They say that Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel! In my opinion, patriotism and war is the last and only refuge of the President, as he is clueless as to how to manage the economy. The only bait he can dangle at the gullible majority is a few military victories that seem to be endlessly won in the government media!
The Government keeps talking about patriotism and how people should join hands to defeat terrorism! Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
Given below are a few famous quotes that hopefully will jog the minds of the blind patriots of Sri Lanka!
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
~ Julius Caesar ~"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
~ Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II ~"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
~ Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister ~"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."
~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I ~"The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one, especially if it is repeated over and over."
~ Adolf Hitler ~"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
~ Adolf Hitler ~"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth"
~ Adolf Hitler ~"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
~ Adolf Hitler ~"Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
~Aesop ~"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."
~ Ernest Hemingway ~"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."
~ Ernest Hemingway ~"The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin."
~ Ernest Hemingway ~"The government is merely a servant… merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
~ Mark Twain ~"I want to know who the men in the shadows are. I want to hear somebody asking them why they can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are, but they're never the ones to fight and to die."
~ Jackson Browne ~"If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army."
~ Frederick the Great ~"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism."
~ Howard Thurman ~"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary."
~ Mahatma Gandhi ~"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
~ General Douglas MacArthur ~"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it."
~ Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States ~"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
~ Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States ~ "A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader's arbitrary whim -- that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens."
~ Chris Floyd, The Moscow Times ~"The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief."
~ Aristotle ~"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
~ John F. Kennedy, President of the United States ~"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
~ Voltaire ~Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
~Albert Einstein ~"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
~Albert Einstein ~"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
~Albert Einstein ~"Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."
~Albert Einstein ~"Peace is the only battle worth waging."
~ Albert Camus ~"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."
~Albert Camus ~When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid, it can't last long." But though a war may be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting.
~Albert Camus ~"In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
~ Albert Camus ~"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence."
~Alexander Solzhenitsyn ~"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn ~"O peace! How many wars were waged in thy name."
~Alexander Pope ~"As a rule of thumb, if the government wants you to know it, it probably isn't true."
~ Craig Murray ~"As long as mankind shall bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst for military glory will remain the vice of the most exalted characters."
~ Edward Gibbon ~"The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies."
~Basil O'Connor ~"War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man."
~ Alfred Adler ~"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~ "An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind"
~ Mahatma Gandhi ~"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
~ Arthur Schopenhauer ~"Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
~ Buddha ~"Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace."
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ~"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public"
~ Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States ~"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
~ H.L. Mencken ~"We are going to be in such a fix when this war is over, or before this war is over. Our grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be paying for this war. I look at our future as, I'm sorry, being very dark."
~ Walter Cronkite ~"The People cannot be safe without information. When the PRESS is FREE, and every man is able to read, all is safe."
~ Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States ~"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."
~ Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States ~
