Phyllis Bennis famous quotes

Whether the proposed constitution is approved or rejected . . . it is a process and a text largely crafted and imposed by U.S. occupation authorities and their Iraqi dependents, and thus lacking in legal or political legitimacy.
-- Phyllis Bennis

#Political #Occupation #Constitution

The question of Israeli apartheid was anathema a decade ago. Now it's even talked about by top Israeli officials, who say - they differ on the timing: We say it's already there; they say that if we don't do something different, we're going to face apartheid.
-- Phyllis Bennis

#Different #Faces #Timing

Instead of ending U.S. military aid to the 23rd wealthiest country to use for its consistent violations of international law and human rights, we see the Obama administration escalating the annual amount of aid, so that Israel will now start each year with almost $4 billion, with $3.8 billion a year of military aid coming from our tax money to support its military, without any restrictions on how it makes - how it uses that money, what weapons in the U.S. it's able to buy.
-- Phyllis Bennis

#Country #Military #Rights

We don't have a refugee crisis in America; we have a racism crisis here.
-- Phyllis Bennis

#Refugee Crisis #America #Racism

In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.

The Civic Culture (and The Civic Culture Revisited) remains the best study of comparative political culture in our time.

Music is a pastime, a relaxation from more serious occupations.

Nothing else is required than to act toward God, in the midst of your occupations, as you do, even when busy, toward those who love you and whom you love.

Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice.

They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities.

There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.

Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.