Michael Parenti Quotes

48 quotes in 1136 categories

• 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…
• The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the…
• The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and…
• 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…
• 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…
• No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices…
• 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…
• Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
• In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy. Those…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• A nation as such does not give aid to another nation. More precisely, the common citizens of our country, through their taxes, give to the…
• I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the…
• I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could…
• I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed,…
• For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American…
• 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 US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class…
• Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in…

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