If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read it, you're misinformed.

We have a political system that awards office to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised when those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing to do anything with it.

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"In personal characteristics, apparent values, and thoughts about the future of Germany and Europe, these ex-Nazi officers did not seem to me to be significantly different from my contemporaries in the US Army."

~ Munich station chief, prior to integrating Reinhard Gehlen's anti-Russian Nazi spy network into the CIA in 1949

"Fundamentally, the founding fathers of US intelligence [Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Frank Wisner] were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power."

CIA Chief of Counter-intelligence (1954-1975)

Hierarchies make some people dependent on others, blame the dependent for their dependency, and then use that dependency as a justification for further exercise of authority.