William Blum famous quotes

03-28-2025

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.
-- William Blum

#Giving #Tables #Principles
No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.
-- William Blum

#Government #Matter #Imagine
Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
-- William Blum

#Inspirational #Life #Democracy
A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.
-- William Blum

#Air #Bombs #Force
Do you remember the classic example of chutzpah? It's the young man who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan. The Bush administration's updated version of that was starting a wholly illegal, immoral, and devastating war and then dismissing all kinds of criticism of its action on the grounds that 'we're at war.
-- William Blum

#War #Men #Judging
The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.
-- William Blum

#Media #Fabric #May
Why don't church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?
-- William Blum

#War #Military #Abortion
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
-- William Blum

#War #Military #World
What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists-whatever else they might be-might also be rational human beings ; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.
-- William Blum

#Religious #Hypocrisy #People
From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.
-- William Blum

#Crush #Country #Fighting
If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
-- William Blum

#Love Is #Five Senses #Blind
Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.
-- William Blum

#Compassion #People #Empathy

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