Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)
interview on WBAI, January 1992 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/9201-propaganda.html. <br class="br">Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994 <br class="br">Context: 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 is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)
Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit
( October 22, 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200410221457.asp) http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/author.nationalreview.com/bio/?q=MjE5NQ== <br class="br">2000s, 2004
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s
“Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?”
David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author
31 August 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/3669905898 <br class="br"> Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy
Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts
Response to questioner at a town-meeting in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, broadcast on CNN (18 August 2009); YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGX-2oTNens.
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate
Conversation at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (9 February 1978); published in A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism (1979)
1960s–1970s
Context: I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer
Speech at the Labour Party Conference (30 September 1976), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1976, p. 319. Healey had been forced to abandon plans to attend an international finance ministers' conference in order to speak to the conference because of a run on the pound.
1970s
Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director
Quoted in Craig Modderno, "Newman remains animated at 81," Reuters (2006-06-12)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.