“How did we get from September 12th, 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world — to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib?”
Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)
Context: How did we get from September 12th, 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world — to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib?
To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U. S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat — and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.
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Al Gore 127
45th Vice President of the United States 1948Related quotes

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004
The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: The liberals were right when they insisted that we had enough food and goods for all of our people. But they did not — and we still do not — know how to distribute those goods in a rational way. We have failed to figure out how to turn this abundance into an advantage. The liberals were also right about labor-saving. If we evenly distributed the work that needs to be done, there ought to be a lot of time left over for everybody to have the leisure that people need. But we have managed to reverse that. Today, a great many people cannot find any work. People are dispossessed and cannot support themselves or their families. Many are homeless. For many others, work has become a rat race: something to be endured, not enjoyed.
Today we are witnessing an impoverishment: the apparent drying up of resources for all kinds of things that are badly needed. We seem to have no money for housing, for education, or for health and social services. And yet we have a deficit, and we are told by candidates for public office that we must cut the federal budget even more. This impoverishment is a mystery.

Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, July 12, 2004. http://renewamerica.us/archives/media/interviews/04_07_12hc.htm.
2009

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

Servant of Peace : A Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations (1962), p. 107; this has sometimes been paraphrased: It is in playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
on making American Dreamz http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/movies/14326165.htm
Also phrased as: "I think it was just the weird feeling of, being like a lot of Americans and sort of reading the paper in the morning and worrying about terrorism and whether the administration was handling things in the right way, and then in the evening worrying even more about whether Constantine was going to get kicked off American Idol. It was really just kind of observing myself and, finding this weird disconnect, between the supposedly deadly serious situation of being at war with us going about our daily lives as if nothing is happening."

Answering a toast, "To the Babies," at a banquet in honor of General U.S. Grant (November 14, 1879).
The Writings of Mark Twain, Vol. 20 (1899), ed. Charles Dudley Warner, p. 397 http://books.google.com/books?id=mRARAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA397