We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi
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"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
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"What is the hardest task in the world? To think."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
Edward Abbey
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"Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people..."
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
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"It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Abraham Lincoln
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"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Thomas Jefferson
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"Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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" The news and truth are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann
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"This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Benjamin Franklin
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"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln
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"Those who own the country ought to govern it."
John Jay, first chief justice of the United States, 1787
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"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on."
Michael Parenti
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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"No form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry, those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well being."
Howard Zinn, on the need for dissent and non-violent protest
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" When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking."
John Wooden
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