17 quotes
A man's belief is his own; he is the keeper of his conscience; Big Brother has no rightful concern in these areas.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
But the case against the university is that it is chiefly a handmaiden of the state or of industry or, worse yet, of the military-industrial complex.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
Our militarism threatens to become more and more the dominant force in our lives. This is an inflammatory issue; and dissent on it will not be stilled.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
We are witnessing, I think, a new American phenomenon. The two parties have become almost indistinguishable; and each is controlled by the Establishment.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
A person may be convicted for making a speech or for pamphleteering if a judge rules ex post facto that the speaker or publisher created a ‘clear and present danger’ that his forbidden or revolutionary thesis would be accepted by a least some of the audience.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
There is more knowledge and information than ever before: the experts have so multiplied that man has a new sense of importance; man is indeed about to be delivered over to them. Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
I believe it was Charles Adams who described our upside down welfare state as ‘socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.’ The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
Ideological data—like personality data—is treacherous when fed into a computer. For by its use the loyalty and security board’s failure or refusal to clear a person becomes a virtually incontestable ‘fact.’ All one has to do now is to press the ‘subversive’ button and all the names of ‘dangerous’ people come tumbling out.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
But the fact that communists may have provoked some of the present dissent in the United States is not, as some would have it, the end of the matter. The voices are not communist, for those in rebellion see communism as an even more vicious form of a status quo. The merits must be voted up or voted down.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
The federal food program is not responsive to that growing need. It is designed by the agro-business lobby to restrict production, keep prices high, and assure profits to the producers. That lobby controls the Department of Agriculture, which as a result has made feeding the poor a subordinate and secondary function.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
The First Amendment was designed so as to permit a flowering of man and his idiosyncracies, but we have greatly diluted it. Although the Amendment says that Congress shall make ‘no law’ abridging freedom of speech and press, this has been construed to mean that Congress may make ‘some laws’ that abridge that freedom.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
The continuing episodes of protest and dissent in the United States have their basis in the First Amendment to the Constitution, a great safety valve that is lacking in most other nations of the world. The First Amendment creates a sanctuary around the citizen’s beliefs. His ideas, his conscience, his convictions are his own concern, not the government’s.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
If the war that comes is a nuclear conflict, the end of planetary life is probable. If it is a war with conventional weapons, bankruptcy is inevitable. Modern technological war is much too expensive to fight. Vietnam has bled our country at the rate of 2.5 billion dollars a month.
Points of Rebellion (1970)
At the international level we have become virtually paranoid. The world is filled with dangerous people. Every troublemaker across the globe is a communist. Our obsession is in part the product of a fear generated by Joseph McCarthy. Indeed a black silence of fear possesses the nation and is causing us to jettison some of our libertarian traditions.
Points of Rebellion (1970)