Alexis de Tocqueville

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority… averts all dangers from my path… if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

No sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political sphere… than it exercises… insupportable tyranny.

I hold it to be… a detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything.

To lay down… limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights… [are] the main objects.

The despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual.

Defending rights against the encroachments of the government saves the common liberties of the country.

The Presbyterian Church took a very strong stand on a boycott on the divestment – there are no sanctions…they did it the way it’s effective. They concentrated on the occupied territories and on U.S. multinationals participating in the occupied territories.

At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions-the corporations, now international in scale -that control the economy and much of our social life.

The 2014 IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?

I prefer to be in the grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

The problem is not the occupation, but how people deal with it.

It should be known that Israel is based on treachery.

There was also an operation involving the Vatican, the US State Department and British intelligence, which took some of the worst Nazi criminals and used them, at first in Europe. For example, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon, was taken over by US intelligence and put back to work.

If people can just pour into the country illegally, you don’t have a country.

One who views Latin America today [1981] might well assume that Hitler had won the war, though in fact it is American liberalism that a bears a major responsibility for the plague of terror and torture regimes that often mimic the Nazis.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the national interest and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework-so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

I think George W. Bush has a warm, engaging personality. But, you know, the presidency is more than just a popularity contest.

I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

When I’ve talked about the idea of being President, I’m not saying I have any political views, I don’t have views on politics, I just have a view on humanity. On people. On the truth.