211 quotes
China, remember, is faced with security problems at every border. The United States is faced with no security problems.
What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting... and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.
When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant.
As early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state policy.
I find [no] credible evidence [of anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism] in the material that I have read concerning [Faurisson], either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.
One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.
Deterring Democracy (1992)
The US is now trying to enlist Europe in its confrontation with China by expanding NATO.
The circumstances of the anti-fascist war subjected it to the most severe of tests. Does it survive this test? When I began working on this article, I was not at all sure. I still feel quite ambivalent about the matter.
The revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the backgrounds of the Pacific War (1969)
A good teacher knows that the best way to help students learn is to allow them to find the truth by themselves. Students don't learn by a mere transfer of knowledge, consumed through rote memorization and later regurgitated. True learning comes about through the discovery of truth, not through the imposition of an official truth.
We take for granted that the organism does not learn to grow arms or to reach puberty... When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in the case of the body.
Rules and Representations (1980)
Incidentally, I don't say it [the US electoral system] is a charade; there are differences in the parties—I don't think they're great differences, but they're real, and small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.
There is a history of Christianity: the first three centuries of Christianity, it was a radical pacifist religion, which is why it was persecuted. It was the religion of the poor and the suffering, and Jesus was the symbol of the poor and the suffering. ...
If... the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.
... the stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomized, obedient nonparticipants—nonquestioning, easily controlled and easily disciplined
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”
Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.
Only rarely has the question been raised whether there was any justification for American victory in the Pacific war; and this issue, where faced at all, has been posed in the context of the cold war -- that is, was it wise to have removed a counterweight to growing Chinese power, soon to become "Communist" power?
The revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the backgrounds of the Pacific War (1969)
We may usefully think of the language faculty, the number faculty, and others as 'mental organs,' analogous to the heart or the visual system or the system of motor coordination and planning. There appears to be no clear demarcation line between physical organs, perceptual and motor systems and cognitive faculties in the respects in question.
Rules and Representations (1980)
In fact, as Descartes himself quite correctly observed, language is a species-specific human possession, and even at low levels of intelligence, at pathological levels, we find a command of language that is totally unattainable by an ape that may, in other respects, surpass a human imbecile in problem-solving ability and other adaptive behavior.
Language and Mind (1968)
Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it.