“For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture … it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration …”
Jay S. Bybee Memo to the White House, August 1 2002
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and so producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.
Aldous Huxley, 1959
But this secrecy … has become a god in this country, and those people who have secrets travel in a kind of fraternity … and they will not speak to anyone else.
Senator J. William Fulbright Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, November 1971
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence indeed, will dictate, that Governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”
United States Declaration of Independence Preamble
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
“It’s not a conspiracy, it is a plot.”
Allen Bruce, AT&T Bell Laboratories Director of Engineering
“Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you.”
Bob Sanferrare, AT&T Bell Laboratories Department Head
“Even the paranoid have enemies”
Golda Meir to Henry Kissinger during 1975 Sinai talks
“Every time I look at a black person, it doesn’t matter if they have a Ph.D. or not, I think negative thoughts about that black person.”
Steve Walters, AT&T Supervisor
“There will be some good things happening here, and there will be some bad things happening here.”
Dr. Hess, Head Psychiatrist for AT&T
“I’m going to teach you a lesson! Go down to the medical department, take a urine test for drugs, go out on mental disability or don’t return to work.”
Lew Miller, AT&T Department Head
“The killing of Americans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and every Muslim….We — with God’s help — call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it. [The September 11th attack] gave a harsh lesson to these arrogant peoples, for whom freedom is but for the white race … God willing, America’s end is near.”
Osama Bin Laden, in a February 1998, appeal to Muslims, and a videotaped statement in the fall of 2001
“For the purpose of understanding and measuring racial discrimination, race should be viewed as a social construct that evolves over time. Despite measurement problems, data on race and ethnicity are necessary for monitoring and understanding evolving differences and trends in outcomes among groups in the U.S. population.”
Measuring Racial Discrimination, National Research Council
“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. […] [A]s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. […] Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
“My senior year, I joined Skull & Bones, a secret society, so secret, I can’t say anything more.”
George W. Bush, President of the United States
You think that finding the answer to this is gonna restore the path of your own life. But how can it possibly do that if you’ve lost yourself along the way?
Eric Olson (his father, Frank Olson, was drugged by LSD by the American Government and possibly murdered.)
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”
“There are certain technical words within every academic discipline that soon become stereotypes and cliches. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any … It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life …
But I say to you, my friends … there are certain things in our nation and in the world (about) which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leave millions of God’s children smothering in an air tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence.
I’m … convinced … that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment – men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation would not survive half‐slave and half‐free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery would scratch across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions, ‘We know these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain unalienable rights’ that among these are ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
Through such maladjustment, I believe that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.