…:: Alex Smirnov ::…

You must be the change you want to see in the world.
::: Mahatma Gandhi :::

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
::: George Bernard Shaw :::

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
::: Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird :::

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
::: Carl Sagan :::

The fact that people are sometimes inspired to heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says nothing about the wisdom or necessity of believing that he, exclusively was the Son of God. Indeed we will find that we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to feel compassion for the suffering of others. Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human being from coming to harm. Genocidal intolerance, on the other hand, must inevitably find its inspiration elsewhere.
::: Sam Harris (The End of Faith):::

The man is born troublemaker. He has no respect for his superiors and he seems deliberately kind to those beneath him. He is immoral, unmilitary and unpatriotic. People like Pierce are a menace to the American way of life as I see it. Unless we each conform, unless we obey orders, unless we follow our leaders blindly there is no possible way we can remain free.
::: Major Frank Burns, MASH 4077th, “The Novocaine Mutiny” :::

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
::: George Bernard Shaw :::

What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life”, to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption”. Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry and, in the political realm, to the self-described “intelligent minorities” who serve and administer power.
::: Noam Chomsky (Hegemony of Survival) :::

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
::: Mahatma Gandhi :::

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
::: George Bernard Shaw :::

Fairness isn’t really the point. They don’t call economics the dismal science because it’s fair. No, no, they call it that after Sir Eustice Dismal. The 18th century English economist who proposed making smokestacks out of children. Yes, it was a very interesting proposal but ultimately flawed. I mean if you make the smokestacks out of children who will you force to clean them?…Yes, it’s referred to as Dismal’s paradox.
::: John Hodgman, The Daily Show, Episode 11066 :::

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out— and this, it must be finally acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be
::: Sam Harris (The End of Faith):::

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
::: George Bernard Shaw :::

We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a defnite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of “biological error”, using their alloted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.
::: Noam Chomsky (Hegemony or Survival) :::

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility and candor.
::: Sam Harris (The End of Faith):::

Many of us seem to have lost all sense of restraint toward animals, an understanding of natural boundaries, a respect for them as beings with needs and wants and a place and purpose of their own. Too often, too casually, we assume that our interests always come first, and if it’s profitable or expedient that is all we know. We assume that all these other creatures with whom we share earth are here for us, and only for us. We assume, in effect, that we are everything and they are nothing.
::: Matthew Scully (Dominion) :::

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
::: Mahatma Gandhi :::

Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth.
::: Thomas Jefferson :::

“Never doubt for a moment that a small group of committed, thoughtful people can make a difference. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead said this more than half a century ago. In the troubled times in which we live now—when corporate power sometimes seems invincible, the silence in mainstream media seems deafening, and true democracy seems like a far-off dream— where do we look for hope?
::: Amy Goodman :::

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
::: Mahatma Gandhi :::

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it’s impossible, it’s like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it’s done. And by the time you get it in, it’s done and you’re sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn’t do. I mean, writing isn’t fun. It’s never been fun. It’s momentum, and once you get the momentum going, that’s great, but it’s a brutal experience in many, many ways. And when you’re done, people tell you “Well, gee, I’m not interested.” “Great, I’m glad I sat down and wrote this!”
::: Lewis Black :::

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
::: Bertrand Russell :::

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
::: Franklin Delano Roosevelt :::

The test of tolerance comes when we are in a majority; the test of courage comes when we are in a minority.
::: Ralph W. Sockman :::

Over the course of modern history, there have been significant gains in human rights and democratic control of some sectors of life. These have rarely been the gift of enlightened leaders. They have typically been imposed on states and other power centers by popular struggle. An optimist maight hold, perhaps realistically, that history reveals a deepening appreciation for human rights, as well as broadening of their range-not without sharp reversals, but the general tendency seems real.
::: Noam Chomsky (Hegemony or Survival) :::

Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then you will find out that money cannot be eaten
::: The Cree Tribe Prophecy :::

The big towns are getting bigger and the villages smaller. The hamlet store, whether grocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization. Our treasured and nostalgic picture of the village general store, the cracker-barrel store where an informed yeomanry gather to express opinions and formulate the national character, is very rapidly disappearing. People who once held family fortresses against wind and weather, against scourges of frost and drought and insect enemies, now cluster against the busy breast of the big town. The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with acids of industry, the creech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. … This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside. This prophecy is underwritten by the tendency of the rich to do this already. Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to.
::: John Steinbeck (Travels with Charlie, 1961) :::

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
::: Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi :::

We are realists. We dream the impossible.
::: Ernesto “Che” Guevara :::

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
::: Dwight David Eisenhower :::

There is no return to the past. In the future we will have to live and think with reference to the present achievements of science. But these achievement assure us that the greatness of man does not consist in his false egocentric pretentions but in his ability to understand the grandeur of the universe, the inexhaustible chain of orderly development which it comprises.
::: Alexander I. Oparin (The Chemical origin of Life, 1964) :::

Without free speech no search for truth is possible… no discovery of truth is useful… Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
::: Charles Bradlaugh :::

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts of such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted idications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes that symbolize continents and states.
::: John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley, 1961) :::

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
::: William Hazlitt :::

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
::: George Bernard Shaw :::

If churches don’t have to pay taxes, they also can’t call the fire department when they catch fire. Sorry reverend, that’s one of those services that goes along with paying in. I’ll use the fire department I pay for; you can pray for rain.
::: Bill Maher :::

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
::: Mahatma Gandhi :::

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
::: John Morley :::

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
::: Albert Einstein :::

Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.
::: Robert Schuller :::

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
::: George Bernard Shaw ::::

Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
::: Anna Lappe :::

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
::: Aldous Huxley :::

The only good writer is a dead writer. Then he couldn’t surprise anyone any more, couldn’t hurt anyone any more. And the last time I saw him he seemed shriveled even more. He said, “I am cold. I seem to be always cold. I am going to Italy.” And he did, and he died there, and I don’t know whether or not it’s true but I’ve heard he died alone. And now he is good for the town. Brings in some tourists. He’s a good writer now.
::: John Steinbeck on Sinclair Lewis and the effect his book “Main Street” had on his hometown (Travels with Charlie, 1961) :::

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use.
::: Galileo Galilei :::

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
::: Noam Chomsky :::

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose – especially their lives.
::: Eugene Victor Debs :::

Jesus loves you! Everyone else thinks you are an asshole!
::: Bumper sticker I got in Boulder, Colorado in 2004 :::

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong about not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgivness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.
::: Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation) :::