Let's Post Some Quotes

Abookamongstthemany wrote:

"I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

"Once you don't vote your ideals... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy."

"Power has to be insecure to be responsive."

"The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers."

"The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun."

"There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship."

"This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies."

"Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you."


"When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated."

"Your best teacher is your last mistake."

~ Ralph Nader

You know I think part of ole Ralphie's problem is he is unable to sahre his views with a positive spin...with a focus on the possibilities instead of the doom and gloom...at least in most of the quotes you mention there.

Instead of talking of problems, he should speak of opportunities. I could be wrong, I'm only basing it off these quotes and the other few times I've heard him speak.

Abookamongstthemany wrote:

What doom and gloom? I see quotes about seizing opportunity and empowering oneself.

I suppose some could be taken that way too...just my opinion of the guy.

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
Henry Louis Mencken

"... our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. "
Thomas Paine

"Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful [...]
The previous regime - armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology - reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could not do more than slowly but inexorably wear out itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere [..] I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

[...]

We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all."

From Václav Havel's address to the nation, Prague, January 1, 1990

Still very relevant today!

"The real leader has no need to lead, he is content to point the way." Henry Miller

"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong or
absolutely right." Albert Guinon

“Non-being is not the opposite of being; it is its contradiction. This implies that logically nothingness is subsequent to being since it is being, first posited, then denied”

(Sartre Being and Nothingness)

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
- Franklin P. Adams

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
- Bertrand Russell

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.
- Steven Wright

“It is possible to fool all of the people all the time; when government and press cooperate.”
GEORGE SELDES (legendary investigative reporter, 1938)

“The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread… We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
JOHN SWINTON (former Chief of Staff New York Times in his toast to the New York Press Club. Quote1880)

“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an Invisible Government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed; our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.”
EDWARD L. BERNAYS (Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the father of psyops, mass spin control and modern propaganda. Bernay’s techniques sold WWI to Americans thru the “Committee on Public Information”. Josef Goebbels as Hitler's Minister of Propaganda was an avid fan of Bernay's work for the Third Reich. Bernays partnered with William Paley to run CBS. Edward Bernay’s work was also the foundation for CIA mass media manipulation via “Operation Mockingbird”. Quote: Bernay’s book “Propaganda” published 1928)

“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”
RICHARD SALENT (President CBS “News” division 1961-64 & 1966-79 )

"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".
REUVEN FRANK (President NBC “News” from 1968-1972 & 1982-1984)

“You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”
PHILIP GRAHAM (editor of the Washington Post quoting his CIA operative source as he discussed the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. Quote 1991)


un-effing-believable...

“Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt