Unpalatable Truths

Here's a collection of quotes that I posted to Quoteland.com somewhere around 2001, that make me go hmmmm... everytime I read them. As quotes are opinions, I thought they could go well on this blog as an alternative post.

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The great masses of the people at the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously evil ... they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe."
-- A sign inside a church in Northern Ireland, explaining the origin of intolerance and hate.

The Israeli military men and capitalists, together with their Palestinian peers, do everything they can to remain in power. Their mass media and educational system spread vicious nationalistic propaganda, hatred and fear. Thus they divide and rule us. They incite against each other Arabs and Jews, East and West, while they continue to reign. These are our real enemies, preventing us from attaining physical and economical security. Against them Arabs and Jews should stand together.
-- Yair Khilou.

Yair Khilou, is a young activist in several radical left-wing groups, and one of the organisers behind the "letter of the twelfth-graders" (a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, signed by 62 youths, announcing their refusal to cooperate with the Israeli army's actions). Yair announced his conscientious objection to military service at the age of 16 and has refused to go through preliminary military medical and psychometric examinations.

Anybody interested in reading the whole article, is invited to click here: (makes an interesting reading) http://www.counterpunch.org/khilou.html
And the letter signed by 62(all between the ages 15-18) youths can be read here: http://www.newprofile.org/english/letters

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to have without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions (9 billion in the U.S. alone in 1996) and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all these animals leads to degenerative -- and fatal -- health conditions like heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and
malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
-- C. David Coats

The inner fragmentation of man mirrors his view of the world 'outside' which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups. The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religious and political groups. The belief that all these fragments - in ourselves, in our environment and in our society - are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological and cultural crisis. It has alienated us from Nature and from our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder; an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.
-- Fritjof Capra, from The Tao of Physics

Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with one club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change?
-- Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens."
-- Charles Derber,from Corporation Nation, p28

"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty."
-- Philip Agee, from CIA Diary, p595

Gross utility kills beauty. We now have all over the world huge production of things, huge organizations, huge administrations of empire - all obstructing the path of life. Civilization is waiting for a great consummation, for an expression of its soul in beauty. This must be your contribution to the world.
-- Rabindranath (Thakur) Tagore.

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you.
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
-- Barry Lopez, from Arctic Dreams

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.
-- Franz Kafka

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured...
... People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from his address given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, titled Apartheid in the Holy Land

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation. Are we ready to get off our starting blocks? Are we ready, many millions of us, to rally not just on the streets, but at work and in schools and in our homes, in every decision we take, and every choice we make?
Or not just yet...
If not, then years from now, when the rest of the world has shunned us (as it should), like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, we too will learn to recognize revulsion in the gaze of our fellow human beings. We too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did and did not do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.
This is us. In India. Heaven help us make it through the night.
-- Arundhati Roy.

All over the world 24,000 people, mostly children, die from poverty every day. This is the true terrorism, and it is aided and abetted by politicians from rich, privileged and powerful countries who, in the cause of profit and feigning respectability, are salesmen of death. Their victims, and the rest of us, deserve better.
-- John Pilger, from his article titled, "How Britain's Armaments Fuel War And Poverty

When faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the "necrophiliac" world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she's twenty-six and she still doesn't own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones - their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world - upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?
-- George Monbiot, from his article titled Choose Life on http://www.zmag.org/Znet.htm

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Expect additions in future to this topic. Most probably it would be done in the form of separate posts.