A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s (other’s) lives should not stake their own.  ~ H.G. Wells

The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.  ~Veterans Fast for Life

If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.  ~Daniel Webster

It is not the critic who counts: not the man (or woman) who points out how the strong man (person) stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man (or woman) who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself (herself) for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he (she) fails, at least he (or she) fails while daring greatly, so that his (her) place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat  ~ Theodore Roosevelt. “Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.  ~Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy. ~John Pierpont Morgan

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.  ~Thomas Jefferson

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.
~ Robert Frost

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.   ~ Samuel P. Huntington

I believe that God wants me to be president.
~ George W. Bush

I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany.
~ Hitler – Berlin March, 1936

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.
~ George W. Bush

If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us.
~ Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg, 3 Oct. 1937

Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
~ George W. Bush

Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!
~ Hitler – Nuremberg, Sept. 13, 1936.

One of the great attractions to patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of a nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat while feeling we’re profoundly virtuous.  ~ Aldous Huxley

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.  ~ W. R. Inge

Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and as irrational as a headless hen.  ~ Ambrose Bierce

Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched.  ~ Guy de Maupassant

Patriotism is a menace to liberty.  ~ Emma Goldman

Torture: If the Americans are doing it, and they’re not accountable, then who’s going to come to our rescue?   ~Moazzam Begg, Detainee #558 in Guantanamo Bay.

“The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight. …”     Read more here

from “War is Sin”, a Chris Hedges column at Truthdig

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” – with his mouth. ~ Mark Twain

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. ~ Bertrand Russell, attributed

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~ George McGovern

The convention which framed the Constitution of the United States was composed of fifty-five members. A majority were lawyers-not one farmer, mechanic or laborer. Forty owned Revolutionary Scrip. Fourteen were land speculators. Twenty-four were money-lenders. Eleven were merchants. Fifteen were slave-holders. They made a Constitution to protect the rights of property and not the rights of man.  ~ Senator Richard Pettigrew – Triumphant Plutocracy (1922)

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless. ~Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864

This great and powerful force-the accumulated wealth of the United States-has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property. ~Senator Richard Pettigrew – Triumphant Plutocracy – Published, January 1, 1922.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. ~Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961) – Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958

A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one! ~ Alexander Hamilton

Many people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. ~Louis Kronenberger – (1904-1980)

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.~ Niccolo Machiavelli – (1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher – Source: Discourses, 1513-1517

Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys–and is bent on perpetuating–has become central to our national identity. More than America’s matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation’s arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.  ~Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism