Quotes from Michael Parenti

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.

America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.

I'm not one of those critics that believes U.S. foreign policy is confused, or stupid, or misinformed, or well-intentioned but it goes awry. I think it's a brilliant policy filled with many brilliant, terrible, horrible victories.

I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.

Julius Caesar was an aristocrat who sided with the Roman people. He's not my hero, but he was one of a long line of what we'll call 'populares,' which were popular leaders who tried to institute these reforms that the people were fighting for.

Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.

Although it sees the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life, if only to maintain its credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the far-right line. On those occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.

In order that a select few might live in great opulence, millions of people work hard for an entire lifetime, never free from financial insecurity, and at great cost to the quality of their lives. The complaint is not that the very rich have so much more than everyone else but that their superabundance and endless accumulation comes at the expense of everyone and everything else, including our communities and our environment.

No system in history has been more relentless [than capitalism] in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.

But for the most part, the press went about its business of blaming the victims, glorifying the police, and demonizing those who fought back.

There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people.

Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Conservative religious affiliation is "one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence.

I]t is the powerful who write the laws of the world-- and the powerful who ignore these laws when expediency dictates.

Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism's raison d'être, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism.

We are not just passive receptors sponging up a flow of images and information. Perception involves organizing stimuli and data into comprehensible units. In a word, perception is itself an act of selective editing.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification offered by the assassins themselves. I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.

They unthinkingly internalize the mainstream pronouncement and then repeat it as their own opinion, as indeed it has become.

At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . .

In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.

most people are worse off than they were under Communism . … The quality of life has deteriorated with the spread of crime and the disappearance of the social safety net

Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or actively employed by U.S. intelligence agencies during the cold war and otherwise enjoying the protection of high-placed individuals. Some of them found their way onto the Republican presidential campaign committees of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.