It [the state] can, as long as production is expanding, increase the absolute living standards of the masses; it cannot change the basic structure of inequality, for that is essential to the accumulation of capital--that is, to the survival and perpetuation of the system itself.

--Michael Harrington, 1976

One capitalist always kills many.

--Karl Marx, 1867

Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation.

--Christopher Lasch, 1979

Because by definition they lack any sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another.  The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one's own interest as far as possible.  Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint.  Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so.  The food of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

--Wendell Berry, 1977

It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even a schizophrenic manner.  The atrocities of our time are done by men as "functions" of social machinery--men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity.  They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.  They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut.

--C. Wright Mills, 1958

Easy reading is damned hard writing. 

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, (1804-1864)

I don't hate my enemies. After all, I made 'em.

--Red Skelton, (1913-1997)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

--William Dement

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs. 

--Henry Miller, (1891-1980)

Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.

--Jack Lemmon

The practical, divorced from the disciplines of value, tends to be defined by the immediate interests of the practitioner, and so becomes destructive of value, practical and otherwise.

--Wendell Berry, 1977

I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.

 --Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

--Henrik Ibsen, playwright (1828-1906)

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast. 

--Peter Drucker (1909- )

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. 

--Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth. 

-Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

A leader who keeps his ear to the ground allows his rear end to become a target. 

--Angie Papadakis

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

- -Amelia Burr

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience. 

--Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen. 

--Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)