Quotes from William Blum

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited?

Far and away the most important lesson to impart to the American mind and soul: regardless of our lifetime of education to the contrary, US foreign policy does not 'mean well.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington's foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change.

With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.') Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: 'The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.

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

to the American power elite one of the longest lasting and most essential foreign policy goals has been preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model. This was the essence of the Cold War. Cuba and Chile were two examples of several such societies in the socialist camp which the United States did its best to crush.

Every one of the many wars the United States has engaged in since the end of World War II has been presented to the American people, explicitly or implicitly, as a war of necessity, not a war of choice; a war urgently needed to protect American citizens, American allies, vital American 'interests,' freedom and/or democracy, or kill dangerous anti-American terrorists and various other bad guys.

The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are: (a) it poses an obstacle – could be anything – to a particular desire of the American Empire; (b) it is virtually defenseless against aerial attack; (c) it does not possess nuclear weapons.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: 'The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.'20

Is it any wonder that countless Americans—bearing psyches no less malleable than those of other members of the species—are only dimly conscious of the fact that they even have the right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and to question the government's real reasons for carrying it out, without thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"? Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington's foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website listed sixty-five projects that it had supported financially in recent years in Ukraine.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.