If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.
(Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President, 20 Feb 1957)
Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.
(Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 19 May 1966)
Sixty-three years ago ... the unemployment figure was 29 percent. Last November [it] was 28 percent. A rather sad end to one's life.
(Harold Macmillan, U.K. Prime Minister, 12 Jan 1987)
This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.
(Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. President, 8 Jan 1964)
There never was a war at arms that was not merely the extension of a preceding war of commerce grown fiercer until the weapons of commerce seemed no longer sufficiently deadly.
(Gen. Hugh Johnson, U.S. General, sometime in the 1940s)
The real reason that the war we just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her and the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the advantage of them.
(Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President, 1919)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
(Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President, 16 Apr 1953)
[regarding the Korean War] ... it involves our need for markets for our agricultural and industrial products, our need to seek in return from the rest of the world such essentials as manganese and cobalt, tin and tungsten.
(Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President, 11 Jun 1953)
Basically North America lives with one political party. It has one ideology within which all the political parties live, even the NDP ... It's funny; we criticize some of the Communist countries for their one-party systems, but that is all we have - a one party system.
(David MacDonald, PC MP in Canada)
I care not who forms the government of a country, so long as I control the purse strings.
(Baron Rothschild, Capitalist, Aug 1984)
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on [them].
(William J. Fulbright, U.S. Senator, 30 Apr 1985)
Everything in the world is purchased by labour.
(David Hume, Philosopher, Of Commerce, in Political Discourses, p.12, 1752)
Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.
(Adam Smith, Professor, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, 1776, p. 33)
The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor contract is free what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
(Einstein, Albert, Monthly Review, New York, May 1949)
The idea of achieving security through national armament is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion.
(Albert Einstein, Physicist, Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, 1959, p. 159, 1950)
In a capitalist society, the only winners are capitalists.
(Dianne Maley, Financial Reporter for the Thomson News Service, Dec 1992)
Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.
(Einstein, Albert, Monthly Review, New York, 1 May 1949)