Misc Quotable Quotes

On Politics and Human Affairs ..

Universal suffrage by the whole people of representatives and rulers of the state - this is the last word of the Marxists as well as of the democratic school. They are lies behind which lurks the despotism of a governing minority, lies all the more dangerous in that this minority appears as the expression of the so-called people's will.

-- Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. The techniques have been honed to a fine art, far beyond anything Orwell dreamt of. The device of feigned dissent, incorporating the doctrines of the state religion and eliminating rational critical discussion, is one of the more subtle means, though more crude techniques are also used and are highly effective in protecting us from seeing what we observe, from knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live.

-- Noam Chomsky, The Manufacture of Consent

In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body.

-- James Madison (debates on the Adoption of the US Federal Constitution)

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

-- Winston Churchill, expounding on his racist views on the Jewish right to Palestine, comparing the indigenous Arabs to a dog in a manger. To the Palestine Royal Commission (1937).

After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.

-- Ilan Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine)

The U.S. use of atomic weapons against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties in what was a demonstration and warning performance, stands alone in the annals of violence.

-- Edward S. Herman

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called "American exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to a universal habit among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing mission" in its colonies, while the French Minister of War called for "exterminating the indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s, who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking and their "burn all, loot all, kill all" campaigns in rural North China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

-- Noam Chomsky

On Religion ..

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

-- Anonymous

To pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

-- Richard Dawkins

22. Mankind scrambles to choose new leader of inflexible, sexually morbid institutional anachronism; heretofore anonymous bureaucrat will instantly be celebrated as world's holiest man as he travels to AIDS-stricken Africa to denounce the use of condoms.

-- Matt Taibbi, The 52 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope

(On the alleged Christian foundation of the USA):
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

-- Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States and the Bey and Subjects of the Bey of Tripoli of Barbary, 'Authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796, the following treaty was sent to the floor of the Senate, June 7, 1797, where it was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved. John Adams, having seen the treaty, signed it and proudly proclaimed it to the Nation.'

On Science and Technology ..

We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.

-- David Clark

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

-- Brian Kernighan, Elements of Programming Style

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.

-- Donald Knuth