Quotes from Michael Parenti

There is a century-old saying, "The dollar votes more times than the man."

Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.

It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.

The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.

Democrats—lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.

You dont know your wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

Designed to leave the world's economic destiny at the mercy of bankers and multinational corporations, Globalization is a logical extension of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, international finance capital over democracy.

Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.

You don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day

How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.

The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication—which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.

The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.