Quotes from William Blum

If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.

America's state religion, is patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that 'treason' is morally worse than murder or rape.

The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow's bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia's border. Kiev's membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family;

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called 'communism' stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically.

I trust God speaks through me,' said Bush the younger in 2004. 'Without that, I couldn't do my job.

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, declared: 'He [Obama] is trying to say: "Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you".

forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages, and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much

The women don't really believe that their beloved would do such a thing,even if they're shown s severed limb or a headless torso.Or if they believe it,they know down to their bone marrow that lover-boy really had the best of intentions;it must have been some kind of very unfortunate accident,a well-meaning blunder;in fact, even more likely, it was a humanitarian act.

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

The questions they ask usually in the polls is: do you support the President's attempt to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein? ... If you ask a question like: do you support the dropping of powerful explosives upon the heads of totally innocent men, women and children, demolishing their homes and their schools and their hospitals, are you in favour of that? That would change the answers, I think, quite a bit.

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.

The makers of aspirin wish you had a headache right now,' says the graffiti.

We bomb homes, and these people have families -- and the U.S. refuses to apologize for these civilian deaths. The absence of concern makes their actions almost equal to a deliberate targeting of civilians.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the truths of anti-communism are self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind;

On the other hand, I'm part of a movement which has a very, very ambitious goal of slowing down ... the American empire and keeping it from continuing to do the many terrible things it does all over the world. We have to reach the American public, and to do that we have to have access to the mass media.

Is it of any significance I wonder that the two countries of the Western Hemisphere whose governments the United States would most like to overthrow - Venezuela and Cuba -have the greatest National obsession with baseball outside of the United States?

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The United States is not concerned with this thing called 'democracy', no matter how many times every American president uses the word each time he opens his mouth. As noted in the Introduction, since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries.

The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire.

Do you remember the classic example of chutzpah? It's the young man who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan. The Bush administration's updated version of that was starting a wholly illegal, immoral, and devastating war and then dismissing all kinds of criticism of its action on the grounds that 'we're at war.