Quotes about regime (622 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Every entrepreneur is either a socialist, anarchist, or a communist. Meaning, you are not willing to depend upon an individual who tells you what to do and how to live your life. Your boss represent the capitalist regime.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Dependency , Life

“The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target. And not exempt of responsibility are those Western regimes whose presence in the region offers support to the American troops there. We know at least one reason behind the symbolic participation of the Western forces and that is to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel. Surely, their presence is not out of concern over their interests in the region. … Their presence has no meaning save one and that is to offer support to the Jews in Palestine who are in need of their Christian brothers to achieve full control over the Arab Peninsula which they intend to make an important part of the so called Greater Israel.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

1990s, ABC interview (1998)

War , Support , Parting

“According to old records, it has been a rule with the Muslim rulers from the first to build mosques, monasteries, and inns, spread Islam, and put (a stop to) non-Islamic practices, wherever they found prominence (of kufr). Accordingly, even as they cleared up Mathura, Bindraban etc., from the rubbish of non-Islamic practices, the Babari mosque was built up in AH 923 (?) under the patronage of Sayyid Musa Ashiqan in the Janmasthan temple (butkhane Janmsthan mein) in Faizabad Avadh, which was a great place of (worship) and capital of Rama's father'…'A great mosque was built on the spot where Sita ki Rasoi is situated. During the regime of Babar, the Hindus had no guts to be a match for the Muslims. The mosque was built in AH 923 (?) under the patronage of Sayyid Mir Ashiqan' Aurangzeb built a mosque on the Hanuman Garhi' The Bairagis effaced the mosque and erected a temple in its place. Then idols began to be worshipped openly in the Babari mosque where the Sita ki Rasoi is situated.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

Muraqqa-i-Khusrawî (Tãrîkh-i-Awadh) by Shykh Azmat Alî Kãkorwî Nãmî , cited by Dr. Harsh Narain, "Rama-Janmabhumi Temple: Muslim Testimony", 1990, and quoted in Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples - What Happened to them.

According to Harsh Narain, the publication of the chapter "dealing with the Jihad led by Amir Ali Amethawi for recapture of Hanuman Garhi from the Bairagis" was suppressed "on the ground that its publication would not be opportune in view of the prevailing political situation". Dr. Kakorawi himself lamented that ‘suppression of any part of any old composition or compilation like this can create difficulties and misunderstandings for future historians and researchers’. Muraqqa-i-Khusrawî (Tãrîkh-i-Awadh) by Shykh Azmat Alî Kãkorwî Nãmî. Shykh Azamat Ali Kakorawi Nami (1811–1893), Muraqqa(h)-i Khusrawi also known as the Tarikh-i Av(w)adh cited by Harsh Narain The Ayodhya Temple Mosque Dispute: Focus on Muslim Sources, 1993, New Delhi, Penman Publications. ISBN 8185504164 Quoted in Dr. Harsh Narain: Rama-Janmabhumi Temple Muslim Testimony Harsh Narain (Indian Express, February 26, 1990) and in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.
Quotes from Muslim histories of early modern era

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Night , Country

“… yesterday’s enemies are in power and from there, they are trying to establish a Marxist regime.”

Jorge Rafael Videla (1925–2013) Argentinian President

As quoted in Alexei Barrionuevo (23 December 2010). "Argentina: Ex-Dictator Sentenced in Murders". The New York Times.

“As a nation-state, Iran has no problems with anybody. As a vehicle for the Khomeinist ideology it has problems with everybody, starting with the Iranian people. The Khomeinist regime makes no secret of its intense hatred for Iranian culture, which it claims has roots in “the age of ignorance” (jahiliyyah). To admire this regime because of Iranian culture is like admiring Hitler for Goethe and Beethoven and praising Stalin for Pushkin and Tchaikovsky. This regime has executed tens of thousands of Iranians, driven almost 6 million into exile, and deprived the nation of its basic freedoms. It has also killed more Americans, often through surrogates, than al Qaeda did on 9/11. Not a single day has passed without this regime holding some American hostages. Iran as a nation is a solid friend of America. Iran as a vehicle for the Khomeinist revolution is an eternal enemy of “The Great Satan.” The only realistic strategy for the United States would be to help it stop being the Islamic Republic and become Iran again. President Obama’s policy, however, points in the opposite direction. He has made it harder for the Iranian people to regain their human rights.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

What US leaders have never understood about Iran http://nypost.com/2015/07/19/what-us-leaders-have-never-understood-about-iran/, New York Post (July 19, 2015).
New York Post

People , Secret , Age , Problem

“[T]here is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Letter to Humphry House, (11 April 1940). p. 532 http://books.google.com/books?id=0j2qODEJkdoC&pg=PA532#v=onepage&q&f=false, The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: An age like this, 1920–1940, Editors: Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus

“If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.”

Ludwig von Mises book Socialism

Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)
Context: The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.

“If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
: BRITISH TORY. Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
: COMMUNIST. If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
: IRISH NATIONALIST. Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
: TROTSKYIST. The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.
: PACIFIST. Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

War , People , Secret , Fools

“National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

. . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.
Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (4 May 1940). Orwell: My Country Right or Left - 1940 to 1943, Vol. 2, Essays, Journalism & Letters, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, edit., Boston, MA, Nonpareil Books (2000), p. 25.

“All national rulers, no matter what the nation or the political regime, lord it over their subjects. There can be no political power without tyranny.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 61

“And freedom will win -- not because it’s inevitable, not because it is ordained, but because these basic human yearnings for dignity and justice and democracy do not go away. They can be suppressed. At times, they can be silenced, but they burn in every human heart in a place where no regime could ever reach, a light that no army can ever extinguish. And so long as free peoples summon the confidence and the courage and the will to defend the values that we cherish, then freedom will always be stronger and our ideas will always prevail no matter what.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)

People , Justice , Democracy , Confidence

“[The Soviet government] is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

Source: https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=WWMHAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA132&dq=%5BThe+Soviet+government%5D+is+the+most+realistic+regime+in+the+world+%E2%80%94+no+ideals.&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=YpSgVOShKoyogwT9loTIAg&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%5BThe%20Soviet%20government%5D%20is%20the%20most%20realistic%20regime%20in%20the%20world%20%E2%80%94%20no%20ideals.&f=false

World

“Already, the United States has imposed strong sanctions on Syria’s leaders. We supported a transfer of power that is responsive to the Syrian people. And many of our allies have joined in this effort. But for the sake of Syria -- and the peace and security of the world -- we must speak with one voice. There's no excuse for inaction. Now is the time for the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian regime, and to stand with the Syrian people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, UN speech to General Assembly (September 2011)

People , World , Peace , Support

“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Prologue: Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs.
New millennium, Swimming Across: a Memoir, 2001

War , People , Democracy , Time

“I think, as a politician, [the exiled shah] had realized that the leaders were after their own political interests and they would very much like to establish relations with the [upcoming] regime in the country. But their inhuman behavior was terrifying, along with all the lies that the media would publish. I used to wonder for years, all those who wrote on the [subject] of human rights back then, how did they remain silent after all the inhuman incidents in Iran during the later years? [It was no] coincidence [that] the downfall of the shah [led to an Iran in which] the Iranians no longer had any human rights.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Interview: Farah Pahlavi Recalls 30 Years In Exile http://www.rferl.org/content/Interview_Farah_Pahlavi_Recalls_30_Years_In_Exile/2111354.html, Radio Free Europe, (July 27, 2010).
Interviews

Behavior , Thinking , Country

“Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions. After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers. The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"The Territories" (1968)

Hostility , People , Secret , Education

“The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Responding to anti-semitic propaganda and to criticisms of German writers living in exile during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany, as quoted in "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114269/thomas-mann-stands-anti-semitism-stacks

World , Feeling , Courage , Heart

“I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Quran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Letter to Sheikh El-Messiri, (28 August 1798); published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol.4, No. 3148, p. 420

Men , Education , Hope , Time

“Unfortunately [South Africa] has been badly repaid for her loyalty because the West has expelled her from the family circle while befriending the most dictatorial regimes on Earth.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As state president in an interview with Figaro, Paris, 8 December 1986, as cited in The Star, and Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, PW Botha in his own words, p. 41

Family , Loyalty

“What policymakers (and econometricians) should recognize, then, is that societies face a meaningful set of choices about alternative economic policy regimes.”

Thomas J. Sargent (1943) American economist

"Rational expectations and the dynamics of hyperinflation." 1973

“Some Western powers admit that they have killed a large part of Jewish population in Europe and founded the occupied regime in order to put right the wrong they had committed.
With deference to all nations and followers of divine religions, we are asking if this atrocity is true, then why the people of the region should pay for it by occupation of Palestinian lands and unending suppression of Palestinian people, by homelessness of millions of Palestinians, by destruction of their cities and rural areas and agricultural lands.
Why should they pay by fire, bullets and imposition of forces? And why should they pay by tolerating occupation of Islamic lands? Are the consequences of the establishment of this regime less than the Holocaust you are claiming?
If there are doubts regarding the Holocaust, there is really no doubt regarding Palestinian disaster and Holocaust. The Holocaust in Palestine has persisted for more than sixty years.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

People , Religion , Parting

“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 8

War , Question , Sense , Strong

“Every left of centre party that gets into power is doomed to disappoint – more so, probably, than governments of the right, since the left aspires more definitively to reshape society. It is a phenomenon found around the world in democratic countries. Once into the grind of day to day government, the left’s erstwhile supporters will be quick to say that the party lacks direction, or it has betrayed its values, or that its policies are not radical enough, or all three together. The 1945 Attlee government is fondly remembered by many activists as the most radical and accomplished of all Labour regimes. Yet at the time it was vociferously denounced for its timidity and its lack of purpose.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Ten Years of New Labour edited by Matt Beech and Simon Lee (2008), pp. xi.

World , Disappointment , Support , Time

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , People , Age

“The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"Magnetic Sleep", review of From Mesmer to Freud by Adam Crabtree, originally published in [London] Daily Telegraph (1994)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

History

“We will continue to pursue the strategy of boosting domestic demand and ensure fast and balanced economic and social development in China. This will create more opportunities for China-U. S. economic cooperation and trade. We will continue to advance the reform of the RMB exchange rate regime, take positive steps in such areas as expanding market access, increasing imports, and strengthening the protection of intellectual property rights, and further expand China-U. S. economic cooperation and trade.”

Hu Jintao (1942) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

2000s, White House speech (2006)

“Today we have done what we had to do. If necessary, we shall do it again. It gives me no pleasure to say that, and I wish it were otherwise… When our citizens are abused or attacked anywhere in the world on the direct orders of a hostile regime, we will respond so long as I'm in this Oval Office. Self-defense is not only our right; it is our duty. … Despite our repeated warnings, Qadhafi continued his reckless policy of intimidation, his relentless pursuit of terror. He counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Address to the Nation on the United States Air Strike Against Libya http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/41486g.htm (14 April 1986)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)

Hostility , Pleasure , World

“The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude — as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

62
Empire

World , Dead

“Dignity will win -- because every human being is born equal, with free will and inalienable rights. And any regime or system of government that tries to deny these rights will ultimately fail and countries that uphold them will only grow stronger.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)

Country

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life

“We stand together because we believe that people and nations have the right to determine their own destiny. And that includes the people of Ukraine. Robbed by a corrupt regime, Ukrainians demanded a government that served them. Beaten and bloodied, they refused to yield. Threatened and harassed, they lined up to vote; they elected a new President in a free election -- because a leader’s legitimacy can only come from the consent of the people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, 25th Anniversary of Polish Freedom Day Speech (June 2014)

People

“As we meet here today, men and women and children are being tortured, detained and murdered by the Syrian regime. Thousands have been killed, many during the holy time of Ramadan. Thousands more have poured across Syria’s borders. The Syrian people have shown dignity and courage in their pursuit of justice -- protesting peacefully, standing silently in the streets, dying for the same values that this institution is supposed to stand for. And the question for us is clear: Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors?”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, UN speech to General Assembly (September 2011)

Women , Men , Children , People

“Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the U. S. caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.”

William Blum book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

third edition (2006), p. 1-2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

Life , People , Despair

“We are ready to continue to work with the U. S. side and other parties concerned to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, and the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiation to uphold the international non-proliferation regime and safeguard global peace and stability.”

Hu Jintao (1942) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

2000s, White House speech (2006)

Peace

“I believe a government that suppresses peaceful dissent is not showing strength; it is showing weakness and it is showing fear. History shows that regimes who fear their own people will eventually crumble, but strong institutions built on the consent of the governed endure long after any one individual is gone. That's why our strongest leaders -- from George Washington to Nelson Mandela -- have elevated the importance of building strong, democratic institutions over a thirst for perpetual power. Leaders who amend constitutions to stay in office only acknowledge that they failed to build a successful country for their people -- because none of us last forever. It tells us that power is something they cling to for its own sake, rather than for the betterment of those they purport to serve.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2015)

People , Fear , Peace , History

“I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime would think of Nazi Germany. … I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the Wizarding world.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

J. K. Rowling, as quoted in ‪Harry Potter's Bookshelf : The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures‬ (2009) by John Granger 
2000s
Context: I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime would think of Nazi Germany. … I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the Wizarding world. So you have to the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is a great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves on nothing else, they can pride themselves on perceived purity. … The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

World , Problem , Thinking , Evil

“The KGB, in Kalugin’s view, was more successful than the CIA, partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime. As Inder Malhotra noted, though corruption was not new in India: People expected Indira Gandhi’s party, committed to bringing socialism to the country, to be more honest and cleaner than the old undivided Congress. But this turned out to be a vain hope. On the contrary, compared with the amassing of wealth by some of her close associates, the misdeeds of the discarded Syndicate leaders, once looked upon as godfathers of corrupt Congressmen, began to appear trivial.”

Indíra Gándhí (1917–1984) Indian politician and Prime Minister

The Mitrokhin Archive

Country , Success , Wealth , Hope

“Violence was common in both places, but the violence of the capitalist order seemed inherent in it; whilst the violence of Russia, bad though it was, aimed at a new order based on peace and cooperation and real freedom for the masses. With all her blunders, Soviet Russia had triumphed over enormous difficulties and taken great strides towards this new order. While the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways, in the Soviet country a great new world was being built up before our eyes. Russia, following the great Lenin, looked into the future and thought only of what was to be, while other countries lay numbed under the dead hand of the past and spent their energy in preserving the useless relics of a bygone age. In particular, I was impressed by the reports of the great progress made by the backward regions of Central Asia under the Soviet regime. In the balance, therefore, I was all in favour of Russia, and the presence and example of the Soviets was a bright and heartening phenomenon in a dark and dismal world.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)

Peace , Dead , Freedom , Country

“Watch the movie closely, and you’ll see how personal it is. Here’s a film in which cinema brings down the Nazi regime, metaphorically and literally. What could possibly be better than that? In this story, cinema changes the world, and I fucking love that idea!”

Quentin Tarantino (1963) American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor

Source: Interview with The London Paper about Inglourious Basterds http://www.thelondonpaper.com/going-out/whats-new/quentin-tarantino-the-big-interview

Personality , World , Idea , Love

“There’s very little places, virtually no places obviously in the corporate media apparatus that you can tell the truth to challenge corporate tyranny and this US imperialist narrative of constant regime change all around the world... It’s a very dangerous and slippery slope that we’re on and I just think it’s time that we take a step back and actually fund the journalists that we want to see...”

Abby Martin (1984) American journalist

Quoted in Curating our reality: Investigative journalist Abby Martin takes aim at US media hegemony, RT.com https://www.rt.com/news/437721-abby-martin-telesur-sanctions/ (5 September 2018)

Time , Truth , Thinking , World

“A capitalist regime is more likely to produce these narcissistic behaviours in its citizens compared to a socialist country.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Country

“Obviously, Lenin meant that the stage of fierce civil war and the restriction of democracy imposed on the Soviet people were only provisional and had to be abolished as soon as the new regime was consolidated.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

"Development of Ideological Unity Among Marxist Leninist Parties" (August 3, 1956)
1950s

Democracy , War , People

“It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U. S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Source: Come September

Women , War

“The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.”

Helmut Newton (1920–2004) German-Australian photographer

American Photo (January/February 2000), p. 90
Context: Since the commercialization and banality of editorial magazine pages have made this work uninteresting, advertising has become an increasingly important part of my work. It is interesting to compare European and American mores in regard to my work. One will notice that most of my European images have a stronger sexual content that those destined for American publication. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

“The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.”

Gene Sharp book From Dictatorship to Democracy

Source: From Dictatorship to Democracy

Way , Effort

“Perhaps if they're not happy here they can go back to Iran and try their luck with ayatollahs, if they don't like the planning regime or my approach.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Remarks at press conference, 21 March 2006, criticising the businessmen David and Simon Reuben who were obstructing land acquisition for the 2012 Olympics. The Reuben brothers were in fact born in India, to parents of an Iraqi Jewish heritage. Quoted in "Gaffe lands Livingstone back in trouble" by Jill Sherman in The Times (22 March 2006)

Happiness

“The now famous slogan 'keep calm and carry on' poster from 1939 was designed as a motivational poster for people living in cities expecting to be bombed by the Nazis. But the UK wasn't just 'keeping calm': we had taken a stand like no other country in the world and declared war on a barbaric regime which was a global threat to peace and security. Today, as we wait to hear news from Manchester following the slaughter and maiming of innocent children, we have people calling for us to do nothing. But it's not the same 'carry on' as in 1939: they want us to accept terror attacks as a part of life we should now accept. Well, I don't accept it. How many people are we going to sacrifice on the alter (sic) of political correctness before we build up the courage to confront what most people will happily admit to their friends and family: that we are facing a continuing threat from radical Islam which hashtags and tea lights will not stop?”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Jane Collins MEP responds to terror attacks in Manchester http://jane-collins.org/news.php?id=79. Item on official website (May 23, 2017).

Life , War , Children , People

“In China's communist era, despite all of the rhetoric about internationalism and "liberation of mankind" during the Mao years, the regime, especially in its claims to legitimacy, has consistently stressed nationalism. Nationalism has taken different forms at different stages - an arrogant, bellicose style under Mao; a pragmatic, defensive style under Deng Xiaoping; and a resurgence of the arrogant, bellicose style under Jiang Zemin - but the underlying passions that shape the policies have always been caught up in a vicious cycle between self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century" (2002)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Passion

“All reactionary classes in all historical epochs, when the antagonism between exploiters and exploited reaches its highest peak, presaging the arrival of a new social regime, have turned to the worst weapons of repression and calumny against their adversaries.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

“What is actually happening now is that monoploy capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's institutions and lives. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each other's regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only those at the very top of society in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years.”

Phillip Blond (1966) British philosopher

Money , People , World

“And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Archived NedaNet page http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/

Feeling , Question

“We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U. S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 124

Reality

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Invasion of Iraq (March 2003)

People , Peace

“In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Truth , History , Decision , Science

“Our nightmare, any of us, which would change the way we lived our lives, was if we thought that any moment Al Qaeda might detonate a nuclear weapon in a city anywhere in the world, because we learned that they had gotten hold of some plutonium from the North Koreans by sale, or when the North Korean regime collapsed, somebody smuggled it out.”

Ash Carter (1954) United States Secretary of Defense

pbs.org interview http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kim/interviews/acarter.html

World , Way , Learning , Change

“We know that we are a main goal for the Iranian regime. We will not wait until the battle becomes in Saudi Arabia but we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia”

Mohammad bin Salman (1985) Saudi crown prince and minister of defense

2017-05-07 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saudi-minister/iran-minister-warns-saudi-arabia-after-battle-comments-tasnim-idUSKBN1830Y7

Waiting

“Instead of negotiating with the Israeli regime, the Arab states should talk to the Palestinian nation so as to garner divine consent and national popularity.”

Ahmad Khatami (1960) Iranian ayatollah

Iranian cleric slams Arabs for negotiating with Israel http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/Iran/212319 27-04-2007.

“Trying to plant such an oligarchy in the midst of what was otherwise the world's most successful republican regime was no small task, and it required the invention of ideological monstrosities to justify it. In the Southern case, the monstrosities included race-based rationales for the enslavement of Africans.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

World , Success

“The armature of economic neo-liberalism … cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.”

Arnold Davidson (1955) American academic

"In praise of counter-conduct," History of the Human Sciences, v. 24, n. 4

Behavior , History , Idea

“The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book The Old Regime and the Revolution

Variant translation: The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
Old Regime (1856), p. 214 http://books.google.com/books?id=N50aibeL8BAC&pg=PA214&vq=%22most+critical+moment+for+bad+governments%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
1850s and later

“I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U. S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U. S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

At the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991 http://web.archive.org/web/20041130090045/http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/soref/cheney.htm
1990s

Way , Thinking , Effort , Time

“Third World elections provide an excellent testing ground for a propaganda model. Some elections are held in friendly client states to legitimize their rulers and regimes, whereas others are held in disfavored or enemy countries to legitimize their political systems. […] the United States organized what have been called “demonstration elections” in its client states, defined as those whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention is well intentioned, that the populace of the invaded and occupied country welcomes the intrusion, and that they are being given democratic choice. The elections in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 were true demonstration elections, and those held in Guatemala in 1984-85 were strongly supported by the United States for image-enhancing purposes. The elections held in Nicaragua in 1984, by contrast, was intended to legitimize a government that the Reagan administration was striving to destabilize and overthrow. The U. S. government therefore went to great pains to cast the Nicaraguan election in an unfavorable light.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, pp. 87-88.

Pain , World , Home , Support

“All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agreed to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

While trying to work out a plan to internally destabilize Lebanon in favor of a Christian-Maronite government.
The Iron Wall (1999)

Money , Heart

“For years, whenever I saw Mubarak, he reminded me of a mummy. He spent a considerable time each day to “prepare” himself. That meant dying his hair and eyebrows jet black, and applying rouge to his cheeks to make them look rosy, in more or less the same way Egyptian mummy makers did with dead pharaohs. He also wore heels to look taller and used a corset to keep his belly in. Despite declining eyesight, he shunned glasses in public. Even in his 80s, he wanted to appear alive and young, just as pharaohs had done. Mubarak’s attempts at securing eternal youth were faintly comical and ultimately harmless. What was not comical and certainly harmless was the mummification of his regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Curse of the mummy" http://nypost.com/2011/02/13/curse-of-the-mummy/, New York Post (February 13, 2011).
New York Post

Youth , Way , Appearance , Time

“The Arab world has seen elections before. However, virtually all of them were artificial affairs, their outcomes never in doubt. They were in the end celebrations of one version or another of autocracy, never a repudiation of them. That kind of state-management is not what has just taken place in Iraq. Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one's own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out. No wonder the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world are so worried, and no wonder they were so hostile to everything that happened in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. They had longed for failure. They trotted out the tired old formulas of anti-Americanism to impart legitimacy to the so-called Iraqi "resistance to American occupation." But the people of Iraq have put an end to all that. En masse, ordinary people took to the streets in the second great Iraqi revolt against the politics of barbarism exemplified by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's immortal words: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hostility , War , People , World

“The price, then, that the professional study of ethics for bureaucrats exacts from the curriculum is that questions of political philosophy ("Is the regime just?") must yield to less fundamental questions such as "How can I promote the values of the regime?" The method of regime values eschews metaphysics and addresses the students in the existential situation in which it finds them—persons who have taken or are about to take an oath to uphold the values of a particular regime. It admonishes them that taking such an oath presupposes an acceptance of the fundamental justice of the regime but does not require into how the students arrived at the conclusion that the regime is just.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

(1989, p. 70-71)
Ethics for bureaucrats, 1988

Justice , Question , Study , Personality

“The repression of liberty that took place in the countries in which Communist regimes were established cannot be adequately explained as a product of backwardness, or of errors in the application of Marxian theory. It was the result of a resolute attempt to realize an Enlightenment utopia - a condition of society in which no serious form of conflict any longer exists.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.99)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Error , Country

“They are arrayed against every principle for which we stand. So when the Soviet leaders jail a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker, for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a regime that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others. If detente is to progress then it ought to mean that the Soviet authorities relax their ruthless opposition to all forms and expressions of dissent.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Chelsea Conservative Association (26 July 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102750
Leader of the Opposition

People , Truth , Freedom

“The Iranian revolution was a real revolution, not just a coup d'etat or a putsch or whatever. It was a genuine revolution in the sense that the French and the Russian revolutions were revolutions. It brought a massive change, social, economic, ideological not just a change of regime. Like for the French and Russian revolutions in their day, Khomeini had had a tremendous impact everywhere they had a shared universe of discourse, that is to say, the Muslim world. Just as the French and Russian revolutions in their day, and for some time after, had such an impact, so did the Iranian revolution, and it was not limited to the Shi'a world.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

World , Sense , Universe , Change

“… Assad’s survival—if Saddam Hussein’s murderous rampage in 1991 is any indication—will without a shadow of a doubt translate into hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead, mostly butchered after his victory has been assured. The comparison comes to mind because the two Ba’thi regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad bear an unmistakable resemblance—they are mirror images of one another, one might say. Both are minority dominated, single party regimes originating in the same quasi-fascist pan-Arab ideology built on the principle that any form of disagreement is an act of “betrayal” to the “revolution.””

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Intervention In Syria is a Moral and Human Imperative", New Republican (February 24, 2012)

Betrayal , Victory , Dead

“Great Britain, will now have to determine its attitude toward the conflict, and it has the following possibilities: It can accept that the situation will never return to what it was before April 2, in which case we would maintain an attitude of negotiating for the recovery of our sovereignty. Or it can proceed toward the restoration of its colonial regime, with which there would be no security or definitive peace, and the responsibility of deepening the conflict would fall on Great Britain. In any case, the nation united, on its feet, motivated by the sentiment a united cause, will continue marching toward improving and strengthening itself.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

As quoted in "Galtieri bars peace if Britain restores its 'colonial rule'" http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/16/world/galtieri-bars-peace-if-britain-restores-its-colonial-rule.html, The New York Times (June 16, 1982)

Peace , Motivation

“There have been violations in the protest squares, especially in Sana'a. This is natural when hundreds of thousands of people [protest] for extended periods of time. However, these violations are marginal, and do not tarnish the beauty of the revolution. We see rival tribes meeting and debating in their tents, and men and women struggling [together] in the square to oust the regime.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman – A Profile (2011)

Women , Men , People , Beauty

“Socio-economic hardship breeds not only repression to force people to live with hardship, but also resistance, often in turn provoking repression in initial rounds, but in subsequent rounds quite possibly forcing dictatorial regimes to give in, partially or thoroughly, and to concede democratic reforms. This is another way, twisted as it may look, in which structural adjustment may indeed lead up to democratization.”

Lars Rudebeck (1937)

Source: Politics and Structural Adjustment in a West-African Village (1990). AKUT, Uppsala universitet, p. 20

People , Way

“The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. […] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems, 1966

Time , Parting

“During the lengthy process of production the business world is incurring outgoings in terms of money-paying out in money for wages and other expenses of production-in the expectation of recouping this outlay by disposing of the product for money at a later date. That is to say, the business world as a whole must always be in a position where it stands to gain by a rise of price and to lose by a fall of price. Whether it likes it or not, the technique of production under a regime of money-contract forces the business world always to carry a big speculative position; and if it is reluctant to carry this position, the productive process must be slackened.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money (1923)

Money , World , Business

“The boat people, the boat people, in getting out what got in, getting out of South Vietnam, that so called communist paradise and that’s to show enough to the whole world that the communist regime doesn't work in South Vietnam. And maybe if we are in fight now inside in…in…South Vietnam, we will have certainly the support of the general, of the majority, of the population. We never had that thing before. But now, if there is some, something, you know, moving over there, I am almost sure that we have I am sure that we have, the support, the majority of the population.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

Political resentment in contemporary Vietnam
1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

People , World , Support , Fight

“The [Nazi] regime was also able to use the state-owned multi-nationals as a ‘battering ram’ for entering economies that were not occupied territory.”

Richard Overy (1947) British historian

Source: War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), p. 330

“Since no example of Leninist socialism is other than totalitarian and bureaucratic, one wonders how the doctrinaire ideologists can dismiss so disdainfully those who point out that the promise of socialism in freedom, while surely praiseworthy, remains a promise only, not something experienced in reality. The utopia of socialism with a human face has been crushed everywhere even before it could be born. How distressing that becoming humane, which should be the least we could expect from a regime dedicated to liberating humanity, should present for socialism a problem as impossible as squaring the circle.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 57

Problem , Reality , Freedom

“The existence of the Zionist regime is tantamount to imposition of an unending and unrestrained threat so that none of the nations and Islamic countries of the region and beyond can feel secure from its threat. The closer these nations are to the epicenter of this threat, the more threatened they feel. The people of Palestine are at the very core of such a threat. They have not been able to spend a day with peace of mind for the past sixty years. Three generations of sons and daughters of Palestinians have lived and are presently living under these circumstances. The peoples of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the entire Middle East are essentially under similar situation.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

People , Peace , Feeling , Past

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris (15-21 January 1998). (Brzezinski has repeatedly http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04252012-175722/unrestricted/WHITE_THESIS.pdf denied https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjAsQJh7OM having said this, and no such memo exists. https://books.google.com/books?id=ToYxFL5wmBIC&q=deep+skepticism#v=snippet&q=deep%20skepticism&f=false)
Disputed

Secret , History , Reality

“The top secret "M Device", an exploding shell containing a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine. The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised". Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price, was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."The cabinet was hostile to the use of such weapons, much to Churchill's irritation. He also wanted to use M Devices against the rebellious tribes of northern India. "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he declared in one secret memorandum.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), .

Hostility , Secret , Home

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

Hostility , Communication , Literature , Question

“More than a decade after the Shah's death it is no longer necessary to be for or against him on all matters. How could one be for or against everything that happened during a reign of nearly thirty-eight years? How could Iranians not be for him when he fought over Azerbaijan or when he gave the royal assent to the bill that nationalised Iran's oil? How could one be against the principle of land reform or the enhancement of women's status? And did he not deserve support when he fought for a more just system of production and pricing for oil, which he called 'a noble substance'? But how could anyone be for him when he closed all doors on discussion and debate and effectively drove many intelligent and patriotic Iranians into the arms of reactionary mullahs? And how could one approve of the unchecked intervention of the SAVAK secret police in virtually all aspects of life, especially in the 1970s? Last but not least, it would be difficult to understand, much less to justify, his almost pathological belief that only the major powers were capable of either protecting or destabilising his regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Life , Death , Women , Secret

“People are very shortsighted when they argue that way, when they say: Beuys makes everything with felt, so he's trying to say something about the concentration camps [of the German Nazi regime]. Nobody bothers to ask whether I might not be more interested in evoking a very colorful world as an anti-image inside people with the help of this element, felt. So it's a matter of evoking a lucid world, a clear, lucid, perhaps transcendentally spiritual world through something which looks quite different, through an anti-image.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Beuys, 1997, p. 11, xix); as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, by Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 192
Quotes after 1984, posthumous published

People , World , Color , Way

“Whatever his inner thoughts and intentions, Hitler now had to serve as a representative of his unit within the new Soviet regime. By his willingness to run for office as Bataillons-Rat, he had become even more significant cog in the machine of Socialism than previously had been the case. Hitler’s actions helped sustain the Soviet Republic.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), pp. 49-50

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“For the first time people in the south stopped calling for separation, raised the national flag and demanded an end to the regime. It's been truly historic. The country is united in its aim to rid itself of the regime through public vigils and rallies, civil disobedience and slogans instead of tear gas and bullets.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen (2011)

People , Tear , Time , Country

“The tools threatening President Trump with impeachment have one bag of tricks stuffed with power tools: they audit, indict, arrest, bomb, change regimes. They don't make profitable business deals; they tax them. They don't make peace; they wage war.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Fends Off 'Showboat' Comey And The Federal Zombies," http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/06/trump_fends_off_showboat_comey_and_the_federal_zombies.html The American Thinker, June 9, 2017.
2010s, 2017

War , Peace , Business , Change

“This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?, The New York Times, June 11, 2006, 2007-08-13 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11bronner.html?ex=1307678400&en=efa2bd266224e880&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss,
Foreign policy

Time

“In its actual power today, the Chinese regime is still far behind the U. S., and there is no chance of its becoming a world hegemon any time soon.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century"
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

World , Chance , Time

“The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. … In the new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the value of things?”

Michel Foucault book The Birth of Biopolitics

Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, pp. 45-46
The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)

Exercises , Question , Wealth

“By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
2010s, <u>Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa</u> (2011)

Fate , Communication

“Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 319

Freedom , Indifference

“We know that the enemies of our civilization and of Arab-Muslim civilization have emerged from what is actually a root cause. The root cause is the political slum of client states from Saudi Arabia through Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, that has been allowed to dominate the region under U. S. patronage, and uses people and resources as if they were a gas station with a few flyblown attendants. To the extent that this policy, this mentality, has now changed in the administration, to the extent that their review of that is sincere and the conclusions that they draw from it are sincere, I think that should be welcomed. It's a big improvement to be intervening in Iraq against Saddam Hussein instead of in his favor. I think it makes a nice change. It's a regime change for us too. Now I'll state what I think is gonna happen. I've been in London and Washington a lot lately and all I can tell you is that the spokesmen for Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush walk around with a look of extraordinary confidence on their faces, as if they know something that when disclosed, will dissolve the doubts, the informational doubts at any rate, of people who wonder if there is enough evidence. [Mark Danner: It's amazing they've been able to keep it to themselves for so long. ] I simply say, I have two reasons for confidence. I know perfectly well that there are many people who would not be persuaded by this evidence even if it was dumped on their own doorstep, because the same people, many of the same people, didn't believe that it was worth fighting in Afghanistan even though the connection between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was as clear as could possibly be. So I know that. There's a strong faction of the so-called peace movement that is immune to evidence and also incapable of self criticism, of imagining what these countries would be like if the advice of the peaceniks has been followed. I also made some inquiries of my own, and I think I know what some of these disclosures will be. But, as a matter of fact I think we know enough. And what will happen will be this: The President will give an order, there will then occur in Iraq a show of military force like nothing probably the world has ever seen. It will be rapid and accurate and overwhelming enough to deal with an army or a country many times the size of Iraq, even if that country possessed what Iraq does not, armed forces in the command structure willing to obey and be the last to die for the supreme leader. And that will be greeted by the majority of Iraqi people and Kurdish people as a moment of emancipation, which will be a pleasure to see, and then the hard work of the reconstitution of Iraqi society and the repayment of our debt — some part of our debt to them — can begin. And I say, bring it on.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"How Should We Use Our Power: A Debate on Iraq" http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/03/03-01hitchensdanner-qa.html with Mark Danner at UC Berkeley (2003-01-28}: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2003

People , Pleasure , World , Peace

“In a few cases, regimes have publicized their murders, often to intimidate people. For instance, Communist Chinese government newspapers would report speeches by officials in which one might boast, ‘We killed 2 million bandits in the 10th region between November and January.’ The term bandit was standard lingo for presumed counterrevolutionaries.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

People

“Your armed forces have toppled the reactionary, backward and corrupt regime. With one strike your heroic army has toppled idols and destroyed them in one of Providence's fateful moments. As of now Libya shall be free and sovereign, a republic under the name of the Libyan Arab Republic. No oppressed or deceived or wronged, no master and no slave; but free brothers in a society over which, God willing, shall flutter the banner of brotherhood and equality. And thus shall we build glory, revive heritage and avenge a wounded dignity. Sons of the Bedouins, sons of the desert, sons of the ancient cities, sons of the countryside, sons of the villages, the hour of work has struck and so let us forge ahead.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Radio broadcast from Benghazi (1 September 1969), quoted in The Libyan Revolution: Its Origins and Legacy (2009) by Nicholas Hagger
Speeches

God , Fate

“When then is liberalism correctly understood? Liberalism is not an exclusvely political term. It can be applied to a prison reform, to an economic order, to a theology. Within the political framework, the question is not (as in a democracy) “Who should rule?” but “How should rule be exercised?” The reply is “Regardless of who rules—a monarch, an elite, a majority, or a benevolent dictator—governments should be exercised in such a way that each citizen enjoys the greatest amount of personal liberty.” The limit of liberty is obviously the common good. But, admittedly, the common good (material as well as immaterial) is not easily defined, for it rests on value judgments. Its definition is therefore always somewhat arbitrary. Speed limits curtail freedom in the interests of the common good. Is there a watertight case for forty, forty-five, or fifty miles an hour? Certainly not…. Freedom is thus the only postulate of liberalism—of genuine liberalism. If, therefore, democracy is liberal, the life, the whims, the interests of the minority will be just as respected as those of the majority. Yet surely not only a democracy, but a monarchy (absolute or otherwise) or an aristocratic (elitist) regime can be liberal. In fact, the affinity between democracy and liberalism is not at all greater than that between, say, monarchy and liberalism or a mixed government and liberalism. (People under the Austrian monarchy, which was not only symbolic but an effective mixed government, were not less free than those in Canada, to name only one example.)”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 21

Life , People , Way , Exercises

“A government, a regime that is not willing to slaughter large numbers of its own citizens to stay in tyrannical power will lose power.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

“The collapse of European communist regimes will not entail disillusionment with the substance of socialism under other names until the latter is identified and linked to the catastrophic experience of the former. There is no reason to believe that this has occurred.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

“Trump is arguing that through a stronger and more assertive negotiating posture, using all the tools of persuasion theoretically at our disposal, the U. S. should be able to capture more of the gains from free trade. It is quite possible that the free trade regime that results from this approach will be more efficient, more equitable, and more legitimate than what we currently have. Free trade enthusiasts who support President Trump are simply saying that his new approach deserves a chance. No one has abandoned free trade, and if the veterans of NeverTrump would put aside their wounded pride, they might see that there is less distance between them and the administration than they may care to admit.”

Joel Pollak (1977) Politician, writer

POLLAK: Free Trade and the Conservative Intellectuals http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/21/free-trade-conservative-intellectuals/ (February 21, 2017)

Support , Chance