Responding to Trump’s Alt-Right Collage of Multibillionaires, White Supremacists, Wall Street Tycoons and Military Generals, we bring to the attention of our readers Dr. Gary Kohl’s incisive compilation of political quotes “That Can be Used to Resist Donald Trump’s Oval Office Tyranny in 2017”
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We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. — H. L. Mencken (Baltimore Sun 26 July 1920)
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished – unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. — Voltaire
A nation can survive its fools – even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor — he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation — he works secretly and unknown to undermine the pillars of a city — he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. — Cicero (42 B.C.)
Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power. — Benito Mussolini
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have (hidden) owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork… It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club… The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice… Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on… It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. — George Carlin
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. — Thomas Jefferson
Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. — Benjamin Franklin
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. – President Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power… Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. — President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his televised farewell speech (1961)
Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – President John F. Kennedy
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace – more about killing than we do about living. — WWII General Omar Bradley
I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. – Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman
No one ever became poor underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer. — H. L. Mencken
…the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. — H. L. Mencken (1922)
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. — H. L. Mencken – Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)
It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.”– Adolf Hitler
What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think. — Adolf Hitler
Through clever and constant application of propaganda people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. — Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf 1923)
The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. — Ernst Rohm, Hitler’s chief of the SA
The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. — Joseph Mengele, MD, “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who COUNT the votes decide everything. — Joseph Stalin
It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. — Voltaire
We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. — Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. — Arthur Miller
The system is bankrupt when humanity shrinks from recognizing that it is in the process of destroying itself. The enormous expenditure of energy, scientific sophistication and wealth on the military is the main cause of poverty, inflation and despair in the world. — Petra Kelly (Fighting For Hope)
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions. You take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. — Noam Chomsky
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. – Henry A. Wallace
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. – Henry Wallace
Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people. — Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)
The world is…galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there. While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.– Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet)
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who during times of great moral crisis maintained their neutrality. — Dante
Shamefully, the decaying Democratic Party works to block millions of voters from having a choice of progressive third-party candidates. No country in the Western world places more obstacles to third-party and independent candidates getting on the ballot than the United States. Democrats and Republicans built this exclusionary duopoly. As a result, major redirections and reforms, often supported by a popular majority, are excluded from electoral arenas. Without a competitive democracy, our political system cannot attract better candidates. A political monoculture with safe, gerrymandered incumbents serving myopic commercial interests is systematically undemocratic. It helps explain why the Democratic Party has been unable to defend this country from the worst Republican Party in history at the congressional and state levels. – Ralph Nader
All great truth is dealt with in three ways: First it is ridiculed; then it is violently opposed; and finally it is accepted as self-evident. – Arthur Schopenhauer
It seems to me that the tellers of unwelcome truths (the poets, the prophets, the heretics, the whistle-blowers and the knowledgeable exposers of conspiracies) are dealt with in six ways:
1) First, they are ignored; 2) Second, they are ridiculed; 3) Third, they are threatened with ostracization, persecution, imprisonment or execution; 4) Fourth, they are ostracized, persecuted, imprisoned or executed (physically, psychologically or spiritually); 5) Fifth, their truths may be accepted as self-evident and then, 6) Sixth, the truths of these courageous prophets are then co-opted by the tyrants, the politically powerful, the police state, the wealthy elite and/or the ruthless, amoral corporate powers, who may even build statues and declare federal holidays to honor the now safely dead truth-teller. — G. G. Kohls, amateur philosopher, “plagiarizing” Schopenhauer
Not all conservatives are stupid people, but I have found that most stupid people are conservative. — John Stuart Mill
Certified lunatics are shut up because of their proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given the control of powerful armies and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach. — Bertrand Russell
The people never give up their liberties except under some delusion. — Edmund Burke
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. — Edward Abbey
Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic. — Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
— Sinclair Lewis
What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians…and Christian values.” “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night. — Ralph Reed (R- Christian Coalition executive director 1987-1989)
Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this. — Lt. General William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Under George W. Bush -10-17-03
We’ll know that our disinformation campaign has worked when everything the American public believes is false. — William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s newly-appointed CIA Director at his first staff meeting, 1981
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. — Henry Kissinger, as reported in the October 28, 1973 New York Times Newspaper
The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. — J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI and probable co-conspirator in the JFK assassination
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt. — Mahatma Gandhi
If…the machine of government…is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. — Henry David Thoreau
Show, by your actions, that you choose peace over war, freedom over oppression, voice over silence, service over self-interest, respect over advantage, courage over fear, cooperation over competition, action over passivity, diversity over uniformity, and justice over all. — Anthony J. Marsella, PhD
