Anti War Activists

"Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe, but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed."

"Far away in the thirties and forties she (the girl you want to be) is waiting her turn. Her body, brain, her soul are in your girlish hands. She cannot help herself. What will you leave for her? … Will you throw away her inheritance?"

"In 1910 our attention was turned to what seemed a possibly useful educational effort against war, inaugurated at Stanford University by its president, David Starr Jordan. I knew Dr. Jordan slightly. His argument for opening the channels of world trade in the interest of peace had helped keep up my spirits when laboring against the tariff lobbies that so effectively closed them."

"Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it."

"There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living."

"The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going."

"I think it is fair to say that in many ways the Democratic Party has become a party of the coastal elites, folks who have a lot of money, upper-middle-class people who are good people, who believe in social justice in many respects.... But I think for many, many years the Democratic Party has not paid the kind of attention to working-class needs that they should've."

"O'DONNELL: Senator Sanders, we haven't had a national unemployment rate this low for this long in 50 years. Here in South Carolina, the unemployment rate is even lower. How will you convince voters that a Democratic socialist can do better than President Trump with the economy?"

"Trump was saying that the only way he could lose the election is if there was — let me get the exact quote — "the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election." Now he is making that statement at a time when virtually every national poll has him behind."

"O'DONNELL: Mayor Bloomberg, I'll let you respond to that. Do you think Senator Sanders' economy would be better for America than President Trump's?"

"Let's be clear, the lack of health care and affordable medicine does not only threaten the health and well-being of the uninsured, it impacts everyone who comes in contact with them. In fact, what this crisis is beginning to teach us is that we are only as safe as the least insured person in America."

"It was -- you know, gay marriage today is considered a Little bit differently than it was 25 years ago. I remember that vote. It was a very hard vote. I voted against the Defense of Marriage Act. You voted for it. I voted against the bankruptcy bill. You voted for it. I voted against the war in Iraq, which was also a tough vote. You voted for it. I voted against disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR with China, which cost this country over 4 million good-paying jobs. You voted for it. I voted against the Hyde amendment, which denies low- income women the right to get an abortion. You have consistently voted for it. I don't know what your position is on it today, but you have consistently voted for it. In other words, all that I'm saying here, we can argue about the merits of the bill."

"Sanders: You have to stop with this. I'm dealing with a fucking global crisis. You know? We're dealing with it and you're asking me these questions.Manu Raju (CNN): You're running for president, so...Sanders: Well right now I'm running. Right now I'm trying to do my best to make sure that we don't have an economic meltdown and that people don't die. Is that enough to you? To keep you busy for today?"

"SANDERS: I wonder why. And maybe, you know, Pete mentions what the American people want. I will tell you, Pete, what the American people want, and, Joe, what the American people want. They don't want candidates to be running to billionaires for huge amounts of funding."

"Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of our country and he must be defeated. Tragically, we have a president today who is a pathological liar and who is running a corrupt administration. He clearly does not understand the Constitution of the United States and thinks that he is a president who is above the law. In my view, he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot, and he must be defeated, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen."

"Let me be absolutely clear: in terms of potential deaths and the impact on our economy, the crisis we face from coronavirus is on the scale of a major war, and we must act accordingly. Nobody knows how many fatalities we may see, but they could equal or surpass the U.S. casualties we saw in World War II. It is an absolute moral imperative that our response -- as a government, as a society, as business communities, and as individuals -- meets the enormity of this crisis... If our neighbor or co-worker gets sick, we have the potential to get sick. If our neighbors lose their jobs, then our local economies suffer, and we may lose our jobs. If doctors and nurses do not have the equipment and staffing capacity they need now, people we know and love may die. The American people deserve transparency... We need daily information -- clear, science-based information -- from credible scientific voices, not politicians."

"The pharmaceutical industry must be told in no uncertain terms that the medicines that they manufacture for this crisis will be sold at cost. This is not the time for profiteering or price gouging."

"Let me respond and I'll answer your question, respond to what Joe's comments about the 2007 immigration bill. That bill was opposed by LULAC, the largest Latino organization in America. The Southern Poverty Law Center called its guest worker programs akin to slavery. There wasn't really a vote on the bill. It was killed because there was a vote on the Doggett Amendment, I think it was 49-48, and you know who voted with me on that one, Joe? Barack Obama. He understood that that proposal was a bad idea. We don't need slavery in America where workers -- guest workers are forced to stay with their employers. But in terms of immigration in general, let me outline some of the things that we do. Day one, we restore the legal status of 1.8 million young people and their parents in the DACA program. Number two, immediately, we end these ICE raids which are terrorizing communities all over this country. Three, we change the border policy. Under my administration, no federal agent will ever grab little babies from the arms of their mothers. And, fourth, I think we can pass what the American people want and that is comprehensive immigration reform, a path towards citizenship for the 11 million undocumented."

"O'DONNELL: I want to allow Senator Sanders to respond because you've gone after the insurance industry. You've taken on pharmaceutical companies. And you've taken on big tech. Why did you vote repeatedly to give gun manufacturers a pass?"

"Here is the bottom line. When we are dealing with this crisis, we need to listen to the scientists, to the researchers, to the medical folks, not politicians. We need an emergency response to this crisis and we need it now."

"Because we have to invest in an unprecedented way -- in an unprecedented way. You started off by saying that we're talking about a $13 trillion, $14 trillion investment. That is a lot of money. And I've been criticized for that. But I don't know what the alternative is, if we are playing for the future of this planet. So we've got to be dramatic. And what being dramatic is, massive investments in wind, in solar, under the -- in sustainable energies in general, in research and development, in making our buildings all over this country. My state of Vermont and around this country have got a lot of old buildings. We can put millions and millions of people to work making our buildings energy-efficient, moving our transportation system to electricity. So what we're talking about is a massive unprecedented investment. That is what the Green New Deal is about. I supported it. And I will fight to implement it."

"SANDERS: Thirty years ago, I supported a ban on assault weapons. Mike Bloomberg has started a very good organization, Moms Demand Actions. Congratulations."

"Sanders has policy ideas that cross the simple partisan divides, that unite people by impacting them where they live. He thumbs his nose at millionaires, yet is joining the Senate, which has more than 40 of them. With a lame-duck president and nearly evenly split Senate, where coalitions matter and every vote counts, Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is poised to make a difference."

"If Bernie Sanders wins he'll be the first socialist elected president since 2008."

"Bernie Sanders finished Outsider in the House, the original 1997 edition of this book, with a chapter titled "Where Do We Go From Here?" He was serious about the "we" part, offering up a movement agenda that anticipated the message he would carry into the U.S. Senate and ultimately into presidential politics: "rid the country of any vestige of racism, sexism, and homophobia"; establish a "progressive tax policy" in order to close the "obscene and terrifying" gap between rich and poor; guarantee "health care for all through a single-payer system"; end "race-to-the-bottom" trade policies and assaults on workers; "rebuild America" with massive investments in communities and schools and job creation; begin "addressing forthrightly the problem of corporate control of the media"; and instigate sweeping reforms "to ensure that votes and not money determined which direction our leaders take." As for himself, however, Sanders simply wrote, "There is much to do, and for an Independent there is no established trail to follow"...Bernie Sanders knows a few things that more cautious politicians will never understand. Sometimes the outsiders win. Sometimes the left wing of the possible simply becomes the possible. Sometimes, political revolutions occur in cities, in states, and perhaps even nations."

"I hope Bernie Sanders is the destruction of the Democratic Party. It's time to break up the two party dictatorship."

"The Clinton campaign just made a serious mistake. They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care. What’s so wrong with that? Don’t all candidates use family surrogates when and where they can? The Kennedys, for example, deployed a horde of kinfolk for Jack’s campaign for president, then Bobby’s, then Teddy’s. But when it’s the first time (as this was for Clinton the younger), the surrogate should be sure whereof she speaks, and had better stick to talking about her candidate, not the opponent. Unfortunately, Chelsea Clinton misrepresented Senator Sanders’ position, and her premiere performance on the stump backfired, producing a flood of political donations to Sanders."

"Rather than “strip” millions and millions of people of their health insurance, he wants to be sure millions and millions of people actually get health insurance. This was Sanders’ position as far back as 1993 when newly-elected President Bill Clinton put First Lady Hillary Clinton in charge of reforming our disheveled and unjust health care system. Her task force huffed and puffed in secret for months, calling in legions of experts and academics, ultimately producing a plan so complicated and impenetrable – not to mention unexplainable – that it would have collapsed of its own ponderous weight even if the Republicans had not propagandized it into a laughing stock of pretensions and inefficiencies that could only make matters worse."

"He continues, even as the party elites rig the primaries against him, to make a mockery of democratic participation, to hold up the Democrats as a tool for change. He will soon be urging his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton, actively working as an impediment to political mobilization and an advocate for political lethargy. Sanders, whose promise of a political revolution is as hollow as competing campaign slogans, will be rewarded for his duplicity. He will be allowed to keep his seniority in the Democratic caucus. The party will not mount a campaign in Vermont to unseat him from the U.S. Senate. He will not, as he has feared, end up a pariah like Ralph Nader. But he, like everyone else in the establishment, will have sold us out."

"All these years later, Sanders is still fighting the battle for single payer, Medicare-like coverage for all, even as fellow Democrats capitulated to the siren songs of the health and insurance industries. President Obama, himself a one-time advocate of single payer coverage, buckled to the insurance companies and its lobbyists and minions in Congress and agreed to health care legislation (the Affordable Care Act) that would continue to treat healing the sick as a profit center instead of a basic human right."

"By winning white working-class voters and making inroads with minority voters, Sanders is moving beyond an elite and generational candidate, and forcing Clinton to address reform in a much bolder way, says Greenberg, who was the Clintons’ pollster in their first bid for the White House in 1992. Clinton says she’s a progressive who gets things done, and that she won’t make promises she can’t keep, a message while admirable is not inspirational. "This is not a practical election, this is a change election," says Greenberg. And so far it is Sanders who has capitalized on the hunger for change, while Clinton has relied on her long history of championing liberal causes to resonate with voters, many too young to appreciate what she fought for. Sanders began the way Gene McCarthy did in ’68 with support that was educated and young, and with a focus on the economy, the issue that matters most to these voters. The coming weeks will tell us whether Clinton can revamp her message to meet the moment, and whether she can continue to win minority voters with the same spirit of hopefulness that Robert Kennedy’s too short candidacy symbolized. Otherwise, she risks that mantle being grabbed by Sanders."

"I've been very concerned about his lack of knowledge."

"Markets are unsettled because of geopolitical risks, the slowdown in China, and because Bernie Sanders has become a viable candidate."

"Bernie Sanders, who at least acknowledges our economic reality and refuses to accept corporate money for his presidential campaign, plays the role of the Democratic Party’s court jester. No doubt to remain a member of the court, he will not condemn the perfidy and collaboration with corporate power that define Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. He accepts that criticism of empire is taboo."

"Bernie Sanders [is] doing good and courageous things. He’s organizing a lot of people. That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement that will use the election as a kind of an incentive and then go on, and unfortunately it’s not. When the election’s over, the movement is going to die. And that’s a serious error. ... The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle."

"Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical."

"It's very likely Hillary Clinton will still prevail in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, though, has had a remarkable showing, particularly among young people."

"Sanders ... has mobilized a large number of young people, these young people who are saying, "Look, we're not going to consent anymore." And if that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized force, that could change the country."

"I have been a conservative Republican my entire life. But the Republican Party as a whole has gotten so far out of touch with the American people. I switched my registration so that I could vote for Sanders in the primary, but the day the primary is over I'm going to register as an independent."

"Sanders’ modus operandi and avowed lack of experience in the real world of profits, loss, and investment leaves him at something of a loss when it comes to talking about the economy. His plans for everything from reforming health care to boosting economic growth and providing free college tend to have an air of unreality about them. As a result, mainstream economists and business leaders aren’t feeling the Bern."

"Bernie Sanders, a self-professed socialist who is almost as extreme in his own way as Trump is. I don't “feel the Bern” and I can't make common cause with those who do."

"If Bernie Sanders had an ounce of [Michael] Avenatti’s fearlessness, he would’ve been the Democratic nominee, and we would have had a much tougher time beating him. Now, I don’t believe a professional politician is going to be there at the end of the day. I’ve always said it’s going to be someone like Oprah, or Avenatti, or somebody that’s more media-savvy that’s going to be there."

"The remarkable candidacy of Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist, inspired tens of thousands of mostly young supporters to join the Democratic Socialists of America over the last year."

"Sen. Bernie Sanders is introducing a bill to increase the estate tax on the nation's billionaires to a rate of 77 percent. Sanders would like to get back there: Under his plan, estates between $3.5 million and $10 million would be taxed at 45 percent; estates between $10 million and $50 million would be taxed at 50 percent; and estates between $50 million and $1 billion would be taxed at 55 percent. Estates of people with more than a billion dollars to their name would be taxed at 77 percent. Sanders said the bill would affect the richest 0.2 percent of earners. Sanders’ proposal also would get rid of some of the tax shelters and dodges that the wealthy use to get out of paying the estate tax. That move echoes policy proposals from Warren and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Each has included reforms to estate tax loopholes as funding mechanisms for other legislative proposals. Sanders said his act already has the approval of economists including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich."

"If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel? To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating."

"Trump’s dig on socialism means he’s scared, Ocasio-Cortez said after his speech. What really scares the pro-plutocrats on both sides of the political aisle about her, [Bernie] Sanders and other democratic socialists is that they have become messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision — the simple idea that it’s up to government to intervene and equalize the playing field between the capital that owns the politicians, the system and the rewards, and the general public toiling to provide those rewards."

"Sanders' new 'For the 99.8% Act' is squarely aimed at preventing the children of today's billionaires from dominating our future democracy, economy, culture and philanthropy.... The Republicans can’t control their baser greed impulse, as revealed in their latest move to abolish the federal estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of the super-rich. Congress should jump on board an improved estate tax introduced today by Senator Bernie Sanders, that would levy a top rate of 77 percent on inheritances over $1 billion. Sanders bill, The For 99.8% Act (summary), would also plug up loopholes and ban trusts that wealthy families use to hide and perpetuate wealth dynasties"

"In fairness, Sanders ran a surprisingly effective campaign tapping the same anti-establishment fury Donald Trump stirred. Although Sanders and Trump are very different, their campaigns were not. Each treated Hillary Clinton as a compromised, Wall Street–worshipping, Establishment sellout. Both demonized Washington insiders and free trade, rather than tackling the real structural problem: the United States deindustrialized because Americans refuse to pay what it costs to hire American workers and instead buy cheaper imported products. As a result, just as Ralph Nader siphoned tens of thousands of votes on Election Day 2000 in Florida from Al Gore, causing the deadlock and George W. Bush’s victory, Bernie Sanders’ similar vampire effect enfeebled Hillary Clinton."

"The estate tax, established by Congress a century ago to put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, is paid only by a miniscule sliver of billionaires and multi-millionaires. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt supported the estate tax as a protection against the “tyranny of plutocracy.” Sanders estate tax proposal is a plutocracy prevention act, squarely aimed at preventing the children of today’s billionaires from dominating our future democracy, economy, culture and philanthropy."

"Days ago, when Bernie Sanders launched his campaign with a big rally in Brooklyn, the MSNBC coverage was so slanted that an assessment from Glenn Greenwald appeared under the headline “MSNBC Yet Again Broadcasts Blatant Lies, This Time About Bernie Sanders...” Greenwald’s critique of MSNBC [below] focused on flagrantly inaccurate anti-Sanders commentary from a former Hillary Clinton aide that immediately followed the senator’s Brooklyn speech... The coverage prompted an email from FAIR founder (and my colleague) Jeff Cohen to an MSNBC vice president: “You have no trouble finding hardcore Clintonite Bernie-bashers; please offer some balance in your analysts. In today’s Democratic Party, there’s clearly more sympathy for Bernie than the Clintons—but not on MSNBC.” It’s worth noting that the (Washington) Post is owned by the world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, while MSNBC is owned by Comcast, “the world’s largest entertainment company.” To counteract the media propaganda arsenal now in place, we should fully recognize that arsenal as the main weaponry that corporate power will deploy against the Bernie 2020 campaign. We must confront those corporate media forces while vastly strengthening independent progressive media work of all kinds."