Michael Parenti Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.

  Michael Parenti

  Law, People, Needs

  15 Copy quote

• A tiny portion of the population controls the lions share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse.

  Michael Parenti

  Exercise, Media, Banking

  21 Copy quote

• The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.

  Michael Parenti

  Country, Jobs, Children

  23 Copy quote

• Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.

  Michael Parenti

  Lying, Dirty, Practice

  Michael Parenti (1996). “Dirty Truths”, p.132, City Lights Books

  14 Copy quote

• One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.

  Michael Parenti

  Children, Dirty, Thug

  26 Copy quote

• The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.

  Michael Parenti

  Dirty, People, Political

  Michael Parenti (1996). “Dirty Truths”, p.32, City Lights Books

  14 Copy quote

• Global warming is already acting upon us with an accelerated feedback and compounded effect that may be irreversible! We do not have eons or centuries or many decades. Most of us alive today may not even have the luxury of saying 'Après moi, le déluge' because we will be around to experience it ourselves. And if you think it will be 'interesting' or 'exciting,' ask the tsunami survivors if that's how they felt. This time the plutocratic drive to 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate' may take all of us down, once and forever.

  Michael Parenti

  Thinking, Luxury, Interesting

  29 Copy quote

• If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors.

  Michael Parenti

  Running, Gun, Government

  20 Copy quote

• Editors and reporters are not as free and independent to invite a variety of opinions as they might think. They are free to say what they like only as long as their bosses like what they say. They are free to produce what they want if their product remains within acceptable political boundaries. You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when your stray that you feel the restraining tug.

  Michael Parenti

  Independent, Thinking, Media

  Michael Parenti (1996). “Dirty Truths”, p.150, City Lights Books

  8 Copy quote

• America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.

  Michael Parenti

  America, Flags, Honest

  Michael Parenti (2004). “Superpatriotism”, p.9, City Lights Books

  16 Copy quote

• The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.

  Michael Parenti

  Powerful, Ubiquity, Political

  Michael Parenti (2013). “Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader”, p.36, City Lights Books

  10 Copy quote

• The last four secretaries of defense have pointed out that defense spending creates jobs. So do pornography, prostitution, and narcotics.

  Michael Parenti

  Jobs, Defense, Four

  Michael Parenti (1995). “Against Empire”, p.166, City Lights Books

  30 Copy quote

• Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth.

  Michael Parenti

  Military, Land, Culture

  12 Copy quote

• Capital requires protection, as do the institutions through which it operates. As capital expands its operations, the state that is associated with its protection must develop its capacity for autocratic control. Thus, the "Free World" increasingly resembles a dreary string of heartless police states.

  Michael Parenti

  Heartless, Police, World

  9 Copy quote

• The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.

  Michael Parenti

  Party, Order, Two

  "Democracy for the Few". Book by Michael Parenti, 1974.

  15 Copy quote

• I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.

  Michael Parenti

  Dream, War, Land

  11 Copy quote

• The [CIA] Agency has owned outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many more.

  Michael Parenti

  Agency, Publishing House, Media

  13 Copy quote

• Between 1831 and 1891, US armed forces - usually the Marines - invaded Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Argentina, and Chile a total of thirty-one times, a fact not many of us are informed about in school. The Marines intermittently occupied Nicaragua form 1909 to 1933, Mexico from 1914 to 1919, and Panama from 1903 to 1914. To 'restore order' the Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, killing over two thousand Haitians who resisted 'pacification.'

  Michael Parenti

  School, Marine, Order

  32 Copy quote

• People may like what third-party candidates say, because often they are the only ones saying anything, but they usually won't vote for someone who doesn't have a chance. Since third-party candidates are not in the news, they are considered to be not really in the race; and since they are not in the race, this justifies treating them as if they are not news.

  Michael Parenti

  Party, Race, People

  7 Copy quote

• Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

  Michael Parenti

  Political, Buttons, Revolution

  "Dirty Truths". Book by Michael Parenti, 1996.

  18 Copy quote

• The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.

  Michael Parenti

  Political, Rich, Poor

  "Democracy for the Few". Book by Michael Parenti, 1974.

  11 Copy quote

• Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.

  Michael Parenti

  Fate, Political, Humanity

  Michael Parenti (2007). “Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader”, p.97, City Lights Books

  18 Copy quote

• A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.

  Michael Parenti

  War, Government, United States

  10 Copy quote

• Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.

  Michael Parenti

  Military, War, Order

  12 Copy quote

• To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them.

  Michael Parenti

  Country, Lying, Mean

  12 Copy quote

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