Ameya Narvekar 5
WEBSITES TO VISIT
TRUTH-TELLERS
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Roman Emperor Caligula
The world does not work the way we have been led to believe -- by our corporate mainstream media, by our politicians, by our corporations, by our financial institutions, by our intelligence and military services, by our places of worship, by our schools and universities.
We are bombarded daily with so much misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, half-truths, and outright lies, that it takes a persistent individual to sort through the fog of information to find the truth.
The excerpted books on this website may help you destroy the myths, discover the truth, and educate yourself about how the world really works.
Excerpted Books
by Subject
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
George Orwell
New World Order
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
John Maynard Keynes
Democracy/Society/Politics
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading them."
Ray Bradbury
"Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people..."
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
George Kennan, secret U.S. State Department memo, 1948
"To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell
"To criticize one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
J. William Fulbright, American senator
"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world.
... Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent
Foreign Policy
"To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"You believe you are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists."
Anatoly Franace, French writer
"To criticize one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright
"Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public."
Bill Moyers
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister
" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."
William Greider
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
H. L. Mencken
"The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy."
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
Third World
"You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead."
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
Bertrand Russell, British mathematician, philosopher
Empire
"There is nothing puzzling ... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy... What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope."
Walter Karp
Media
"The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being."
Ashley Montagu, American anthropologist
"Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
Thomas Jefferson
FBI /CIA / NSA
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
William Blum
Prisons / Prison System
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Fascism
"If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag, carrying a cross."
Huey Long
Health, Food, Environment
"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world.
... Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent
Education
"24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract."
Will Hutton
Terrorism
"Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO and other U.S. labor organizations have worked with CIA and multi-national corporations to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments, worked with corporate America to organize racist and protectionist campaigns against foreign countries, and encouraged racist campaigns against immigrant workers."
Lee Siu Hin
Economics / Labor / Banks
"For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites ..."
Cornel West
Corporations / Globalization
"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth."
Mark Crispin Miller
"While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.
History
"We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn
Religion
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