50 More Quotes

Here are 50 quotes added to the list since I posted the first 100 on Mar 1. Eat and enjoy!

A high degree of inequality causes the comfortable to disavow the needy.    -James K Galbraith

A high degree of inequality …. increases the social and the psychological distance separating the haves from the have-nots, making it easier to imagine that defects of character or differences of culture, rather than an unpleasant turn in the larger schemes of economic history, are at the root of the separation.   -James K Galbraith

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.   -Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Even after his assumption of power he [Hitler] paid lip service to the Constitution, though he never subsequently pretended to be curbed or controlled by it.   -Anton Gill

. . . . experts on the moral problems created by the economic life. Let the church discover such men and she will be well on the way to fulfilling her role of being a moral guide to society.   -Peter Taylor Forsyth

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.   -Benito Mussolini

For Christians, it may be time to acknowledge that we have misunderstood Jesus in virtually every way that matters.   -Thomas Cahill

God plays a great joke on those who would seek after power at any cost. As [C.S.] Lewis reminds us . . . “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.”   -Kathleen Norris

He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.   -W. H. Auden

I do not think that I know what I do not know.   -Socrates

i’ve been wanting some way to thank Natalie & the Dixie Chicks. they paid a huge price for their honesty. But they saved their souls.   -krazypuppy at dkos

If it doesn’t connect with the kids [i.e. the target audience], there’s no reason to use it.   -Ned Parks

If one answered him in kind – with lies, deceit, violence and force – one would be denying oneself and him the future and the possibility of change; one would be perpetuating the kingdom of evil.   -Milan Machovec

If you have fifteen diamond rings, you still have only ten fingers.   -Dalai Lama XIV

Insofar as the disestablishment of religion is the bedrock of the American founding, the neoconservative rejection of this principle sows the seeds of the American un-founding.   -Shadia Drury

It is one of the rules of the power game that the oppressor always uses the maximum force possible within existing political and military constraints.   -Walter Wink

It is … from the Jews that we learned that chosenness implies both suffering and redemption.   -Thomas Cahill

Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.   -Walter Wink

Jesus did NOT tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. That would have been absurd. His entire ministry is utterly at odds with such a preposterous idea.   -Walter Wink

[Jesus’] teaching does not presuppose a threshold of decency, but something of God in everyone.   -Walter Wink

Love is the motive of all things that move harmonious by free will without constraint.   -Christina Rossetti

Neoconservatism combines capitalist economics with conservative social policies. It aims to keep the government out of the economy, but not out of the bedrooms, the schools, the arts, publishing, and broadcasting.   -Shadia Drury

19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.   -Rocco Galati

Nothing could gladden the heart of a neoconservative government more than the prospect of endless war.   -Shadia Drury

One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.   -Martin Luther King Jr

Politics is no longer seen as the domain of judicious lying. Politics has become an arena of creative lying. Lying has become synonymous with politics: it is now considered an art. . . .After all, a great lie, one that is believed, gives form to the void, imposes order on chaos, and creates the world ex nihilo.   -Shadia Drury

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak …. Power always thinks … it is doing God’s service when it is violating His laws.   -Thomas Jefferson

Societies that are more egalitarian find themselves willing and able to make consistently larger investments in education, training, infrastructure, research, and other public goods.   -James K Galbraith

The best argument against democracy is to spend five minutes conversing with the average voter.   -Unknown

The biggest threat posed to America is not the weapons of the rest of the world. It is the universe of lies which have been built around your very own citizens.   -Mia Couto (Mozambique)

The church’s need is of men able to probe the root-cause in the sickness of our modern society — men who know the economic situation as well as the Old Testament prophets did theirs in their day.   -Peter Taylor Forsyth

The issue is not “What must I do in order to secure my salvation?” but rather, “What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?” … Otherwise our nonviolence is premised on self-justifying attempts to establish our own purity in the eyes of God, others, and ourselves, and that is nothing less than a satanic temptation to die with clean hands and a dirty heart.   -Walter Wink

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.Harry Truman

The political prominence of the religious right within the Republican Party is likely to make American politics resemble the politics of the Middle East — a politics of extremism fueled by religious hatred.   -Shadia Drury

The Powers That Be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing depotentiates them faster than deft lampooning.   -Walter Wink

The reason for resisting efforts to re-empower the Churches is that people who believe much of what Jesus believed are not likely to behave well in positions of power — unless they are willing to keep their religioin out of politics as Jesus did.   -Shadia Drury

The unexamined life is not worth living.   -Socrates

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.   -Adolf Hitler

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 imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.    -Michael Parenti

There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed because they want to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.   -C S Lewis

This is … about the gap between good and bad jobs, about what can be earned in America in decent as compared with mediocre employment. This gap was once quite small. But the gap has grown, and now it is wider than at any other time since the Great Depression. It is so wide that it has come, once again, to threaten the social solidarity and stability of the country.   -James K Galbraith

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.   -Theodore Roosevelt

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.   -Abraham Lincoln

We must always be on our guard against a knee-jerk piety that obscures rather than assists insight and that prefers to judge, punish, and exclude rather than welcome.   -Thomas Cahill

What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?Thomas Jefferson   –

What is disturbing about the new conservatism, or neoconservatism, is not so much that it is elitist, but that it cultivates an elite that is self-righteous, an elite that deludes itself into thinking that it is a natural aristocracy, that all its privileges are deserved, and that it has no obligation to the have-nots of society.   -Shadia Drury

What is merely stated is never really presented.   -Henry James

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.   -Thomas Jefferson

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