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When I thought I had hit rock bottom, someone knocked from below.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
If you care about other people, thatâs now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. Thatâs not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you donât care whether other peopleâs kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, thatâs called âlibertarianâ for some wild reason. I mean, itâs actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.
For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
- Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
- Jobs for those who can work.
- Security for those who need it.
- The ending of special privilege for the few.
- The preservation of civil liberties for all.
- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
In capitalist society individuals are controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond their comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value. This law acts upon all aspects of one's life, shaping its course and destiny. The laws of capitalism, which are blind and are invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without he or she being aware of it. One sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon ahead. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller â whether or not it is true â about the possibilities of individual success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly. (A discussion of how the workers in the imperialist countries gradually lose the spirit of working-class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent countries, and how this at the same time weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries, would be appropriate here, but that is a theme that goes beyond the scope of these notes.)
In any case, the road to success is portrayed as beset with perils â perils that, it would seem, an individual with the proper qualities can overcome to attain the goal. The reward is seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Furthermore, it is a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others.
But when they plunder from these miners, these children, my fellow citizens, countrymen, thrown out on the highways and mother insulted â do you think that they will be good citizens when they grow up? I don't. The revenge and resentment will be buried there if they grow into manhood, it will develop, they will kill, they will murder to get even with those who robbed them. I want you to stop that. I don't want it to go on. Your Governor may, but I don't. I want the children to have the best of influence, I want the children to have good schooling, I want women to know nothing but what is good, I want to leave to this nation a nobler manhood and greater womanhood. Can I do it? No, I can't, boys, with the administration you have got, I can't do it.
I can do it if you men and women will stand together, find out the seat of the disease and pull it up by the roots.
Take possession of that state house, that ground is yours. (Someone interrupted, and the speaker said "Shut your mouth.")
You built that state house, didn't you? You pay the public officials, don't you? You paid for that ground, didn't you? (Cries of: "Yes," "yes.")
Then, who does it belong to? Then why did the militia chase you off? You have been hypnotized. The trouble has been that they wanted the slave system to continue. They have had a glass for you and your wives and children to look into. They have you hypnotized.
Your children of this era have quietly said âYesâ Your last chance has come, oh China History is waiting for you The whole world is intently calling and listening for you To say one wordâ âNo!â"China You Canât Remain Silent" (1976)
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked" (1935)
You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant.
Those captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel. They vote for a slogan, a smile, perceived sincerity, and attractiveness, along with the carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. It is style and story, not content and fact, that inform mass politics."Empire of Illusion"
Too big to fail is too big.
The course our city runs is the same towards men and money. She has true and worthy sons. She has fine new gold and ancient silver, Coins untouched with alloys, gold or silver, Each well minted, tested each and ringing clear. Yet we never use them! Others pass from hand to hand, Sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand. So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names. These we spurn for men of brass..."The Frogs" (405 BC)
Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieve power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.
Your silence and self-censorship won't matter in the end. The Soviets often just targeted random people because it chilled dissent overall.
Silent or not, party member or not, you will be dragged from your home in the night and never seen again. This is the reality of what it was like.
So you might as well be brave and speak out against it because that's the only actual defense you have.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.
It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.
Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, "I love arm-chairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose; not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."
But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.
At the end of life you may close your eyes saying: "I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance, the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future."
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do.
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonaldâs French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadnât crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that werenât random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talithaâs blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in timeâs great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kidâs head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didnât fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.
And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well."Wolves of the Calla"
Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like.
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
To will oneself free is also to will others free.
"Niggle's Picture!" said Parish in astonishment. "Did you think of all this, Niggle? I never knew you were so clever. Why didn't you tell me?"
"He tried to tell you long ago," said the man; "but you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them. This is what you and your wife used to call Niggle's Nonsense, or That Daubing."
"But it did not look like this then, not real," said Parish.
"No, it was only a glimpse then," said the man; "but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try."
"I did not give you much chance," said Niggle. "I never tried to explain. I used to call you Old Earthgrubber. But what does it matter? We have lived and worked together now. Things might have been different, but they could not have been better. All the same, I am afraid I shall have to be going on. We shall meet again, I expect: there must be many more things we can do together. Good-bye!" He shook Parish's hand warmly: a good, firm, honest hand it seemed. He turned and looked back for a moment. The blossom on the Great Tree was shining like flame. All the birds were flying in the air and singing. Then he smiled, and nodded to Parish, and went off with the shepherd.
He was going to learn about the sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk even further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture: but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them."Leaf by Niggle"
Know what's cooler than a billion dollars? Being a decent human being.
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
We will beat the machine. We will win.
That primal clarity lives within us still, and you can only sedate a giant for so long.
The primal giant will rise, will crush the machine and the CIA black sites, will crack open Gitmo and devour Hollywood, will defecate on the Pentagon and wipe its ass with Langley, and will howl at the moon and banish the narrative matrix to wherever deleted files go.
And we will be free. And we will be vast. And we will look at each other with unpolluted eyes for the very first time.
And we will go out into the world, the real world, the original world, walking with our original feet and looking with our original eyes.
Our seeds now great forests.
Tortured no more.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
I got to write these jokes. So, I sit at the hotel at night and I think of something that's funny. Or, If the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of wasn't funny.
Is it only when the flowers are in full bloom and when the moon is shining in spotless perfection that we ought to gaze at them?
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.
If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: our courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance in secret, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I was â standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the unalienable rights that are supposed to protect us from an abuse of the stateâs authority.
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.
It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as âa crime under international lawâ in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg.
Personally, I'd never want to be a member of any group where you either have to wear a hat or you can't wear a hat.
What is to be done? The answer is easy. It has always been easy. Stop saying "not in my name" and start saying "over my dead body". That's what we did. It works. Do it.
It will be a great day when the schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, manâs fear and greed for manâs enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.address to the the graduating class at University High School, Oxford, Mississippi on May 28, 1951
Big Brother isnât watching. Heâs singing and dancing. Heâs pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brotherâs busy holding your attention every moment youâre awake. Heâs making sure youâre always distracted. Heâs making sure youâre fully absorbed.
Heâs making sure your imagination withers. Until itâs as useful as your appendix. Heâs making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, itâs worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about whatâs in your mind. With everyoneâs imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."Lullaby"
Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."On Violence"
Gender ideology is Queer Theory in action; the goal is to stop things making sense & to stop you from even caring if things make sense. This is a juvenile theology that appeals to those who wish that wishing made it so.
Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom.
Arms are instruments of ill omen. When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. There is no glory in victory, and to glorify it despite this is to exult in the killing of men. When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe mourning rites.
Odds are you're pretty boring and nobody is interested in what the NSA has on you. What if you were actually really interesting, and your enemies had a lot of money? Do you plan on becoming interesting at some point in the future, or are you firmly committed to being a bore until you die?
I am talking about the monstrous phenomenon of a regime that is imposed upon a population which is not made up of a single people, but of two peoples who are enemies. On top of this national conflict, itself insoluble, there is a social conflict of these two peoples. One works and the other exploits the first. That is why there cannot be a democratic regime in this country, neither can human rights be respected. I insist: they cannot be. It doesn't depend on someone's goodwill. It is the consequence of the objective fact that the State of Israel is, today, a colonial power. Precisely when history, for the second half of the 20th century, has been characterized by world decolonization, the State of Israel and South Africa are the only remaining colonial powers.
People are like stained-glass windows, they sparkle and shine when the sun is out but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.