Blaise Pascal

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991)

If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.

New York City Mayor John Lindsay at Columbia University (October 1969)

We cannot rest content with the charge from Washington that this peaceful protest is unpatriotic... The fact is that this dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

The Use of Force in International Affairs (1961 Publication)

If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?

Howard Zinn (2002)

While some people think that dissent is unpatriotic, I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. In fact, if patriotism means being true to the principles for which your country is supposed to stand, then certainly the right to dissent is one of those principles. And if we're exercising that right to dissent, it's a patriotic act.

(Mis-Attributed) Thomas Jefferson

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

John Ehrlichman, White House Domestic Policy Chief under Richard Nixon

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin… and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Lex Luthor

Do you know the oldest lie in America, Senator? It's that power can be innocent.

Ernest Hemingway

Fuck literature.

Dylan Thomas (mis-attributed to Ernest Hemingway)

Write drunk; edit sober.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions—that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives heartily disagree.
Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chat - June 24, 1938

Dr. Shashi Tharoor MP

No wonder that the sun never set on the British Empire, because even God couldn't trust the English in the dark.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

…no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. …and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act June 16, 1933

Galadriel

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.