"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (administrations), too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance." - James Madison

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson

"Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges... which are employed altogether for their benefit." - Andrew Jackson

"If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations." - Andrew Jackson

"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it." - Andrew Jackson

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." - Lord Acton

"But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them. Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice." - George Washington

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes such as mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp - former Director of Bank of England

"Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to...provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply." - Nathan Rothschild

"Who controls money controls the world." - Henry Kissinger

"The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution." - Benjamin Franklin

"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." - Benjamin Franklin

"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill." - Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, reflecting on passage of the Federal Reserve Act

"A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible." - Woodrow Wilson

"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States." - Barry Goldwater

"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." - Horace Greeley

"The Federal Reserve is one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the international bankers." - Congressman Louis T. McFadden

"I refer to the Federal Reserve Board.... This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it." - Louis T. McFadden

"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government Institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers." - Louis T. McFadden

"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is - The Fed has usurped the government!!" - Louis T. McFadden

"The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That Board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is Private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money" - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr

"Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.

"I was as secretive - indeed, as furtive - as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress." - Frank Vanderlip (referring to the Federal Reserve Act)

"Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country." - Senator Nelson Aldrich

"The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street Plan. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr

"The Aldrich bill was condemned in the platform when Woodrow Wilson was nominated. The men who ruled the Democratic party promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the 'king's bank' to control us from the top downward, and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave." - Louis T. McFadden

"The bill [Federal Reserve Act] grants just what Wall Street and the big banks for twenty-five years have been striving for - private instead of public control of currency. It robs the government and the people of all effective control over the public's money, and vests in the banks exclusively the dangerous power to make money among the people scarce or plenty." - Alfred Crozier

"The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury...and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest." - Wright Patman

"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they "create" the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their "Federal Reserve Notes" and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc." - H. L. Birum Sr.

"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any government that ever existed. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them whey they control finance." - Charles A. Lindbergh Sr

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." - Alan Greenspan

"In the United States today we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government..... Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution." - Congressman Wright Patman

"The Federal Reserve system is nothing more than legalized counterfeit.” - Ron Paul

"Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself." - Thomas Jefferson

"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." - Daniel Webster "The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." - John Sherman - referring to the National Banking Act, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act

"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." - John Adams

"This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon." - Robert Hemphill

"It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all." - Louis T. McFadden

"The Federal Reserve definitely caused the Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one-third from 1929 to 1933." - Milton Friedman

"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." - James A. Garfield

"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." - F A Hayek

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." - Richard McKenna

"Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd." - J. P. Morgan

"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?" - Ayn Rand

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes

"...for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 -- that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost." - Thomas Edison

"But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 per cent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to Muscle Shoals (referring to a public works project in Alabama) in some useful way." - Thomas Edison

"It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold." - Thomas Edison

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution -- taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." - Thomas Jefferson

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity." - Abraham Lincoln

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more selfish than bureaucracy." - Abraham Lincoln

"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world." - Otto von Bismark

"If this mischievious financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." - Times of London (article referring to Lincoln issuing debt-free currency.)

"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots.... I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance." - Otto von Bismarck

"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution." - W. Cleon Skousen

"On Sept. 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price.... Then the farmers will become tenants as in England." - 1891 American Bankers Association as printed in the Congressional Record of April 29, 1913

"The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe [monetary] contractions of 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38. No other 20-year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System... and that the severity of each of the major contractions is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, so that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such a far reaching effect, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers." - Milton Friedman

"The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans. " - British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1876 - First Prime Minister of England

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - Woodrow Wilson

"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy." - Woodrow Wilson

"The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen. It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection. At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and magazines in this country." - John F. Hylan, New York City Mayor 1922

"From the days of Sparticus, Wieskhopf, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." - Winston Churchill 1922

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." - J. Edgar Hoover

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The real rulers of Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." - Felix Frankfurter - Supreme Court Justice

"But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing." - Congressman Virgil Goode

"There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." - Senator Daniel Inouye

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” - Benjamin Disraeli

"There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself." - William Pitt 1770, British House of Lords

"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery." - Buckminster Fuller

"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed." - Arthur S. Miller

"You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. … You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything." - Bill Clinton

"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite." - Senator William Jenner

"Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure." - Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK

"I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within." - General Douglas MacArthur

“The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and secret conspiracy that relies primarily on covet means for expanding its spere of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversions instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine, that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no secret is revealed. It conducts the cold war, in short, with a wartime discipline no democracy would ever hope to wish to match. That is why the Aethenian law makers so decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. Confident that with your help, man will be what he was born to be, free and independent.” - John F. Kennedy

"The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight." - John F. Kennedy

"For a long time I felt that FDR had developed many thoughts and ideas that were his own to benefit this country, the United States. But, he didn't. Most of his thoughts, his political ammunition, as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advanced by the Council on Foreign Relations-One World Money group. Brilliantly, with great gusto, like a fine piece of artillery, he exploded that prepared "ammunition" in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people, and thus paid off and returned his internationalist political support." - Curtis Dall, FDR's son-in-law as quoted in his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law

"The UN is but a long-range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One-World revolutionaries, hungry for profit and power." - Curtis Dall

"A global economy requires a global currency." - Paul Volcker, Former Chairman, Federal Reserve

"The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market....The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank." - Curtis Dall

"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control.... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent." - Congressman Larry P. McDonald, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets

"After WWI, Germany fell into the hands of the German international bankers. Those bankers bought her and they now own her, lock, stock, and barrel. They have purchased her industries, they have mortgages on her soil, they control her production, they control all her public utilites. The international German bankers have subsidized the present government of Germany and they have also supplied every dollar of the money Adolph Hitler has used in his lavish campaign to build up a threat to the government of Bruening. When Bruening fails to obey the orders of the German International Bankers, Hitler is brought forth to scare the Germans into submission. Through the Federal Reserve Board over $30 billion of American money has been pumped into Germany. You have all heard of the spending that has taken place in Germany, modernistic dwellings, her great planetariums, her gymnasiums, her swimming pools, her fine public highways, her perfect factories. All this was done on our money. All this was given to Germany through the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board has pumped so many billions into Germany that they dare not name the total." - Louis T. McFadden

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” - James Paul Warburg

"The American Communists worked energetically and tirelessly to lay the foundations for the United Nations, which we were sure would come into existence." - Earl Brower - former President of Communist Party USA

"The age of nations must end. The governments of nations have decided to order their separate sovereignties into one government to which they will surrender their arms." - U.N. World Constitution

"The United Nations is the greatest fraud in history. It's purpose is to destroy the United States." - Congressman John E. Rankin

"It is the sacred principles enshrined in the United Nations charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance." - George Bush Sr.

"The planning of the UN can be traced to the 'secret steering committee' established by Secretary [of State Cordell] Hull in January 1943. All of the members of this secret committee, with the exception of Hull, a Tennessee politician, were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. They saw Hull regularly to plan, select, and guide the labors of the [State] Department's Advisory Committee. It was, in effect, the coordinating agency for all the State Department's postwar planning." - Professors Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, writing in their study of the CFR, "Imperial Brain Trust: The CFR and United States Foreign Policy."

"I would support a Presidential candidate who pledged to take the following steps: ... At the end of the war in the Persian Gulf, press for a comprehensive Middle East settlement and for a 'new world order' based not on Pax Americana but on peace through law with a stronger U.N. and World Court." - George McGovern

"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election....It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!" - Senator George W. Malone 1957

"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world." - Professor Arnold Toynbee, in a June l931 speech before the Institute for the Study of International Affairs in Copenhagen.

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, their loyalty to family traditions and national identification." - Brock Chisolm, when director of UN World Health Organization

"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all." - Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State

“The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” - Richard Gardner - article in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations

"A system of world order--preferably a system of world government --is mandatory... The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty..." - Walter Cronkite

"It is difficult to re-educate people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body." - Prince Bernhard - The Netherlands

"We are giving away the country so a few very rich people can get richer." - Congressman Virgil Goode

"By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations ... a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of human survival. One world government is inevitable." - Pope John Paul II

"Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders." - George Bush Sr.

"A colossal event is upon us, the birth of a New World Order." - Brent Scowcroft, George Bush's National Security Advisor

"A careful examination of what is happening behind the scenes reveals that all of these interests are working in concert with the masters of the Kremlin in order to create what some refer to as a “New World Order.” Private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Dartmouth Conference, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Atlantic Institute, and the Bilderberg Group serve to disseminate and to coordinate the plans for this so-called new world order in powerful business, financial, academic, and official circles." - Senator Jesse Helms

"In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade." - Karl Marx

"NAFTA is a major stepping stone to the New World Order." - Henry Kissinger

"In this new world economy, national boundaries are increasingly becoming obsolete." - Ronald Reagan

"Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order." - Mikhail Gorbachev

"The New World Order is a world that has a supernational authority to regulate world commerce and industry; an international organization that would control the production and consumption of oil; an international currency that would replace the dollar; a World Development Fund that would make funds available to free and Communist nations alike; and an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order." - Willy Brandt, former West German Chancellor

"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power; political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future." - Barry Goldwater

"...This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of "one world government'....National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept..." - Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values." - Zbigniew Brzezinski

"The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth - in Morocco - to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund." - Statement by the Moroccan government

"The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress." - Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups." - Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton said Quigley was his mentor during 1993 Inaugural Address)

"The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established." - Carroll Quigley

"There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies ... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." - Carroll Quigley

"The Council on Foreign Relations is "the establishment." Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also announces and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship." - Congressman John Rarick 1971

"The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government." - Admiral Chester Ward - Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy

"The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for "the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." - Harpers, July l958

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot]. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or *promulgated*, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this *scenario*, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government." - Henry Kissinger

"We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money." - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"To defend the New World Order, US soldiers will have to kill and die." - Arthur Schlesinger

"The world can therefore seize the opportunity [Persian Gulf crisis] to fulfill the long-held promise of a New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind." - George Bush Sr.

"But this present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for long. Already there are powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts to erect an enduring structure of global interdependence." - David Rockefeller

"The developing coherence of Asian regional thinking is reflected in a disposition to consider problems and loyalties in regional terms, and to evolve regional approaches to development needs and to the evolution of a new world order." - Richard Nixon

"... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people." - H. G. Wells

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press....They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers." - Congressman Oscar Callaway

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” - David Rockefeller

"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." - David Rockefeller

"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - William Colby - Former CIA Director

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director 1981

"I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo." - Harry S. Truman

"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands." - Spiro Agnew

"By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise." - Adolph Hitler

"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." - Adolph Hitler

"The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed." - Adolf Hitler

"The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force." - Adolf Hitler

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." - Albert Einstein

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar weekly salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, former New York Times Chief of Staff

"These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government." - Theodore Roosevelt

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." - Harry S. Truman

"The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper." - Thomas Jefferson

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson

“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” - John D. Rockefeller

“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” - Joseph Stalin

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies." - Carroll Quigley

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates." - Gore Vidal

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." - George Washington

"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." - Thomas Jefferson

"To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute." - James Buchanan

"The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which....pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I." - British military historian Major General J.F.C. Fuller, l941

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Hermann Goerring

"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence." - Ron Paul

"If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbours those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force." - Dick Cheney

"Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators." - Adolph Hitler

"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." - Dick Cheney

"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure." - Abraham Lincoln

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home." - James Madison

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." - James Madison

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H. L. Mencken

"Powerful dictatorships that make their leaders powerful need to stage wars to get ordinary people to march in lockstep like mindless Nazi robots. That is the road to Greatness." - Michael Ledeen, Special Advisor to Reagan's Secretary of State Alexander Haig

"We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls." - Wayne LaPierre

“Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader—a dictator—willing to use those dreaded ‘extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ.’ - Michael Ledeen

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." - David Rockefeller

"We need a common enemy to unite us" - Condoleezza Rice, 2000

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death." - Adolph Hitler

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded." - FA Hayek

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." - Aristotle

"In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of an external menace. This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero, nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of sacrifice. Once these exist, we have gone a long way on the path to war." - Senator John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State 1950's

"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country." - Alexis de Tocqueville

"No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." - James Madison

"Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." - George Washington

"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures." - Ron Paul

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - General Douglas MacArthur

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency." - Douglas MacArthur

"Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it." - Douglas MacArthur

"America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist." - Ron Paul

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." - H. L. Mencken

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom...crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" - Samuel Adams

"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of [their] war [for independence, a nation begins] going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of [that] war will remain on [them] long, will be made heavier and heavier, till [their] rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion." - Thomas Jefferson

"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms." - Aristotle

"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth." - George Washington

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed." - Sara Brady, Chairman, Handgun Control, Inc.

"Waiting periods are only a step. Registration is only a step. The prohibition of private firearms is the goal" - Janet Reno

"There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun....And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution." - Michael Gartner, former President of NBC News

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans... and so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." - Bill Clinton

"A Republic, if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin, when asked by a woman while he was leaving the Constitutional Convention what kind of government they had given us.

"To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race." - Calvin Coolidge

"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind." - Thomas Jefferson

“We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” - Alexander Hamilton

"[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.” - Congressman Fisher Ames

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” - from the US Constitutitution

"I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the Republic, for which it stands." - from the Pledge of Allegiance

“The honest and serious student of American history will recall that our Founding Fathers managed to write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without using the term ‘democracy’ even once. No part of any of the existing state Constitutions contains any reference to the word. [The men] who were most influential in the institution and formulation of our government refer to ‘democracy’ only to distinguish it sharply from the republican form of our American Constitutional system.” - Clarence Manion - Dean of Notre Dame Law School 1950's

“Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos,” - John Marshall - US Supreme Court Chief Justice

"In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson

"Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy." - Ron Paul

"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms." - Aristotle

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.” - Fisher Ames

"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism." - Fisher Ames

“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.” - Oscar Wilde

"Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians." - Benjamin Disraeli

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” - John Adams

“The one prevailing evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” - Lord Acton

"The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots." - Elbridge Gerry - Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” - Alexander Hamilton

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” - James Madison

“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.” - James Russell Lowell

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." - Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy passes into despotism.” - Plato

“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.” - Plato

"Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants." - Seneca

“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish Philosopher and Author

“to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy....” - Edmund Randolph - participant in Contstitutional Convention

“I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” - Thomas Babington Macaulay

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship." - Alexander Tyler

"The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." - Alexander Tyler

"Democracy - A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of “direct expression.” Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic — negating property rights. Attitude of the law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy. [the framers of the Constitution] made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy … and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had formed a republic.” - US Army Training Manual 1928

“Because the United States is a democracy, the majority of the people decide how our Government will be organized and run....” - US Army Training Manual 1952

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.” - G.K. Chesterton

“Democracy is the road to socialism” - Karl Marx

“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” - Karl Marx

"Democracy is indispensable to socialism." - Vladimir Lenin

"The goal of socialism is communism." - Vladimir Lenin

“Taken as a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are essentially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can be carried through only after the first has been completed. The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society.” - Mao Tse-tung

"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history." - David Rockefeller

“...to make the world safe for democracy” - Woodrow Wilson

“[America] must be the great arsenal of democracy” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity." - Jimmy Carter

"Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man." - Ronald Reagan

"Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy." - George Bush Sr.

"We must fortify African democracy and peace by launching Radio Democracy for Africa, supporting the transition to democracy now beginning to take place in Nigeria. We must continue to deepen our ties to the Americas and the Caribbean, our common work to educate children, fight drugs, strengthen democracy, and increase trade. And I'd like to say to the Senate, I hope you will say yes to a stronger American democracy in the year 2000." - Bill Clinton

"As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world -- and I can assure you more are on the way." - George W. Bush

"It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy." - George W. Bush

"We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations." - George W. Bush

"Our aim is a democratic peace." - George W. Bush

“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” - Karl Marx

"I think the important thing is to realize that the establishment of a democracy is sometimes a messy thing and it takes time. Yeah, we've been at it 240 years." - Mike Huckabee

"Now the question is, now that we are there, what should we do in the best interest of the U.S., not only from a standpoint of the necessity of some stable democracy in the Middle East...." - Mike Huckabee

“That does not mean we won't experience the tragedy of the loss of some American lives. We will have an opportunity to instill a democracy in Iraq which will be an example and perhaps force other nations in that region to move in the same direction.” - John McCain

“But we have a war of ideals and ideas, and that is to sell democracy..." - John McCain

"There cannot be true democracy unless all citizens are able to participate fully in the lives of their country." - Hillary Clinton

"We are here to advance the cause of women and to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are inseparable." - Hillary Clinton

"I would say to the new leadership the American people are ready to meet you if you move forward toward the path of democracy." - Hillary Clinton

"We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force." - Barack Obama

"This doesn’t mean abandoning our values and ideals; wherever we can, it’s in our interest to help foster democracy through the diplomatic and economic resources at our disposal." - Barack Obama

"The new world order that is in the making must focus on the creation of a world of democracy, peace and prosperity for all." - Nelson Mandela

“In October 1917 we parted with the Old World, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road." - Mikhail Gorbachev

"I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal." - Mikhail Gorbachev

"Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep." - Mikhail Gorbachev

“according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.” - Mikhail Gorbachev

"Every part of our program of perestroika -- and the program as a whole, for that matter -- is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy." - Mikhail Gorbachev

"There is no greater advocate of perestroika than the president of the United States." - George Bush Sr.

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Presidential Candidate

"If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite." - Gary Allen

"The state does not function as we desired. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes." - Vladimir Lenin

"Power from any source tends to create an appetite for additional power. It was almost inevitable that the super-rich would one day aspire to control not only their own wealth, but the wealth of the whole world. To achieve this, they were perfectly willing to feed the ambitions of the power-hungry political conspirators who were committed to the overthrow of all existing governments and the establishment of a central worldwide dictatorship." - W. Cleon Skousen

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

"But it became clear as time went on that in Mr. Bush's mind the New World Order was founded on a convergence of goals and interests between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so strong and permanent that they would work as a team through the U.N. Security Council." - A. M. Rosenthal

"I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world." - General Colin Powell

"Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths...I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" - Barbara Bush

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." - Bill Clinton

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!” - George W. Bush

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." - George W. Bush

"...if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Sr. - speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992

"In war, truth is the first casualty." - Aeschylus

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." - Albert Einstein

"It is the first responsiblity of every citizen to question authority." - Benjamin Franklin

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

"Truth is treason in the empire of lies" - Ron Paul.

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." - Charles Austin Beard

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless and corrupt." - Gandhi

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Gandhi

"They must find it difficult......those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority." - Gerald Massey

"This much is true: you have been lied to." - Ron Paul

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." - Aldous Huxley

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." - Ayn Rand

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Goethe

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell