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TODAY'S UNKNOWN NEWS

| "During the 1930s, writer H.G. Wells was rebuked by conservatives of his day for comparing fascist Adolf Hitler to Caesar and suggesting Hitler was a 'certifiable lunatic.' "Wells turned out to be right on the money. Hitler was not created in a vacuum, and he did not ignite the horrors of the Holocaust until he corruptly obtained the political power of the German masses to do so. It was the manner in which he attained this power that is analogous to the political machinations of the Bush administration. "Those of us who see a creeping fascism with Bush and his corporate brethren will, one day, be vindicated by the muses of history." Steve Musica "What good fortune for those in power that people do not think." Adolf Hitler "The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal." Albert Einstein "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H.L. Mencken "When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the Sixth Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the Second Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the First Amendment, and I can say nothing about it." Jay Bendell "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." Frank Zappa "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." George Washington "All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... 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." Adolph Hitler "You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They KNOW it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt." Robert L. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?" Thoreau "All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should." Samuel Adams "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients." Edmund Burke | "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. You've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." Mario Savio "When you proclaim (as Americans are wont to do) to the whole world that your country is the best, the greatest, the free-est, the most democratic, the most just, the most generous, the kindest, the most peace-loving, the most God-fearing, the most tolerant, the most pluralistic, the bravest, the strongest, the wealthiest, the kindest, the BEST there is -- then you had bloody well live up to your advertising. Non? God bless America -- if only America and ALL Americans would live what they preach, instead of just preaching, preaching, preaching to the rest of us. How many of you are you still only "practicing"? Just wondering?" A.M. J. "The ills of the world are not due to the fact that Christianity has been tried and found to be a failure, but to the fact that Christianity has never been tried." GK Chesterton (apocryphal) "If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness." Carl Sagan "The suppression of speech is something so odious that all such infringements should be criticized, and, with all effort, to fight for the rights of those with which we disagree, no matter how strongly. However, the freedom to hate, while free to be expressed, is not free from its characterization as being the lowest form of expression." Guy Smith "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." Ralph Waldo Emerson "What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled." James Baldwin "Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth -- but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three." Robert A. Heinlein, as Lazarus Long "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces invading Iraq, 1917 "The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day." Theodore Roosevelt, 1912 | "There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle." Robert Alden "The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional." Hugo Black "As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might." Marion Anderson "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." Susan B. Anthony "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin "When I was a teen, I was a Democrat, mostly to annoy the parents. In college, I was a Republican, mostly to annoy the smelly hippies I had classes with. Now, I am neither, mostly to annoy my readers." SayUncle "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. this world in arms is not spending money alone. it is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." Dwight D. Eisenhower "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." George F. Kennan, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study and former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987 "No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives "When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay." Brian Aldiss "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislation? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." Thoreau "It's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." Hermann Goering, Hitler's second-in-command "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." Frederick Douglass |

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