Togs's Quotes For The Week 11 May 08

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.

Che Guevara 1928-1967

Democracy is not for people who just want to be left alone, so long as they do what there told and don’t answer back. The key people in the democratic process are the critics, dissenters, reformers. If their sealed off from the political process, the system grows tired and sick, and turns into something else.

The Glass Canoe 1971

David Ireland,

Australian Writer 1927- Three times Miles Franklin winner

What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one.

Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956, German playwright, founder of the Berliner Ensemble Company.

Empire is on the move, and democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-mix imperial democracy, bring to boil, add oil, then bomb.

Arundhati Roy 1961- , Indian writer and Booker prize winner.

Political language ….is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant 1903-1950

Once we [The Poles] had socialism without social justice, now we have capitalism without capital.

Jan Petrzak, Sayings of the Week, 15 April 1990.

He disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American activities in Germany.

Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 1923-1999

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

John Pilger 1939-

I don't know about you but I enjoy the way our tax money is being spent to arrest, indict, convict, imprison, parole, and re-imprison these people (marijuana smokers). I'd just piss away on beer any way.

Lenny Bruce 1925-66.

Run for office? No. I've slept with too many women, I've done too many drugs, and I've been to too many parties.

George Clooney 1961-

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

Harold Pinter 1930- , 2005 Nobel Lecture

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

Brendan Behan 1923-66

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

Arthur Miller 1915-2005

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

Dennis Potter 1935-1994

When Dennis Potter was dying from cancer, he named his tumor Rupert Murdoch.

John/Togs Tognolini

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007