Dani DeWesee > Dani's Quotes

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
― Eugene Debs

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”
― Eugene Victor Debs

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.”
― Eugene V Debs

“A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs

“If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Eugene V. Debs Speaks

“Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”
― Eugene Debs

“To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to render real service to the cause of humanity.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs

“. . . the press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious designs on the trusts.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs

“I abhorred slavery in every form. I yearned to see all men and all women free. I detested the idea of some men being ruled by others, and of women being ruled by men. I believed that women should have all the rights men have, and I looked upon child labor as a crime. And so I became an agitator and this ruling passion of my life found larger expression.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Labor and Freedom

“Sooner or later every war of trade becomes a war of blood.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“The working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches

“But, alas, this wealth, instead of blessing the race, has been the means of enslaving it. The few have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the extremity of living by permission.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Writings of Eugene V. Debs

“If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.”
― Eugene Victor Debs

“Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship. Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it. We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity—come life or death—to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Writings of Eugene V. Debs

“The capitalist of our day, who is the social, economic and political successor of the feudal lord of the Middle Ages, and the patrician master of the ancient world, holds the great mass of the people in bondage, not by owning them under the law, nor by having sole proprietorship of the land, but by virtue of his ownership of industry, the tools and machinery with which work is done and wealth produced. In a word, the capitalist owns the tools and the jobs of the workers, and they are his economic dependents.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life in the Land of the Free

“I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”
― Eugene V Debs

“the class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government”
― Eugene V. Debs, Writings of Eugene V. Debs

“I would rather be branded as belonging to the 'unworthy' poor than to be insulted by being classed with the 'worthy' poor. The 'worthy' poor! Think of that! It is society’s inadvertent confession of its own crime.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody's. The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead the family was used- men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another , to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when things weren't going right. Why could this not be turned around? Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another? Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds- male, female, parents, children- they could undertake the changing of society itself.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) - that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world - by a teacher, a writer, anyone - is a judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. . . .”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present