We Must Follow The Truth

Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this ‘something’ cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.
( Robert Fulghum )

I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.
( Robin Williams )

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars. 
( Noam Chomsky )

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.
( Mark Haskell Smith )

A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it’s lowest ones.
( Nelson Mandela )

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like. 
( Noam Chomsky )

If you do not want to be lied to, then you need to stop following politics. 
( Steven Magee )

The Explosion Of The Prison Population In The USA ..
Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past 25 years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws, particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences, that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes.
( Michelle Alexander )

Yes the truth is that men’s ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
( Aristotle )

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. 
( Noam Chomsky )

If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up.
If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it. 
( Mark Glamack )

This Government is responsible for deaths, it’s responsible for starvation, it’s responsible for untold suffering and despair on a scale we have not seen since the Victorian era.
( Peter Stefanovic, 15.06.2019 )

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong. 
( Dwight D. Eisenhower )

You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.
( Hillary Rodham Clinton )

He is shallow, friendless, disloyal, deceitful, a womanising, mad-haired, narcissitic, liar.
( Brian Reade on Boris Johnson )

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them. 
( Christopher Hitchens )

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds. 
( Henry Adams )

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit. 
( Noam Chomsky )

The Relentless Smear Campaign Against Jeremy Corbyn ..
The Conservative Party, the Tory-supporting media, and Jewish activist groups, who some claim many have infiltrated the Labour Party by becoming members, seem to devote much of their time and energy attempting  to discredit and blacken the reputation of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The relentless rhetoric, unfounded allegations, propaganda and fear-mongering have persuaded many, both neutrals and Labour supporters, and some who should know better, to join the attack on Mr Corbyn. The reasons for the prolonged smear-campaign, which started almost the moment Mr Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader, are fairly obvious to smart and intelligent people. The initial, ridiculous unfounded attacks were for being a threat to national security and befriending just about every terrorist organisation. When this didn’t work, the meaning of anti-semitism was changed overnight. Because Mr Corbyn is sympathetic to Palestine and criticises Israel, this has been the relentless rhetoric ever since. The reasons, of course, is that the elite and the wealthy are worried (shit-scared, in fact) that if Mr Corbyn did take office as Prime Minister he would, without doubt, look closely at tax-havens, offshore bank accounts, tax-evasion, money-laundering, corruption, and the dodgy goings-on in the banking and financial sectors.
They simply want to stop Mr Corbyn becoming the UK Prime Minister, no matter what they have to do or say, or how dirty or low down in the gutter they have to go.
( Len Firswood, 27.06.2019 )

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests.
( Noam Chomsky )

A person with true power doesn’t need to attack. A person without power attacks constantly. 
( DaShanne Stokes )

Bullies are all the same. They are thin-skinned and cannot accept criticism, but find nothing wrong with name-calling, insulting, undermining and humiliating the characters of good, honest people.
( Rose Winfold )

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. 
( Noam Chomsky )

Being poor is not simply a matter of lacking opportunities to convert one’s labour into a wage, or a living wage, for that matter, but rather of becoming indebted and, through the commodification of these debts, paying an ever-higher price for being poor. 
( Noelle Stout )

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime. 
( Aristotle )

Try to look at causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works. 
( Eqbal Ahmed )

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.
( Robin Williams )

Rewarding jaundiced Boris Johnson for self-serving Brexit fibs largely responsible for the current chaos would be like signing a weekly direct debit for the burglar who just ransacked your home and stole the family silver.
( Kevin Maguire, 28.04.2019 )

America cannot survive a regime as an international tyrant. Only through cooperation of nations will the citizens of the world thrive.
( Kilroy J. Oldster )

The many are more incorruptible than the few. They are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.
( Aristotle )

The Violated Treaties ..
Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American people that Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty or agreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, the saying went, to be Communists. Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement despite the fact that the United States government signed over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian tribes. It would take Russia another century to make and break as many treaties as the United States has already violated.
( Vine Deloria Jr. )

When you hear and read prominent people and politicians continually criticising and attempting to blacken an opponent’s name or reputation, you can be sure it’s either jealousy, or more likely, fearful of that opponent.
( Dion Felsrow )

So casual is Boris Johnson’s acquaintance with the truth, assuming immediately that he’s lying saves time.
( Kevin Maguire, 16.06.2019 )

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering – these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for.
( Robin Williams )

Both are strangers to the truth, guilty of odious racism and are Me-Me-Me egomaniacs elevating themselves first, second and third.
( Kevin Maguire on Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, 28.04.2019 )

Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads. 
( DaShanne Stokes )

Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily. 
( Aristotle )

Illegal immigrants have always been a problem in the USA.
Ask any indigenous American Indian.
( Rose Winfold )

I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretence of taking care of them.
( Thomas Jefferson )

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. 
( Franklin D. Roosevelt )

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
( Kurt Vonnegut )

When you’re dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don’t say than what they do. 
( DaShanne Stokes )

Boris Bikes Or Ken’s Cycles ? ..
He was a terrible Foreign Secretary in a rehearsal for No 10, laughing about dead bodies in Libya and cack-handedly extending a British-Iranian mother’s jail sentence in Iran. Equally his eight-year reign at London Mayor was a complete failure compared with Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone’s innovative terms, the Tory scamster squandering £40m on vanity buses and a £43m luvvie unbuilt garden bridge. Boris Airport was a pricey fiction and even the “Boris Bikes” network was inherited from Livingstone, “Ken’s Cycles” a more accurate eponymous tribute.
( Kevin Maguire on Boris Johnson, 16.06.2019 )

A stupid leader or politician is a dangerous enemy.
There is no defence against stupidity.
Facts, protests, reasons, even the truth, fall on deaf ears.
When presented with irrefutable evidence the stupid person will become irritable, critical and offensive, and just push the truth aside as inconsequential or incidental.
Great caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person, they are dangerous.
( Flori Swedon )

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. 
( Noam Chomsky )

A politician is a hog grateful to whoever is rattling the stick inside the swill bucket. It is time to take the swill bucket away. 
( Mike Lofgren )

Most politicians are corrupt as they do not represent the masses that voted for them, but rather they choose to return numerous favours to the corporations that funded their election campaigns. 
( Steven Magee )

I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.
( Bill Maher )

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way:
Stop participating in it.
( Noam Chomsky )

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
No one in this world, so far as I know, and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
( H.L. Mencken )

Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms. But those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of free men.
( Aristotle )

They declare that it is unpatriotic and disruptive to question the workings of authority, but patriotic to institute harsh and regressive policies that benefit the wealthy, undermine social programs that serve the needs of the great majority, and subordinate a frightened population to increased state control. 
( Noam Chomsky )

Certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make. It is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.
( David A. Bednar )

May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership. Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.
( Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. )

We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children’s children, not to party politics.
( DaShanne Stokes )