Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.
– Adolf Hitler, 1938
=
An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.
– Adolph Hitler : In 1933, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as a pretext to push through emergency decrees suspending the basic civil liberties of German citizens. The “emergency” decrees remained in effect until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.
=
Now I shall ask you to imagine how
Men under discipline of death prepare for war.
There is much more to it than armament
. . . and for a while they join a terrible equality;
Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free;
And so insidious is this liberty
That those surviving it will bear
An even greater servitude to its root:
Believing they were whole, while they were brave;
That they were rich because their loot was great;
That war was meaningful because they lost their friends
– Homer – Source: War Music A verse translation of Books 16 – 19 of the Illiad by Christopher Logue. 1981. King Penguin.
=
In modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
=
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
– Aldous Huxley
=
Another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard – every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve.
– Eric Fromm
=
In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.
– Eduardo Galeano
=
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy?
– Mohandas Gandhi
=
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!.
– Helen Keller. – Source: Told to an audience at Carnegie Hall one year before the United States entered World War I. From ‘Declarations of Independence’ by Howard Zinn page 75
=
Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell
=
You can’t deny the other side don’t want to die anymore than we do. What I’m trying to say is don’t they pray to the same God that we do? And tell me how does God choose whose prayers does he refuse?Who turns the wheel, who throws the dice on the Day after tomorrow?
Lyrics: Day After Tomorrow – Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan 2004
=
Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? … A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
– Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator Source: Speech in the House of Representatives, January 14, 1814
=
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
– James Madison
=
Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
– Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), a Swiss-born scientist and physician
=
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our [1787] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.
– Abraham Lincoln – Source: in an 1848 letter to William Herndon
=
The role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the priveleges and pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side fo the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people; the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
– Martin Luther King – http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
=