Noam Chomsky: What is called 'capitalism' is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5526

Noam Chomsky: In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5527

Augusto Pinochet: We practically wiped this nation clean of Marxists. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5528

Augusto Pinochet: I'm not someone who usually sends out threats. I warn only once. The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law is over. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5529

Mother Jones: If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class! https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5530

James Gilligan: Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history, more people than all the murderers in history, more than all the suicides in history, not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together, structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5531

James Gilligan: Unequal societies are not only the most violent; they are also the least productive. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5532

James Gilligan: The political rhetoric of the ruling class claims to want to decrease the rate of violence. It advocates making the deadliest weapons, from handguns to assault rifles, freely available to as many people as possible; increasing the rate of capital punishment; imprisoning as many people as possible; and making the conditions in which they are incarcerated more and more brutalizing; depriving prison inmates of the opportunity to acquire education which could help them to renounce their criminal violence. All this is pursued in the name of being "tough on crime" and "tough on criminals"; but however "tough" these policies may be on criminals, they are, in fact, the most effective way to promote crime and violence. This deceptive rhetoric still fools millions of voters. This brilliant strategy also labels those policies that would decrease the rates of crime and violence, as being "soft on crime. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5533

James Gilligan: The traditional defense of class stratification and the existence of a "leisure class", ever since the rise of civilization, from both Plato and Aristotle as well as from more recent social thinkers, is that a leisure class is needed in order to have the time and energy for the specialized intellectual development and technological skills that are necessary preconditions for civilization; and "leisure class" has always meant a group with a guaranteed income — i.e. those who did not have to work for a living. Implicit in this argument is the assumption (which I happen to think is correct, as I think the history and development of civilization proves) that when people are freed from the necessity to work — that is, when work is freely chosen rather than slavery or wage-slavery (i.e. "work or starve"), they do not just vegetate in a state of "passivity and dependency." Rather, they engage in much more creative work. Coercion creates an incentive for "passive aggressiveness," because when overpowered and helpless there is no other way to express the minimal degree of autonomy that people need in order to maintain any semblance of self-esteem, dignity, and pride. Furthermore, when work is a means to and end — working in order to eat — then it is, in Marx's terms, "alienated" labor. Labor can only be liberated from alienation when work is an end in itself, entered into freely as the expression of spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability — that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one's true and "essential" human nature as "social" and "political" animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture. In short, the contradiction in the old defense of class stratification is that it defends leisure for the leisure class, but not for the underclass. With reference to the underclass, leisure is said to destroy the incentive to work, leads to slothfulness and self-indulgence, and retards cognitive and moral development. When applied to the leisure class, the concept evokes an image of Plato and Aristotle, whose leisure was based on slave labor, creating the intellectual foundations of Western civilization; or patrician slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson laying the foundations of American civilization; or creative aristocrats like Count Leo Tolstoy or Bertrand Ear Russell; or, even closer to home, of our own sons and daughters (or of ourselves, when we were young adults) being freed from the stultifying tasks of earning a living until well into our adult years so that we could study in expensive universities to gain specialized knowledge and skills. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5534

Mahmoud Darwish: Workers united, a force that can't go wrong, Breaking chains of oppression, pushing for their rights,Their voices echoing, piercing through the nights. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5535

Hugo Chávez: China is larger but not an Empire. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5536

Friedrich Engels: How is the housing question to be solved then? In present-day society just as any other social question is solved: by the gradual economic adjustment of supply and demand, a solution which ever reproduces the question itself anew and therefore is no solution. How a social revolution would solve this question depends not only on the circumstances which would exist in each case, but is also connected with still more far-reaching questions, among which one of the most fundamental is the abolition of the antithesis between town and country. As it is not our task to create utopian systems for the arrangement of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into the question here. But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage,” given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately the proletariat has conquered political power such a measure dictated in the public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other expropriations and billetings are by the existing state. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5537

Marie Curie: You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5538

George Orwell: There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5539