Permissible Viewpoints

December 3, 2008

Permissible Viewpoints

“As a nation, we are resolute in our refusal to identify the true nature of our actions, and in our refusal to acknowledge the consequences of what we do. This may well be true of most nations throughout history. Yet there is a direct correlation between a nation’s power and influence, and its reliance on myth and other public relations ploys. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States via its ruling class saturates its subjects at home and abroad with propaganda on a scale and with an intensity that have rarely been surpassed. As is true of all propaganda, permissible viewpoints are confined within suffocatingly constricted boundaries of thought; variation of any moment from the prescribed guidelines is prohibited.”

Arthur Silber - “Regrettable Misjudgments”: The Shocking Immorality of Our Constricted Thought

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/11/regrettable-misjudgments-shocking.html

4 years ago

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” — Thomas Jefferson

“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” — Thomas Jefferson

“In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.” — Mark Twain

“The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate.” — Dave Rodgers

“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.” — Lucy Parsons

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions." — Abraham Lincoln

“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

“As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.” — Dick Cavett

“To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...”
— Utah Phillips

“The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
— Stephen Biko

“You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.”
— Sean O'Casey

“If large numbers of people believe in Free Speech, there will be freedom of speech”
— George Orwell

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
— Howard Zinn

“The FCC can kiss my Bill of Rights.”
— Stephen Dunifer

“..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority to set brush fires in people's minds.”
— Samuel Adams

``When in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.''
— Emma Goldman

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the
freeness of speech.”
— Ben Franklin

“[T]he right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon ... has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”
— James Madison

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
— Patrick Henry

“A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to. And any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong and foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has the vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well, sustain life.”
— Emma Goldman