Michael Parenti famous quotes

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.
-- Michael Parenti

#Peace #War #Thinking

In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy. Those forced to live in substandard housing are thought to be the authors of substandard lives. Those who do not finish high school or cannot afford to go to college are considered deficient or inept.
-- Michael Parenti

#School #College #Lazy

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
-- Michael Parenti

#Essence #Luxury #Humanity

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
-- Michael Parenti

#Government #Order #Wealth

The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment-or at least much handicap-to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need.
-- Michael Parenti

#Honesty #Hard Work #Compassion

You don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day
-- Michael Parenti

#Peg

The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Jobs #Children

The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
-- Michael Parenti

#Successful #Liberty #Fabric

If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.
-- Michael Parenti

#Brother #Heart #America

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.
-- Michael Parenti

#Class #Government #Sides

Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in Third World nations be overcome if a new system is to prevail.
-- Michael Parenti

#Order #Broken #World

The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Government #Way

My point is that it's incorrect to say that the Iraq policy isn't working. It is working. It is doing what they want. They have got control of the oil and they are exporting it, and they have stripped a government that was 90% state owned and they are privatizing it. ... They have taken a country that was self defining and self developing and is now an impoverished prostrate devastated country where people will line up to work for slave wages or become members of the police or army because it's the only job they can get and serve as adjuncts to U.S. imperialism.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Jobs #Taken

Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #People #Indifference

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
-- Michael Parenti

#Dirty #Poverty #Causes

The trick is to steal big.
-- Michael Parenti

#Political #Stealing #Tricks

Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.
-- Michael Parenti

#Class #Want #Rewards

Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.
-- Michael Parenti

#Teaching #Unions #Firm

All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic. Marx said this, and so did Jefferson. It is a revolutionary doctrine, and very much an American one.
-- Michael Parenti

#People #Political #Doctrine

The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.
-- Michael Parenti

#Powerful #Ubiquity #Political

I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
-- Michael Parenti

#Dream #War #Land

For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them.
-- Michael Parenti

#Character #Years #Wings

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans.
-- Michael Parenti

#Believe #Dirty #People

People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.
-- Michael Parenti

#Thinking #People #World

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.
-- Michael Parenti

#Military #Real #People

If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Fall #Government

Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.
-- Michael Parenti

#War #Military #Order

No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
-- Michael Parenti

#Years #Practice #Culture

The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.
-- Michael Parenti

#Law #People #Needs

Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
-- Michael Parenti

#Class #Generosity #Important

Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth.
-- Michael Parenti

#Military #Land #Culture

I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.
-- Michael Parenti

#Marine #Cities #Honor

I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
-- Michael Parenti

#Wall #Marine #Men

A nation as such does not give aid to another nation. More precisely, the common citizens of our country, through their taxes, give to the privileged elites of another country. As someone once said: foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Giving #People

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.
-- Michael Parenti

#Political #Necks #Feels

A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.
-- Michael Parenti

#War #Government #Movement

Capital requires protection, as do the institutions through which it operates. As capital expands its operations, the state that is associated with its protection must develop its capacity for autocratic control. Thus, the "Free World" increasingly resembles a dreary string of heartless police states.
-- Michael Parenti

#Heartless #Police #World

Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.
-- Michael Parenti

#Lying #Dirty #Practice

The powers that be not only try to control events, but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves.
-- Michael Parenti

#Memories #Understanding #Trying

To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.
-- Michael Parenti

#Media #Political #Television

The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.
-- Michael Parenti

#Political #Rich #Poor

Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.
-- Michael Parenti

#Recovery #Dedication #Political

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.
-- Michael Parenti

#Political #Opponents #Constitution

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.
-- Michael Parenti

#War #Political #Church

Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.
-- Michael Parenti

#Russia #Political #Juicy

In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition-but even more terrible to be frozen into it.
-- Michael Parenti

#Teaching #Writing #Virginia

Conventional opinions fit so comfortably into the dominant paradigm as to be seen not as opinions but as statements of fact, as 'the nature of things.' The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us.
-- Michael Parenti

#Communication #Political #Mind

Candidates who win while spending less than their opponents still usually have to spend quite a lot. While not a surefire guarantor of victory, a large war chest -even if not the largest-is usually a necessary condition. Money may not guarantee victory, but the lack of it usually guarantees defeat. Without large sums, there is rarely much of a campaign, as poorly funded 'minor' candidates have repeatedly discovered.
-- Michael Parenti

#War #Winning #Political

In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.
-- Michael Parenti

#Opportunity #Government #Support

One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
-- Michael Parenti

#Children #Dirty #Gun

If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors.
-- Michael Parenti

#Running #Gun #Rights

Between 1831 and 1891, US armed forces - usually the Marines - invaded Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Argentina, and Chile a total of thirty-one times, a fact not many of us are informed about in school. The Marines intermittently occupied Nicaragua form 1909 to 1933, Mexico from 1914 to 1919, and Panama from 1903 to 1914. To 'restore order' the Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, killing over two thousand Haitians who resisted 'pacification.'
-- Michael Parenti

#School #Marine #Order

The god who presides over the Judeo-Christian belief system bears a disquieting resemblance to those imperfect creations known as human beings. This suggests that either he really did fashion us in his own image or we fashioned him in ours.
-- Michael Parenti

#Christian #Fashion #Political

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.
-- Michael Parenti

#Fate #Political #Humanity

Global warming is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and compounded effect that may be irreversible! We do not have eons or centuries or many decades. Most of us alive today may not even have the luxury of saying 'Après moi, le déluge' because we will be around to experience it ourselves. And if you think it will be 'interesting' or 'exciting,' ask the tsunami survivors if that's how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate' may take all of us down, once and forever.
-- Michael Parenti

#Thinking #Luxury #Interesting

[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy.
-- Michael Parenti

#Home #Class #Justice

The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries.
-- Michael Parenti

#Father #Hymns #Church

With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along.
-- Michael Parenti

#Leader #Drug #Weapons

The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
-- Michael Parenti

#Dirty #People #Truth Is

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.
-- Michael Parenti

#Might #Facts #World

A tiny portion of the population controls the lions share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse.
-- Michael Parenti

#Exercise #Media #Population

Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.
-- Michael Parenti

#Government #Leader #Accountability

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

#Country #Lying #Mean

You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property.
-- Michael Parenti

#Believe #Fighting #People

The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.
-- Michael Parenti

#Struggle #Rights #Roles

It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
-- Michael Parenti

#Mean #People #Support

To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
-- Michael Parenti

#Class #Numbers #People

Editors and reporters are not as free and independent to invite a variety of opinions as they might think. They are free to say what they like only as long as their bosses like what they say. They are free to produce what they want if their product remains within acceptable political boundaries. You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when your stray that you feel the restraining tug.
-- Michael Parenti

#Independent #Thinking #Media

With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests.
-- Michael Parenti

#Country #Powerful #Government

When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.
-- Michael Parenti

#Changed

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
-- Michael Parenti

#Revolution #Buttons #Action

Conservatives insist that government should be " run more like a business." One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.
-- Michael Parenti

#Running #Government #Purpose

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
-- Michael Parenti

#Executive Power #Peculiar #Danger

There is a century-old saying, "The dollar votes more times than the man.
-- Michael Parenti

#Men #Dollars #Vote

The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.
-- Michael Parenti

#Party #Order #Two

Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.
-- Michael Parenti

#Years #Police #World

One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.
-- Michael Parenti

#Jury

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
-- Michael Parenti

#War #Firsts #Atrocities

Democrats—lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.
-- Michael Parenti

#Lilies #Weasels #Democrat