John Pilger famous quotes

Official truths are often powerful illusions.
-- John Pilger

#Powerful #Sea #Illusion

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.
-- John Pilger

#Understanding #Messages #Agendas

Classic nineteenth century European imperialists believed they were literally on a mission. I don't believe that the imperialists these days have that same sense of public service. They are simply pirates.
-- John Pilger

#Believe #Pirate #Classic

If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
-- John Pilger

#Children #War #Support

We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly.
-- John Pilger

#Peace #Memories #Struggle

When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to 'support' troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. 'The ultimate test of our professionalism' is how Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth.
-- John Pilger

#Air #Usa #Iraq

I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.
-- John Pilger

#Israel #United States #Use

The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine don't stand a chance.
-- John Pilger

#Television #Chance #Censorship

Two increasing themes which appear to dominate our listening, reading and watching lives are propaganda and 'national security', or manufactured war.
-- John Pilger

#War #Reading #Two

The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.
-- John Pilger

#Children #Impact #Decision

During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.
-- John Pilger

#War #America #People

What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
-- John Pilger

#Pot #Kissinger

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.
-- John Pilger

#War #Vietnam #Experiments

When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience.
-- John Pilger

#Believe #Government #Use

I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win.
-- John Pilger

#Winning #Two #Pockets

Watch how the propaganda unfolds once the bombing is over and the Americans are running Baghdad and their spin machine. There will be the discovery of Saddam's secret arsenal, probably in the basement of one his palaces.
-- John Pilger

#Running #Discovery #Secret

There is no War on Terrorism; it is The Great Game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.
-- John Pilger

#War #Games #Differences

More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
-- John Pilger

#Media #Tyrants #Training

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.
-- John Pilger

#Writing #Reality #Looks

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.
-- John Pilger

#Dream #War #Moving

The U.S. is a cosmetic democracy.
-- John Pilger

#Democracy #Cosmetics

In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
-- John Pilger

#America #People #Lasts

Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they're not, I don't know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that's been revealed.
-- John Pilger

#Military #Thinking #Iraq

We have an extreme rightwing government in this country, although it's called the Labour government.
-- John Pilger

#Country #Government #Extremes

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
-- John Pilger

#Mother #Eight #Land

In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
-- John Pilger

#Powerful #People #Black

This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we dont try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
-- John Pilger

#Song #Children #Clever

I grew up in Sydney in a very political household, where we were all for the underdog.
-- John Pilger

#Political #Underdog #Grew Up

If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World.
-- John Pilger

#Real #School #People