Arundhati Roy: Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7921
Karl Marx: At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7922
Karl Marx: The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation - as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven - the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7923
Karl Marx: As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7924
Thomas Jefferson: The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7927
Karl Marx: But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7928
Lenin: A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism-about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7929
Lenin: There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property-on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7930
Lenin: Capital has become international and monopolist. The world has been carved up by a handful of Great Powers, i.e., powers successful in the great plunder and oppression of nations. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7932
George Orwell: The 'alternative media' is largely dependent upon philanthropic foundations for support, such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, among many others. While more critical and infused with a better analysis than can be observed in the mainstream corporate press, the 'alternative' is still controlled by the same interests, as the boards of foundations - which are themselves institutions of concentrated wealth and power - represented elite industrialists, academics, and bankers. They function, essentially, as 'controlled opposition': allowing dissent up to a point, primarily focused on criticizing policies and effects, seeking to promote reforms and alterations to the existing system in order to make it more "fair." The discourse, however, still lacks a needed element: radical analysis of information, pushing not for reform, but systemic change, or, in a word: revolution. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7933
Karl Marx: The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7934
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Tom Engelhardt: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales ... controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008... with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7935
Lenin: The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7936
Lenin: Materialism in general recognises objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience, etc., of humanity. Historical materialism recognises social being as independent of the social consciousness of humanity. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7938
Frantz Fanon: Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7939
Friedrich Engels: From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic. Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends - and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7941
Friedrich Engels: Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7942
globalresearch.ca: The Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7943
Doug Soderstrom: Most Americans have no idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens, believe, value, and do. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7948
Network: You're never going to get any truth from us (television). We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We deal in illusions. None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! ... This tube (television) is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth. ... Television is not the truth. Television is a God-damned amusement park. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7949
Neil Postman: The early-twentieth-century journalist Lincoln Steffens proved that he could create a "crime wave" anytime he wanted by simply writing about all the crimes that normally occur in a large city during the course of a month. He could also end the "crime wave" by not writing about them. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7950
Chris Hedges: The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7951
Jon Rappoport: If the US government hires, supports, and arms terrorists. The news can claim the government is doing everything possible to fight against terrorism. The absurd contradictions are simply ignored. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7952
Ken Adachi: What most Americans believe to be 'Public Opinion' is in reality carefully crafted and scripted propaganda designed to elicit a desired behavioral response from the public. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7954
Eric Zuesse: "Mainstream" newspapers are billionaire viewspapers peddling an extreme and extremely biased view of the world. On every single issue of consequence - from party politics, to the economy, from Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, to Venezuela, to climate change, to the nature of human happiness and the prospects for human survival - corporate media reporting and commentary are systematically filtered to further the interests of the state-corporate elites who own, manage and fund them. It is not that corporate media 'spin', 'hype' or 'sex up' the news - they fundamentally distort every significant issue they touch. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7955
