robert's writing

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom”

Martin Luther King Jr., "The Trumpet of Conscience", 1967

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"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"

Martin Luther King Jr., "The Trumpet of Conscience", 1967

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Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten.
And seeing them he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"
God said, "I did do something. I made you."

Sufi Teaching

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It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong:

Voltaire

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“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

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"To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace."

Tacitus

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"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.
Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

Samuel P. Huntington

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Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit
and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism:

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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“Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted,
the indifference of those who should have known better,
the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most,
that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia

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"All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace.
When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?"

Benjamin Franklin

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"Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?"

Holly Near

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"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
We know more about war than we know about peace,
more about killing that we know about living."

General Omar Bradley

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"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas,
they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."

Howard Zinn, historian and author

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"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something:

Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.":

Noam Chomsky

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"Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can't help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East."

John Sheehan, S.J.

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"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life.
It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor.
That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant,
self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking
and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."

Mark Twain

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NY Times 31 May 2004,
“In a recent two-and-a-half-year period, corporate profits surged 87 percent, while wages rose just 4.5 percent.
Not surprisingly, a study last fall by the Conference Board found that
less than 49 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, down from 59 percent in 1995.”

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"Ah yes, truth.
Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it's not the truth they want to hear.":

Helena Cassadine

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"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth."

Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

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Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all.
It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use.
Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own:

John Ruskin

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The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear:

Herbert Sebastien Agar

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which the United States of America never ratified)

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The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties. There is a whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition, and by intuition alone. This is denied us, because we deny sex and beauty, the source of intuitive life and of the insouciance which is so lovely in free animals and in plants.

D. H. Lawrence, 1928

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"The age of nations is past.
The task before us now,
if we would not perish,
is to build the earth."

P. Teilhard de Chardin 1965

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“Wildness is a quality gone from human environment. Tameness is the air one breathes in civilization. People suppose wildness is ferocity. It is something far more serious than that. It is independence—a life commitment to shouldering up one’s own self. For his safety and survival a wolf depends on himself only.”

Arctic Wild, Loris Crisler © 1958

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'...About a year later I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were.
'Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just daddy to tell them exactly what to do'."

Kurt Vonnegot, Bluebeard ©1987

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“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Ursula K. :Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness © 1969