Saturday, August 12, 2006

More Quotes at the Weekend

"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The line that divides them is not clear. But the Penal Code distinguishes between them by the useful concept of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and perfect crimes."
---Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel


"As the physicists are busy engineering the world's annihilation, the social scientists can be entrusted with the smaller mission of engineering the world's consent."
---Peter Berger quoted in Noam Chomsky's Problems of Knowledge and Freedom


"The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists, who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom."
---George W. Bush, 10 August 2006


"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big."
---anonymous White House official, 11 August 2006


"[T]his culture's destructive urges can yoke all circumstances to its advantage."
---Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words


"When a nation calling itself "the Jewish state" oppresses people, it is not surprising that the victims tend to develop a hatred of Jews. This equating of Israel's crimes and all Jews is of course unwarranted, and one way to mitigate this unfortunate association is for Jews to forthrightly criticize Israeli wrongdoing. Blanket endorsement of Israeli crimes by non-Israeli Jews just confirms the anti-Semites in their stereotypes. Anti-Semitism has become much more pronounced in the Middle East in recent years. But the solution is not to drop bombs on everyone. (Some will immediately reply, "so you want us to go quietly to the gas chambers?" as if the two choices in the world are behaving like sheep or behaving like ogres.) [...]

"When the director of Israeli military intelligence declared in 2003, "Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers" he was expressing a view not only deeply immoral, but tragically ineffective, for the result of such brutal policies is likely to be weeping by Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis alike."
---Stephen R. Shalom, Lebanon War Q&A

No comments: