...he [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
— George Orwell
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets
— Voltaire
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause
— Eric Hoffer
Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
— Tom Lehrer
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral
— Paulo Freire
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed....I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed
— Bertrand Russell (attrib)
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men
— Lyndon B. Johnson
In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me...By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone
— Martin Niemöller
The war against hunger is truly mankind's war of liberation
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men
— Jane Addams
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves
— Abraham Lincoln
The only difference is that the stress and the violence is worse at home, because it happens younger, it happens at the hands of someone you love and there is no recognition that this is the enemy
— Gloria Steinem
Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action