Michael Parenti Quotes

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.

You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.

People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.

Apathy's a problem but who cares?

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.

It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.

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.

You don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.

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

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

The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

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

The powers that be not only try to control events, but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves.

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

Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.

Democrats—lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.

Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.

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.

There is a century-old saying, "The dollar votes more times than the man."

Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.

The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.

The trick is to steal big.

To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.

One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.

Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.

Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.