannot solve the climate crisis; saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable.”           —Jeff Masters “I have become increasingly mistrustful of the stability of our climate in recent years.”           —Jeff Masters “It’s like setting a building on fire and then selling the fire extinguishers outside.”           —Andres Mogro “There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn.”           —George Monbiot “[W]e are not missing. We are just unheard.”           —Vanessa Nakate “Everything in the climate prediction world is wrong to the slow side. Things are happening sooner than anyone thought they would.”           —Thomas Neuburger “To reverse climate change we must abolish war; to abolish war we need humanity and especially people of faith to reject violence and war-making.”           —Patrick O'Neill “The insurance sector is a canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate impacts.”           —Janos Pasztor “The threat of climate change is a very clear example of why we all need to pull together, we are in this together. The United States can't do it alone, Europe can't do it alone, China can't do it alone, and no one country can do this alone.”           —Bernie Sanders “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”           —Günther Thallinger “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosytems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”           —Greta Thunberg “If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist”           —Greta Thunberg “We all know that European wealth was built on coal. And if we don't get rid of coal, European death will also be built on coal.”           —Frans Timmermans “If there was a decision to do geoengineering tomorrow, it would be done by white western men, and that isn't good.”           —Matthew Watson “It is remarkable that we are still discovering new aspects of climate change after decades of research. It makes me wonder what other changes our emissions are inflicting on the atmosphere that we haven’t discovered yet.”           —Paul Williams Coal “We all know that European wealth was built on coal. And if we don't get rid of coal, European death will also be built on coal.”           —Frans Timmermans Collapse “when dying regimes collapse, they do so with dizzying speed.”           —Chris Hedges “The collapse is underway, one broken soul at a time.”           — Robert C. Koehler “It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state.”           —Brad Wolf Covid19, Sars-CoV-2 “A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.”           —Jonathan Cook “Divisions between and within countries have provided fertile ground for this fast-moving virus to grow and gain the upper hand.”           —Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “In the end, pandemics are a political problem, not a scientific one.”           —Jeff Goodell “More Americans seem afraid of taking the COVID vaccine than are afraid of nuclear war.”           —Stephen Kinzer “At an estimated cost of $25 billion, vaccinating the world [against COVID-19] is a bargain and an ethical imperative.”           —Ian Lipkin “If you hear of a plague in a land, then do not go into it. If it happens in land where you are, then do not go out of it.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the [SARS-CoV-2] virus,”           —Michael Osterholm “We’re not in nearly as much control as we think.”           —Michael Osterholm “The pandemic clock is ticking. We just don’t know what time it is.”           —Michael Osterholm “An infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere, and we’ve seen this idea come to bear many times.”           —Anne Rimoin “Public health in Cuba is free for everyone. We have family doctors in every neighborhood. People trust their doctors. So, we’re very puzzled when we see the news abroad that there are people that distrust the vaccines, that there are people that don’t want to get vaccinated.”           —Mitchell Valdés-Sosa “Medicines and vaccines are not a commodity. It’s not something to get rich with. It’s something to save people’s lives.”           —Mitchell Valdés-Sosa Democracy “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “Paying attention in a democracy is a moral obligation. It is also a way to avoid repeating immoral mistakes.”           —Blaine Harden “democracies, like civilization itself, are inherently fragile”           —Mike Lofgren “Democracies commit atrocities.”           —Joe Sacco Diplomacy “To convince somebody to put down a gun, you first have to convince them they will not be harmed.”           —Christine Ahn and Gloria Steinem “It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a deal, if he is certain you’re planning to kill him, no matter what he does.”           —Robert Alvarez “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”           —Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country (USA) people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic…. and that justifies everything we do to the Palestinians”           —Shulamit Aloni “You can't have an agreement when one party claims to know nothing about it.”           —Michael Avenatti “Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation is not a step over a line, it is a dive over a cliff.”           —António Guterres “The UN has no capacity to stop the difficulties we’re faced with around the world.”           —Denis Halliday “the State Department has become a collective insane asylum where the inmates are in control.”           —Robert Parry “What the U.S. State Department calls 'diplomacy' is actually aggression by another name and it is questionable whether the U.S. is capable of true diplomacy.”           —Brian Terrell Ecology “The most eco-friendly thing you can do is be anti-war.”           — Katherine Ball “What is an ecological niche when humans have their hands in everything?”           —Carolyn Kormann “You cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one.”           — Chip Ward Education “From a teen’s perspective, society has largely set youth up to fail.”           —Sofia Barnett “When you narrow achievement to what's quantifiable, you miss so much.”           —Belle Chesler “Knowledge is rarely neat and tidy.”           —Belle Chesler “Classrooms were the duct tape securing the smashed bumper on the wreck of a car that was our public education system.”           —Belle Chesler “It is an easy and a vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them, is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.”           —Charles Caleb Colton “When was the last time you heard anyone in academia publicly criticize a funding agency, no matter how outrageous their behavior?”           —Marc Edwards “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”           —Albert Einstein “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”           —Albert Einstein “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”           —Benjamin Franklin “Remember that we are all just frightened animals trying to survive. Help those in need. Be a good neighbor. Educate, don’t disinform.”           —Richard Heinberg “Sure you're a professor at Harvard, but you're speaking a lot of nonsense...”           —Ashish Jha “the planet is, in essence, an elementary school playground: an ‘anarchic realm’ full of other kids, none of whom you can really trust, some of whom are out to get you.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We will someday view this era as one in which the nation turned its back on its public schools, its children, and its educators.”           — Diane Ravitch “Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on.”           —Rethinking Schools “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”           —Bertrand Russell “Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.”           —Bertrand Russell “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”           —Bertrand Russell “Proficiency is not contagious.”           —Ashlee Thompson “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”           — Mark Twain “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”           — Mark Twain Elitism “There is something paternalistic and elitist about this desire to spare the poor ignorant masses the gory details. It is condescending at best, self-defeating at worst. After all, if the full nature of the challenge we face is not known, we cannot expect people take the measures needed to meet it.”           —John Atcheson “It's difficult to convey the degree and depth of elites' failure without descending into lurid disaster porn.”           —Richard Heinberg Empire / Colonialism / Hegemony “The colonizer, oppressor, invader is always blind to his crimes. He sees only the violent reaction – however minuscule – of the people whom he subjugates.”           —Ramzi Baroud “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “They [Africans] were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “They [Europeans] were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. ... Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. ... Thy kingdom is divided,”           —Daniel 5:26-28 (KJV) “The ambition for a U.S. global empire is an incredibly dangerous pipe-dream.”           —Nicolas JS Davies “Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock.”           — John Feffer Pity our prophets ... Pity Julian Assange ... He committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity.           --Chris Hedges “The more the empire deteriorates, the more the impetus to kill grows.”           —Chris Hedges “War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences.”           —Chris Hedges “There’s no such thing as sustainable fast fashion. And there’s no such thing as sustainable global military hegemony.”           —Lindsay Koshgarian “Maybe there’s something worse than a Russian ‘win’ for Ukraine: Permanent occupiers who use friendship as a pretext to stick around and suck the country dry.”           —Rachel Marsden “empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in any foreign military deployment, a surprisingly fragile form of government.”           —Alfred McCoy “The idea that the global south, looted and enslaved for centuries, should owe money to its exploiters is grotesque.”           —George Monbiot “History teaches that Empires always devour themselves.”           — Ralph Nader “Empires do not have friends… they have subjects.”           —Jerry Robinson “empires come home, folks, even if the troops never seem to.”           —Danny Sjursen Entomology “I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest.”           — Fred Reed Evil / Corruption / Oppression “Evil is protean. It mutates.”           —Chris Hedges “We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.”           —Chris Hedges “In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible.”           — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel “There is nothing that cannot be corrupted, nothing good that cannot be transformed into something bad.”           —George Monbiot “burning food is the definition of decadence.”           —George Monbiot “Fear the cry of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God.”           — The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Indeed, when people see an oppressor but do not prevent him from (doing evil), it is likely that Allah will punish them all.”           —Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Perhaps the Lesser of Two Evils argument is the conversation a rotting republic deserves.”           —Joe Sacco “Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job.”           —Jill Stein Evolution “The human race is clearly an evolutionary aberrant on a suicidal mission.”           —Helen Caldicott “Evolution doesn’t act to yield perfection, It acts to yield function.”           —Matt Cartmill “The human condition seems as malleable as a lump of clay. Yeah, the world is changing and I'm a participant. This is evolution.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips.”           —Jeremy DeSilva Extinction / Destruction “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.”           — Guy McPherson “[our culture's] compulsion is to consume and waste, grow and expand, dominate, control and compete at a speed and intensity that is destroying the societies we assume it has evolved to serve.”           —Jim Tull “Resist writing off absurdities and horrors as normal, as business-as-usual, as just-the-way-the-world-is. ... Allow yourself to witness and feel the effects of a desperate and dying culture.”           —Jim Tull Feminism “When warmongerers and imperialists claim to care for women's rights—don't believe them.”           —Nandini Archer “War doesn't save women — it kills women.”           —Codepink “Standing up to bullies is kind of my thing, They started it.”           —Stormy Daniels “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”           —Andrea Dworkin “There is nothing feminist about genocide.”           —Nada Elia Fire “What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?”           —Belle Chesler “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.”           —Genesis 19:28 (KJV) “It’s like when someone dies suddenly. It’s like when someone gets hit by a car. You never expect that to happen. That’s how shocking it was.”           —Steve Guttenberg (Jan. 2025 Los Angeles area fires) “There is no 'firefighting' in these kinds of conditions. There is only saving as many lives as possible and getting the heck out of the fire's way.”           —Eric Holthaus (Jan. 2025 Los Angeles area fires) “What used to be a harmonious relationship between humanity and fire has become a hostile one.”           —Daniel Immerwahr “The history of humanity is the history of fire”           —Daniel Immerwahr “We used to burn what grew around us, with effects largely limited to our own day. Now we excavate plant matter from the deep past, burn it in the present, and send its byproducts wafting into an uncertain future.”           —Daniel Immerwahr “We don't have a fire season, It's year-round now.”           —TJ McGovern “We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.”           —Stephen Pyne “Mass shootings and mass burnings. Welcome to the new America.”           —Stephen Pyne “It sounded like a war zone.”           —Kevin Williams (Jan 2025 Los Angeles area Fires) “One day you're swimming in the pool, and the next day it's all gone.”           —James Woods (Jan 2025 Los Angeles area Fires) Freedom / Liberty / Rights “Those in the West who voiced so much concern about the lack of freedom for Afghan women under the Taliban ought to also care about their survival this winter.”           —Giorgio Cafiero “Overthrowing a dictator is very difficult, but it is no guarantee of liberty.”           —Juan Cole “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “The right to protest is both a fundamental right, and it is a core tool for achieving other fundamental rights.”           —Chip Gibbons “This is America, where we have the freedom to manifest our lethal fantasies.”           —Robert C. Koehler “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”           —George Orwell “You can live without freedom, but you can’t live if you have nothing to eat.”           —Zaigul Health “those who profit from disease have no incentive to protect health.”           —Jonathan Cook “In America the Vengeful, even the philosophers of health can preach death.”           —Richard Eskow “In America, sickness makes you poor; poorness makes you sick; then you die.”           —Tim Faust “The United States won't achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease.”           —John Feffer “It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.”           —Benjamin Franklin “We’ve discovered how piss-poor we are at answering certain kinds of questions that are of paramount importance for public health.”           —Jonathan Kimmelman “What your leaders call national security makes you sick, and your taxes pay for it, in spite of yourselves.”           —John Raby “The world is a small village. The infection that happens in Delhi can have consequences in America and vice versa. So, your measures, however perfect they are, they are useless if they are not applied in all of the world at the same time.”           —Osama Zuhair Salman “Wars can kill thousands, but bacteria kills millions.”           —Osama Zuhair Salman “If you dismantle the health infrastructure of urban life, you can take more lives than bombs could ever do.”           —Ghassan Abu-Sittah “Asperger is not a disease, it's a gift.”           —Greta Thunberg History “History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly.”           — Jared Diamond “History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”           —E.L. Doctorow “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”           —William Faulkner “The history of population transfers is not a pretty one.”           — John Feffer “Men can scarcely be blamed for not learning from the history they are taught. There is nothing to learn from it, because it is not true.”           —John Glubb “The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.”           —Chris Hedges “History may not repeat itself, but it echoes.”           —Chris Hedges “History does not repeat itself, but it delights in patterns and symmetries.”           — Stephen Kinzer “More Americans seem afraid of taking the COVID vaccine than are afraid of nuclear war.”           —Stephen Kinzer “In human history, economic wars often turned into real ones.”           —Dmitry Medvedev “History teaches that Empires always devour themselves.”           — Ralph Nader “This [Donald Trump] is not a man who can learn from the bitter lessons of history.”           —Ralph Nader “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”           —George Orwell “History should make you uncomfortable.”           —Mary Todd “history is studded with unreported holocausts.”           —Anonymous Humanity “An inhuman system demands inhumans.”           —Ta-Nehisi Coates “It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family.”           —Frederick Douglass “the principles we support at home apply equally to human beings everywhere.”           —Richard Eskow “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”           —Che Guevara “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”           — George Orwell (Animal Farm) “Friends do not let friends commit crimes against humanity, much less provide them with the finances and arms to do so.”           —Jeffrey D. Sachs “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”           — Mark Twain Imagination “The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”           —Bertrand Russell “Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.”           —Ernst Toller Indigenous Wisdom “When you go to dig your fields, or make a pot from clay, you are disturbing the balance of things. When you walk, you are moving the air, breathing it in and out. Therefore you must make payments.”           —Arhuaco saying “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”           — Black Hawk (Sauk Tribe) “Money divides communities and does not satisfy the needs of the people.”           —Chief Joey Dearling (KhoiSan tribe) “It is idiotic we are going to destroy nature for the climate.”           —Johan Isak Eira, a reindeer herder “There have been talks of getting leaders to lead, however, we are the leaders. Remember that!”           — Idle No More “Indigenous peoples have inherent rights. We’ve always had them. We will have them after the nation-states fail,”           —Näkkäläjärvi “We adults should be doing the work and carrying the responsibility, but then on the other hand, we have to listen to what our children and youngsters say because they understand everything so much better than many of us.”           —Näkkäläjärvi “How can you talk about sustainability if you end up violating human rights?”           —Näkkäläjärvi “Societies based on conquest cannot be sustained”           —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson “You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?”           —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Intelligence / Wisdom “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”           — George Orwell “The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”           —Bertrand Russell “We had real brilliant thinkers that didn't know what the hell they were doing.”           —Donald Trump “How we perceive and how we think are powerful forces of change.”           —Jim Tull “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”           — Mark Twain “To rely on the wisdom of the people in power is the worst thing you can do.”           — Howard Zinn (quoted in Salt Lake Tribune, 6 Apr. 2004 “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”           —Anonymous (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain) Journalism “Silence is not acceptable journalism.”           -FAIR “The problem is not messaging. The problem is the messenger.”           —Chris Hedges “One must write, even when one realizes the printed word can no longer improve anything,”           —Joseph Roth Justice / Rights “God helps the servant as long as he helps his brother.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “The people before you were destroyed because they inflicted legal punishments on the poor and forgave the rich.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Verily, among the greatest acts of jihad is a word of justice in front of a tyrannical ruler.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Universal human rights are either universal or they mean nothing.”           —Yanis Varoufakis “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”           —Howard Zinn Knowledge / Understanding “Nothing can be understood in isolation.”           —Galen Halverson “Our need to understand never stops.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Ask God for beneficial knowledge and seek refuge with God from knowledge that is of no benefit.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Whoever travels a path in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him a path to Paradise.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”           —Bertrand Russell Law “I wonder now if the U.S. follows any rule of law at all: the Geneva Conventions or even its own Constitution.”           — Moath al-Alwi (held without charge in Guantánamo since 2002) “laws are to be reckoned with, even when they are irrational.”           —Xenia Cherkaev “They [Africans] were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.”           —Glenn Greenwald “digital lynch mobs offer no due process or appeals.”           —Glenn Greenwald “it’s important to contextualize the death penalty. It’s not like it’s the one bad thing the system does.”           —Janine Jackson “‘We were just following the law’ is a lame excuse when you are the one writing the laws in the first instance.”           — William Van Poyck (murdered, June 12, 2013 by State of Florida) “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person”           —Anonymous Leadership “No one is marshaling the world's resources [or] providing global leadership.”           —Gregg Gonsalves “There have been talks of getting leaders to lead, however, we are the leaders. Remember that!”           — Idle No More “What your leaders call national security makes you sick, and your taxes pay for it, in spite of yourselves.”           —John Raby “American leadership is of dangerously low quality.”           —Fred Reed “'Tis the times' plague when madmen lead the blind.”           —Shakespeare “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”           —Gene Tate “‘We need to step up our game’ all our leaders keep saying. Well then, please go ahead! You don’t need UN summits, treaties or ‘deals’ to start lowering emissions. Nor do you need to wait for anyone else. You can start right this second! No-one is stopping you.”           —Greta Thunberg “Our leaders are not leading. This is what leadership looks like.”           —Greta Thunberg “This is what betrayal looks like. Whatever our so-called ‘leaders’ are doing, they are doing it wrong.”           —Greta Thunberg Morality “Paying attention in a democracy is a moral obligation. It is also a way to avoid repeating immoral mistakes.”           —Blaine Harden “There is only moral breakdown everywhere you turn.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The problem with the left is it is afraid of words like ‘morality.’ The left does not know how to distinguish between right and wrong. It does not understand what constitutes unethical behavior.”           —Lee Lakeman Nature / Environment “The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward.”           —Clayton Page Aldern “And so the comic opera runs to an end. The branch is about to give. The blind man in costume looks up, not down, because he has heard the breaking of wood underneath his backside. He looks up to the sky quickly again and wonders ... ‘Is it too late to learn to fly?’”           —Diana Beresford-Kroeger “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “And outside, the silent wilderness ... struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “Mother Nature been changing the geography of this country for millions of years. You think man is going to step in here and change it? Are we that naive?—that the same son of a bitch that messed it up is going to come fix it?”           —Acy Cooper “It is idiotic we are going to destroy nature for the climate.”           —Johan Isak Eira, a reindeer herder “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”           —Richard P. Feynman “We're all compost in training.”           —Whitney Flynn / Jesse Sendejas “Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our re­lationship with others and with God.”           —Pope Francis “God's garden has become man's junkyard.”           —Anthony T. Hincks “the mental boundaries we keep—between the human and the wild—are more porous than we may have ever imagined.”           —Gavin Van Horn “I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity.”           —Robin Wall Kimmerer “Research in nature’s laboratory never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied.”           —Verlyn Klinkenborg “Nature’s resilient, but we’re pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system.”           — Brad Lister “It is certain that nature is wiser than our statesmen and many doctors. Besides, it is not corrupt.”           —Stefano Montanari “Nature does not negotiate, it responds to our intransigence”           —Kumi Naidoo “Just a little rain; Just a little rain; What have they done to the rain?”           — Malvina Reynolds “You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?”           —Leanne Simpson “The world of plants is a slippery slope. It's hard to care just a little.”           —Holly Goldberg Sloan “You cannot steer and control an ecosystem but you might be able to dance with one.”           — Chip Ward “It’s always better to let nature do the job. I don’t know any place on Earth where a planted forest is better than a native forest.”           —Peter Wohlleben Nonviolence / Peace “You have the bullet … I have the word. The bullet dies when detonated, the word lives when spread.”           —Berta Cáceres “an unwanted protest is far more powerful than a sanctioned one.”           —Tim DeChristopher “Protests are always criticized as being at the wrong time because those who need to protest are never the people writing the agenda. That’s the value of protest.”           — Tim DeChristopher “Those who try to stop love with violence are wasting their time.”           —Miguel Diaz-Canel “Each time you refuse the invitation onto the warpath, you become more powerful. Those who can stay peaceful in the face of any terror or threat become virtual miracle-workers.”           —Charles Eisenstein “If this planet and our civilization is to heal, it cannot be through winning a contest of force.”           —Charles Eisenstein “It is not easy to stay off the warpath. Each new atrocity and outrage renews the invitation into hatred.”           —Charles Eisenstein “the purpose of nonviolent action is not to make the other side look bad. That would be a kind of attack, a kind of violence, and a tactic of war. No, the purpose is to invite the other side and onlookers alike to join you in courage.”           —Charles Eisenstein “Authentic religion is a source of peace and not of violence! No one must use the name of God to commit violence! To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege. To discriminate in the name of God is inhuman.”           —Pope Francis (2014) “Where are you sailing, if you do not offer peace processes, creative paths to end the war in Ukraine and so many conflicts that bloody the world?”           —Pope Francis [to European Union] “lasting solutions evolve nonviolently.”           —Robert C. Koehler “To long for lasting, transcendent peace — to imagine that it’s possible — is to marginalize yourself.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We don't need conflict. We need to build peace.”           —Luis Inacio Lula da Silva “We are going for a win-win situation; we are not going to produce weapons or nuclear bombs, we are going to produce food.”           —Nicolás Maduro Environmentalists and climate change activists must make a commitment to peace explicitly. Our planet depends on it.           --Teddy Ogborn “And the servants of (Allah) most gracious are those who walk on the earth in humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say, ‘Peace!’”           — The Holy Qur'an 25:63 “You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side.”           —Bernie Sanders Nuclear “A house so divided against itself is not a safe place to own nukes.”           —Tarik Cyril Amar "Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water!"           — Albert Einstein “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.”           —Donald Trump Palestine / Israel “In a Couple of Years There Will Be Nothing in Israel, Neither Arab nor Jewish.”           —Fouad Agbaria “One day, we will all be Palestinians.”           —Chris Hedges “The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to ߠdefendߡ themselves.”           —Chris Hedges “Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war.”           —Chris Hedges “it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.”           —Chris Hedges “Their [the Biden Administration's] excuses don’t just ring hollow—they expose their complicity. History will not be kind to those who enabled this slaughter.” (Gaza)           —Osama abu Irshaid “after the Holocaust Jews can do whatever they want”           —Golda Meir “Netanyahu is the coldest and most out of touch person I have ever met.”           —Alon Nimrodi (father of Israeli hostage) “They [the Biden administration] chose monstrosity [in Gaza] and they leave office knowing full well that it could have been otherwise.”           —Abdaljawad Omar “Israel’s most exceptional achievement lies not in securing victory but in showcasing unrelenting devastation—a capacity to destroy on an immense scale.”           —Abdaljawad Omar “Israel has condemned itself to perpetual war.           —Abdaljawad Omar “Israel should care that an entire generation of youth in the West will forever see Israel as a pariah.”           —Trita Parsi “The times of genocide and extermination of an entire people cannot return. If Palestine dies, humanity dies.”           —Gustavo Petro “Gaza is the mirror of our immediate future.”           —Gustavo Petro “I end devoted to the same goal I had when I started: not to settle anything, but to unsettle everything”           —Steven Salaita “If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line.”           —Kshama Sawant “if you were a Palestinian refugee in Gaza or the family of a drone strike victim in Yemen, you’d be hard-pressed to see any difference between Republicans and Democrats at all.”           —Jeremy Scahill “What goes down in Gaza is not going to stay in Gaza.”           —Jill Stein “Arabs are fearful and incapable of taking meaningful action. They’re preoccupied with oil, agreements, and business deals. Our children are slaughtered in their infancy, and these countries respond with empty slogans because they’re not the ones suffering.”           —Asmaa Wael “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”           —Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country (USA) people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic…. and that justifies everything we do to the Palestinians”           —Shulamit Aloni “There is nothing feminist about genocide.”           —Nada Elia “Israel may be feared, but it is hated more than ever.”           —James Zogby Police “I'm a good shot, but I don't carry a gun because that's the best way to get shot.”           —Judith Coburn “I say you never call the police for anything, you call your daddy. And this is exactly why I said that, because you can call the police and then all of a sudden you’re dead.”           —Ira Graham III (to his 18 year old son on witnessing a police shooting) “Being policeman to the world was a bad decision.”           —Denis Halliday “Good policing is expensive. Reform can’t happen by merely saying, ‘We’re just not going to have police anymore.’”           —Jon Murad “Betting on outsiders to provide security is never a good gamble.”           —Javad Zarif Politics and Social Sciences “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, since the US now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.”           —Philip Alston “There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”           —Banksy “So who are the 'good guys'? There may not be any.”           —Will Bunch “the noblest aspirations of humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of an uneasy despotism.”           —Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes) “we advocate to deaf ears who tell us all not to believe your eyes.”           —Cosmic Charlie “The political, economic and military system we live under is not only genocidal at this point, but also suicidal.”           —Nicolas JS Davies “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.”           —Eugene V. Debs “Political parties, government agencies, the media, and most other institutions are perfectly willing to meet the market demand for confident answers, whether they're warranted or not.”           —Rex Douglass “[We’re] highly digitized, highly interdependent, highly connected, and highly vulnerable.”           —Jen Easterly “And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. ... It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.”           —Tom Engelhardt (on the War against Iraq) “Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the pundits warn. The Democrats brought a computer to a gunfight. Those computer models of how to win an election now lie in ruins.”           —John Feffer “Many states are held together by little more than surface tension.”           —John Feffer “The history of population transfers is not a pretty one.”           — John Feffer “It doesn’t take much to turn a well-armed population into a mob.”           —John Feffer “There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”           —Benjamin Franklin “Truly, no idea is too absurd for the surveillance state.”           —Sidney Fussell “Divisions between and within countries have provided fertile ground for this fast-moving virus to grow and gain the upper hand.”           —Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse.”           —John Glubb “In the end, pandemics are a political problem, not a scientific one.”           —Jeff Goodell “The UN has no capacity to stop the difficulties we’re faced with around the world.”           —Denis Halliday “In 2024 we have unconsciously or consciously given up a president for a king.”           —Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler “The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.”           —Chris Hedges “without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.”           —Chris Hedges “Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception.”           —Chris Hedges Politics is a game of fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.           --Chris Hedges “We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement.”           —David Korten “Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception.”           —Chris Hedges “Resilience, not dominance, is the real strength, especially in hard times. And the secret to resilience is connected diversity, cohesion, cooperative coexistence.”           —Tim Hollo “The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.”           —Dahr Jamail “Earth's military crisis, its climate crisis, and the paralyzing economic inequalities that burden impoverished people are linked.”           —Kathy Kelly “Anarchy is a poor answer to tyranny.”           —John Kiriakou “When it comes to politics, narrow thinking rules!”           —Robert C. Koehler “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”           —Tom Lehrer “Borders are porous by definition; no matter how fortified, they are more like living membranes than inorganic walls.”           —Michael Mardar “Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.”           — Bill McKibben “I’ve given up political strategising. The political process is just too slow for the problems we face.”           —Michael Mobbs “The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood”           —George Monbiot “Your actions will determine the kind of rulers that govern you.”           — The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “When all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds.”           —C.J. Polychroniou “A politics based on resentment can lurch in any direction at almost any time.”           —Robert Reich “if you were a Palestinian refugee in Gaza or the family of a drone strike victim in Yemen, you’d be hard-pressed to see any difference between Republicans and Democrats at all.”           —Jeremy Scahill “Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.”           —Matt Taibbi “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”           — Mark Twain “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”           — Mark Twain “The established order is never as secure and impervious to change as those who preside over it believe it to be.”           — Jim Wallis “Science stops where politics begins.”           —Anonymous “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”           —Author unknown (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain) Prisons “I wonder now if the U.S. follows any rule of law at all: the Geneva Conventions or even its own Constitution.”           — Moath al-Alwi (held without charge in Guantánamo since 2002) “For each person in jail, a community suffers.”           —Eric Champagne “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”           — Nelson Mandela “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”           — Mark Twain Problem Solving “It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a deal, if he is certain you’re planning to kill him, no matter what he does.”           —Robert Alvarez “The key is to be ready to change one’s mind as the data comes out.”           —Rustom Antia “There is something paternalistic and elitist about this desire to spare the poor ignorant masses the gory details. It is condescending at best, self-defeating at worst. After all, if the full nature of the challenge we face is not known, we cannot expect people take the measures needed to meet it.”           —John Atcheson “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”           —Albert Einstein “When you have everything, you don’t have to think so much. But when you have difficulties, you have to think up new ways to innovate.”           —Gerardo Guillén “Our country has more problems than it should tolerate and more solutions than it uses.”           —Ralph Nader “Free your mind from the disabling assumption that someone is in charge of this: no one is in charge.”           — Robert Naiman “The perception of a problem can be as bad as the problem itself.”           —Nathaniel Persily “As intellectuals, we can talk ourselves into anything.”           —Mark Rudd “Look for what's missing. ... Few are able to see what isn't there.”           —Donald Rumsfeld “our job was to listen, and we talked instead.”           —Matt Taibbi Progress “A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.”           —Jonathan Cook “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.”           —Ogden Nash “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”           — George Orwell Prophecy “In a Couple of Years There Will Be Nothing in Israel, Neither Arab nor Jewish.”           —Fouad Agbaria “Religious prophecies are particularly dangerous when they are embraced by unhinged extremist politicians who wield the political clout and military power to put them into action.”           —Ramzy Baroud “Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.”           —Isaiah 24:1 (KJV) Proverbs “Blood doesn’t wash away blood.”           —Afghan Proverb “Foreigners should not give orders.”           —Haibatullah Akhundzada “Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.”           —Tryon Edwards “It so rarely is what you’d expect.”           —Dagomar Degroot “How quickly dreams can segue into nightmares.”           —John Feffer “Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations.”           —Pope Francis “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”           —Benjamin Franklin “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”           —Benjamin Franklin “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”           —Benjamin Franklin “He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”           —Benjamin Franklin “Most things fail most of the time.”           —Lizzie Gibney “The higher up the tree the monkey climbs, the more all you can see of the monkey is his ass.”           — Haitian Proverb “After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.”           — Italian Proverb “it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun”           —Billy Joe Shaver, sung be (Bobby Bare and Kris Kristofferson) “We cannot bomb our way to peace.”           —Anonymous “It’s easier to break things than it is to fix them,”           —Anonymous Psychology “To invade a country, dismantle its institutions, create a failed state, exit from the ensuing chaos, and then return with unending bombing campaigns is imbecility of an order that has few historical parallels.”           —John Gray “We’re sold the idea of—we’re going to liberate people, we’re fighting terrorism. Then we realize we’re the ones terrorizing people. That torments you psychologically. I’ve lost a few friends to suicide.”           —Michael Hanes “Cultic thinking is habit-forming, because it fills human needs for meaning and belonging. It takes effort to break the habit.”           — Richard Heinberg “It can be like this: For the first time he comes, smiles widely, he can even be shy. The next time he comes, and there is emptiness in his eyes, He has been through something, and he is different.”           —Tetiana Khimion “the State Department has become a collective insane asylum where the inmates are in control.”           —Robert Parry “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”           —Bertrand Russell “'Tis the times' plague when madmen lead the blind.”           —Shakespeare “We have lost our capacity to think straight — a grievous self-inflicted wound.”           —Haroon Siddiqui “We are living in a time that's so extreme that if it doesn't drive you mad, you are not sane.”           —Hamza Yusuf “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”           —Anonymous (often attributed to Albert Einstein) Reality “Sometimes, reality outraces our capacity for satire.”           —John Atcheson “We see what we want to see and assume that what we see is reality.”           —Eugene Linden “By comparison, Alice in Wonderland seems brutally realistic.”           —Fred Reed Reason and Rationality “We have tried being reasonable. Perhaps it is time to be unreasonable”           —Charles Eisenstein There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification.           --Chris Hedges “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”           —Bertrand Russell “We have lost our capacity to think straight — a grievous self-inflicted wound.”           —Haroon Siddiqui “I think it's very insane and weird that people come here [Davos] in private jets to discuss climate change. It's not reasonable.”           —Greta Thunberg “All generalizations are false, including this one.”           — Mark Twain “anyone who does not consider that hopelessness may be a rational response to current reality is living in a fantasy world.”           —Phil Wilson Regime Change “When all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds.”           —C.J. Polychroniou “How many times have an attempt by the American government to effect regime change anywhere in the world worked out well? Ask the women of Afghanistan. Ask the people of Iraq. How did that liberal imperialism work out for them? Not very well. Do they really propose to try this out with a nuclear power?”           —Yanis Varoufakis “It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state.”           —Brad Wolf Religion “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day. God will ask: ‘How did you make your money?’ And then he will ask: ‘How much suffering did you cause in the process?’”           —Imam Farisullah Azhari “Sometimes, God uses unusual people, people that are not exactly on the straight and narrow. And I believe God is using Mr. Trump. Like I said I don’t like his style, but I believe God is using him. He doesn’t answer to people, he does whatever.”           —Kathy Casillas “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”           —Athena Chavarria “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.”           —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”           —Albert Einstein “To have religion used as a pawn in the service of deceit is deeply offensive to us.”           —Jane Field “[A] person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”           —Pope Francis “it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.”           —Chris Hedges “all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice”           —Chris Hedges “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”           —Thomas Jefferson “Do they really fear backlash and American and European sanctions more than the wrath of Allah Almighty?”           — Ramzan Kadyrov “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”           — Martin Luther King Jr. “‘Love’ is still the religious rule, but it compliantly steps aside when it becomes time to conquer and kill.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We sold our soul to the devil and got nothing at all in return.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Most farmers cannot do what the government says, they just rely on God,”           —Steve Makungwa “strangers to the Spirit of God ... they combat without victory, have war without peace, and are in slavery all their days. They spend their strength for that which is not bread and their labor for that which profits not.”           —John Owen “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. ... We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”           —Vladimir Putin “Assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is a greater (matter) than the creation of men: Yet most men understand not.”           — The Holy Qur'an 40:57 “Verily God is full of Bounty to mankind, but most of them are ungrateful.”           — The Holy Qur'an 10:60 “God is with those who patiently persevere.”           — The Holy Qur'an 8:66 “Making it rain even when Google says the sky should be sunny is God’s way of saying: I’m the boss,”           —Abdul Hadi Safi “it's hard to be a Christian soldier when you tote a gun”           —Billy Joe Shaver, sung be (Bobby Bare and Kris Kristofferson) Sanctions “We’re always open to additional sanctions.”           —Joe Biden “We kill people with sanctions. They’re not a substitute for war—they are a form of warfare.”           —Denis Halliday Science, Math, Technology “The key is to be ready to change one’s mind as the data comes out.”           —Rustom Antia “Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation.”           —Nicholson Baker “Things can go wrong in a hundred different ways.”           —Nicholson Baker “Every model fails; but some are useful.”           —attributed to George Box “Earth’s history is very starkly telling us ... that we have been missing something crucial in the models we use to predict the future.”           —Peter Brannen “No amount of clever technology can cover the gap that is forming. Artificial intelligence cannot compensate for a lack of human intelligence.”           —Chris Bretherton “Yes, a lot of data are now being generated, but I liken it to severed arteries: There is just blood spurting everywhere.”           —Rick Bright “How come the physicists, engineers, and military personnel who have laced the world with nuclear weapons ready to launch never factored into their equations the probability that an immature, petulant man-baby could hold the trigger for our destruction in his hands?”           —Helen Caldicott “I often get the urge to just throw the phone across the room and never look at it again, but then I always end up picking it up and getting back on.”           —“Michael Calore “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”           —Athena Chavarria “science often advances slowly on issues with great complexity and large variability.”           —Judah Cohen “Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community's failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.”           —Jonathan Cook “I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.”           —Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”           —attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain “Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.”           —John Feffer “Cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories.”           —John Feffer “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”           —Benjamin Franklin “I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.”           —Benjamin Franklin “The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas.”           —Stephen Hawking “We have to be willing to adapt to new data, even when it does not fit neatly into prior messaging.”           —Buzz Hollander “The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”           —William James “How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? ... And, indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.”           — Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map) “Experts certainly create a formidable barrier to change.”           —Malcolm Kendrick "biology does a great job of showing the limitations of logical thought.”           —Michael Kinch “The notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent.”           —Paul Kingsnorth “things have gone further and faster than we expected. That's an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be.”           —Rob Larter “They can snow all their clients By calling it (hah) Science.”           —Tom Lehrer “Basic science research has a very low return-on-investment ratio.”           —Liang Wenfeng “A nation cannot be sovereign if it is beholden to Big Tech!”           —Mathew Maavak “[J]ust because the models are in unison doesn’t mean they are correct!”           —Jeff Masters and Bob Henson “Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism.”           —Guy McPherson “Ask God for beneficial knowledge and seek refuge with God from knowledge that is of no benefit.”           —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Just like the model learns from us, we learn from the model.”           —David Novak “Surprisingly, scientists proved as susceptible to herd-think as everyone else, and equally unaware of it.”           —Fred Reed “Statistics is a cruel science.”           —Matt Reynolds “Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”           —Bertrand Russell “There are still far more experts around than is healthy for the advancement of science.”           —David Sackett “You don’t get an accurate number by adding an inaccurate one to an accurate one.”           —Gavin Schmidt “Variation should always be expected.”           —Karin Sigloch “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”           —Jonathan Stoye “we should not blindly follow experts.”           —Zhu Tao “Scientists are subject to perception bias.”           —Tim Tinker “Medicines and vaccines are not a commodity. It’s not something to get rich with. It’s something to save people’s lives.”           —Mitchell Valdés-Sosa “If there was a decision to do geoengineering tomorrow, it would be done by white western men, and that isn't good.”           —Matthew Watson “Science stops where politics begins.”           —Anonymous Security “You cannot bomb and slaughter your way to security any more than you can kill your way to the truth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “What your leaders call national security makes you sick, and your taxes pay for it, in spite of yourselves.”           —John Raby “Betting on outsiders to provide security is never a good gamble.”           —Javad Zarif Speech “In all the many years I’ve worked in defense of free speech, I’ve never seen the principle so blatantly exploited for other ends by people who plainly don’t believe in it as was true of the Hebdo killings.”           —Glenn Greenwald “Guns are the speech of the inarticulate.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Oh, where, oh, where are the white silver tongues, who forgot to listen to the warnings?”           —Phil Ochs (In the Heat of the Summer) “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing,”           —George Orwell “As intellectuals, we can talk ourselves into anything.”           —Mark Rudd “our job was to listen, and we talked instead.”           —Matt Taibbi Survival “our culture and our survival as a species have become incompatible.”           —Jim Tull “A new deal with the old dealers won’t save us. New dealers in the same game won’t either. A new game, or an assortment of new games, might.”           —Jim Tull Terrorism “Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself”           —Jeremiah 20:4 (KJV) “More Americans died of alcohol poisoning (booze terror!) on New Year's Eve than terrorism.”           —Peter Van Buren “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.”           —Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent) “Yes, I would give the stuff [high explosives] with both hands to every man, woman, or fool that likes to come along.”           —Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent) “We’re sold the idea of—we’re going to liberate people, we’re fighting terrorism. Then we realize we’re the ones terrorizing people. That torments you psychologically. I’ve lost a few friends to suicide.”           —Michael Hanes “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.”           —Nelson Mandela “Mass shootings and mass burnings. Welcome to the new America.”           —Stephen Pyne “The last 20 years have shown that you can't stop on-the-ground terrorism by terrorizing people from the air. Sooner or later, what goes around comes around.”           —Norman Solomon “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”           —Voltaire Truth “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”           —Lewis Carroll “Sounded like the Truth; Seemed the better way; Sounded like the Truth; But it's not the Truth today.”           —Leonard Cohen “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”           —attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain “Justice, like truth, is no longer relevant.”           —Chris Hedges “There’s no lack of information to confirm any bias we may have.”           — Richard Heinberg “The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.”           —Dahr Jamail “being open and honest is actually a pretty strong tool against misinformation.”           —Ashish Jha “You cannot bomb and slaughter your way to security any more than you can kill your way to the truth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Those who are not patient are not really interested in the truth.”           —Tommy Lam “The pathetic refrain of recent years—'Nobody saw this coming'—is always a self-serving lie.”           —Eugene Linden “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”           — George Orwell “Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.”           —Bertrand Russell “There can't be a practical reason for believing something that is not true.”           —Bertrand Russell “We live in a post-truth era, where facts don’t matter anymore.”           —Damien Spleeters “A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”           — Mark Twain “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”           — Mark Twain “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”           —Voltaire “The fact that the messenger is deranged doesn’t mean the message itself contains no significant truths.”           —Gary Younge United States “In America the Vengeful, even the philosophers of health can preach death.”           —Richard Eskow “In America, sickness makes you poor; poorness makes you sick; then you die.”           —Tim Faust “Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war.”           —Chris Hedges “The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.”           —Ralph Nader “Our country has more problems than it should tolerate and more solutions than it uses.”           —Ralph Nader “They [the Biden administration] chose monstrosity [in Gaza] and they leave office knowing full well that it could have been otherwise.”           —Abdaljawad Omar “Mass shootings and mass burnings. Welcome to the new America.”           —Stephen Pyne “American leadership is of dangerously low quality.”           —Fred Reed “Most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens.”           —Robert Reich “In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”           —Bertrand Russell “Nobody in this room or in this country has a right to say ‘I give up.’ You’ve got to jump in and start fighting.”           —Bernie Sanders “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.”           —Bernie Sanders “Americans must resist the temptation to try to forge national unity through hostility and fear.”           —Bernie Sanders “I find it somewhat amusing that you [Donald Trump] are attacking the establishment when the establishment is sitting right behind you.”           —Bernie Sanders “Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.”           —Matt Taibbi “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”           — Mark Twain “How many times have an attempt by the American government to effect regime change anywhere in the world worked out well? Ask the women of Afghanistan. Ask the people of Iraq. How did that liberal imperialism work out for them? Not very well. Do they really propose to try this out with a nuclear power?”           —Yanis Varoufakis “Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses.”           —Phil Wilson “In the U.S. the pundits and politicians blame the victims as a matter of choreographed practice.”           —Phil Wilson “Due to travel restrictions, the U.S. will be attempting coups only in its own capital. Normal worldwide services will resume shortly.”           —World Beyond War ““Everything has gone haywire in the White House.”           —Maria Zakharova “The whole world is responsible for these murders, and a day will come that we say to the world, ‘You supported Americans who killed us.’”           — Anonymous Iraqi (quoted by Ali al-Fadhily, 10 July 2007) Violence “To convince somebody to put down a gun, you first have to convince them they will not be harmed.”           —Christine Ahn and Gloria Steinem “Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.”           —Champe Barton “You have the bullet … I have the word. The bullet dies when detonated, the word lives when spread.”           —Berta Cáceres “I'm a good shot, but I don't carry a gun because that's the best way to get shot.”           —Judith Coburn “Those who try to stop love with violence are wasting their time.”           —Miguel Diaz-Canel “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”           —Mohandas Gandhi “Once you start killing, it’s hard to stop.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Good violence is no better than bad violence. Our violence is no better than theirs. Murder is murder.”           —Robert C. Koehler “In the real world, attempting to dominate a situation at gunpoint seldom results in a happy ending. Far more often, it results in tragedy.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Guns are the speech of the inarticulate.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Gun control isn’t enough. We also need hatred control.”           —Robert C. Koehler “From violence only violence is born, following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”           —Primo Levi “A monopoly on violence is a terrifying monopoly to hold.”           — Deborah Orr “hopeless people are as likely to respond with violent rage as with passivity”           —Phil Wilson War “Memories of war can be strangely positive, because to have them at all means you must have survived”           —Atef Abu Saif “On any given day, it’s more likely than not that the US is bombing – someone, somewhere, for some bad reason or another.”           —Tarik Cyril Amar, “You call it war; we laugh at your battleships.”           — Anonymous (hacker collective) “When warmongerers and imperialists claim to care for women's rights—don't believe them.”           —Nandini Archer “Death from hunger is better than humiliation... We will not bow to anyone.”           —Maher al-Asbahi (Yemeni) “Loaded with loot and praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has no discipline and no direction.”           — William Astore “U.S. special ops touched down in 150 countries between 2011 and 2014. And the results of all this activity have been remarkably repetitive and should by now be tragically predictable: lots of chaos spread, lots of casualties inflicted, and in every case, mission unaccomplished.”           —William Astore “The most eco-friendly thing you can do is be anti-war.”           — Katherine Ball “You will never understand the pains, the agony, the fear and the suffering until war comes to your doorstep.”           —Joe Bassey “How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”           —2 Samuel 1:27 (KJV) “Four American presidents have made war in the region [Middle East] without success, and whoever follows Obama into the Oval Office will be number five.”           —Peter van Buren “when you have to repeatedly explain how much you're winning, you’re likely not winning much of anything at all.”           —Peter van Buren “War doesn't save women — it kills women.”           —Codepink “Oil is behind both catastrophes, war and the climate disaster.”           —Juan Cole “War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed.”           — John Cory “One of the dirty little ironies of war is that it matters less who wins the war than where it was fought.”           — Ron David (Arabs & Israel for Beginners) “it is almost inevitable that military force will, at best, end up solving nothing. In fact, it almost always makes thing worse."           —Digby “How long can civilization survive, if we cannot learn to give up war and work cooperatively?”           —Steve Downs “The most intimate betrayal is to be sent to kill or die for nothing by your countrymen.”           —Erik Edstrom “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”           —Albert Einstein “The bombs may be smart, but the acts couldn’t be dumber.”           —Tom Engelhardt “And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. ... It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.”           —Tom Engelhardt (on the War against Iraq) “Wars of aggression never were and never will be free of atrocities. The decision to invade another nation is a decision to kill those who resist and get in your way — soldiers or civilians.”           — Jeff Faux “Cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories.”           —John Feffer “Mutual exhaustion is one of the best signs of a cease-fire that can endure.”           —John Feffer “Surrender is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.”           —Leslie Feinberg “Who’s ever heard before of a ‘moderate’ with a Kalashnikov?”           — Robert Fisk “War is always a defeat – always, always,”           —Pope Francis “This is cruelty, not war”           —Pope Francis (about Gaza) “And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children who are machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals—how much cruelty.”           —Pope Francis “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.”           — Benjamin Franklin “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”           —Benjamin Franklin “Among bored consumers in post-military societies, [war] has become another entertainment. As for real war, that is like smoking, a habit of the poor.”           — John Gray (Straw Dogs) “To invade a country, dismantle its institutions, create a failed state, exit from the ensuing chaos, and then return with unending bombing campaigns is imbecility of an order that has few historical parallels.”           —John Gray “We kill people with sanctions. They’re not a substitute for war—they are a form of warfare.”           —Denis Halliday “Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.”           —Conn Hallinan “We’re sold the idea of—we’re going to liberate people, we’re fighting terrorism. Then we realize we’re the ones terrorizing people. That torments you psychologically. I’ve lost a few friends to suicide.”           —Michael Hanes “Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war.”           —Chris Hedges “militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.”           —Chris Hedges “The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.”           —Chris Hedges “We too go to war to fight phantoms of our own creation.”           —Chris Hedges There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification.”           —Chris Hedges the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home           --Chris Hedges “War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences.”           —Chris Hedges “The enormous expenditure of energy, scientific sophistication and wealth on the military is the main cause of poverty, inflation and despair in the world.”           —Petra Kelly “It can be like this: For the first time he comes, smiles widely, he can even be shy. The next time he comes, and there is emptiness in his eyes, He has been through something, and he is different.”           —Tetiana Khimion “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”           — Martin Luther King Jr “War, in other words, does nothing but create the certainty of more war.”           —Robert C. Koehler “War will always come home, whether as loners with AK-47s or as nuclear winter.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Why are guns so damn sacred... not to mention fighter jets, nuclear weapons, our annual military budget?”           —Robert C. Koehler “Just war theory makes the world numb to human slaughter.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The path to war is easy and smooth, and nuclear war is easiest of all.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Public compliance is crucial to the waging of war. The power we commoners wield is enormous, if only we knew it.”           —Robert C. Koehler “You cannot bomb and slaughter your way to security any more than you can kill your way to the truth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The one thing we do not need is another war, certainly not against Planet Earth.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Far more children are killed in today's wars than combatants. War has become the killing of children.”           —Robert C. Koehler “War always creates consequences well beyond the imaginations of its planners.”           —Robert C. Koehler “We lose every war we fight. Actually, ‘lose’ does not adequately describe the nature of our ongoing defeat. Every war we wage implodes, destroying the integrity that sustains us.”           — Robert C. Koehler “War is evoked with such brainless ease.”           — Robert C. Koehler “We bomb civilians, killing them by the thousands, by the millions, to fight wars we do not win – because winning is not the point, or even possible. ”           —Robert Koehler “‘Love’ is still the religious rule, but it compliantly steps aside when it becomes time to conquer and kill.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Our real threats will not be solved, but they will certainly be amplified, by militarism.”           —Robert C. Koehler “The nature of war is to beget war: to magnify trouble, to make matters worse. War always comes home.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Trump merely puts a face on America’s out-of-control militarism. He didn’t create it.”           —Robert Koehler “Engaging in the game of war is always an act of defeat.”           —Robert C. Koehler           —Lindsay Koshgarian “Militarism hasn't protected us from a pandemic that at its worst took the toll of a 9/11 every day, from poverty and instability driven by staggering inequality, or from hurricanes and wildfires made worse by climate change.”           —Lindsay Koshgarian “Members of the [US Marine] Corps All hate the thought of war. They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.”           —Tom Lehrer “War is sloppy and unpredictable.”           —Anatol Lieven “if there's one thing we don't want here in South America, it's war.”           —Luis Inacio Lula da Silva “In human history, economic wars often turned into real ones.”           —Dmitry Medvedev “The real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia.”           —John Pilger “America crumbles economically, politically, culturally, but has the very best bombers.”           —Fred Reed “Militaries have a very poor record of predicting outcomes of wars.”           —Fred Reed “Killing lots of people and winning a war are not the same thing.”           —Fred Reed “War does not determine who is right — only who is left.”           —Bertrand Russell “If you think it's too expensive to take care of veterans, then don't send them to war.”           — Bernie Sanders “War is never quick, and it is never easy.”           —Bernie Sanders “People in my country, the United States, and all over the world are sick and tired of spending billions and billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, war planes, missiles, bombs, and tanks.”           —Bernie Sanders “Societies based on conquest cannot be sustained”           —Leanne Simpson “infections of war can’t be contained to war zones”           —Ghassan Abu-Sittah “It’s a long way from their [Pentagon Contractors'] glassed-in office suites to the places where the bombs fall.”           —Norman Solomon “The last 20 years have shown that you can't stop on-the-ground terrorism by terrorizing people from the air. Sooner or later, what goes around comes around.”           —Norman Solomon “Victory is not a pleasant thing. Those who are pleased by victory Are pleased with the slaughter of others. Those who are pleased with the slaughter of others Have no just place in this world.”           —Tao te Ching “I want people to stop dying over this ridiculous [Ukrainian] war.”           —Donald Trump “The fiercest fighters might well be those who have no chance to succeed.”           —Phil Wilson “The whole world is responsible for these murders, and a day will come that we say to the world, ‘You supported Americans who killed us.’”           — Anonymous Iraqi (quoted by Ali al-Fadhily, 10 July 2007) Wealth “Loaded with loot and praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has no discipline and no direction.”           — William Astore “Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”           — Napoleon Bonaparte “Happily for private profits, the votes of American politicians can be purchased very economically.”           —Rando Calrissian “Money increasingly sets the terms for debate in the Trump era, not law or ethics.”           —Juan Cole “Money divides communities and does not satisfy the needs of the people.”           —Chief Joey Dearling (KhoiSan tribe) “It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.”           —Benjamin Franklin “To think that we can preserve the rich people, and let the poor people suffer, is a stupid mistake.”           —António Guterres “What you see quite clearly today, is the wealthy undermining the very system that made them wealthy, and a total failure to see how ruinous that is in the long term.”           —Sean Illing “Greed and stupidity make a lethal cocktail.”           — Dave Jorgenson (quoted in Empire of the Beetle) “The rich and powerful are clueless about change.”           —Robert C. Koehler “Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.”           —Karl Marx “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.”           — Guy McPherson “Financial regulators have billionaire friends who want to watch the world burn from space.”           —Teddy Ogborn “Most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens.”           —Robert Reich “I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.”           —Bertrand Russell “People in my country, the United States, and all over the world are sick and tired of spending billions and billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, war planes, missiles, bombs, and tanks.”           —Bernie Sanders “You can't be on the side of the wealthy and the powerful if you're going to really fight for working families.”           —Bernie Sanders “There is nothing boring about going broke in 2019."           —Donna Smith “[W]hen others bear the costs of mistakes, the incentives favour self-delusion. A system that socialises losses and privatises gains is doomed to mismanage risk.”           — Joseph E. Stiglitz Youth “From a teen’s perspective, society has largely set youth up to fail.”           —Sofia Barnett “Far more children are killed in today's wars than combatants. War has become the killing of children.”           —Robert C. Koehler INTERNAL LINKS top Author Index Subject Index Top Ten Quotes 25 More Top Quotes Alphabetic by Author Alphabetic by Subject ###