Journalists From The United States

"The nationalists have no political power. They have no votes and they hate votes. Votes to them are as repugnant as holy water to the devil."

"We devoted the decade that started in 1940 to beginning the struggle to abolish poverty. To do that we set aside political status as an issue. During the decade that started in 1950 we directed our energy especially toward the creation of a new political status vitally adapted to the economic needs of Puerto Rico. During the decade that is now starting I propose that we devote special attention to what kind of civilization, what kind of culture, what deep and good manner of living the people of Puerto Rico want to make for themselves on the basis of their increasing economic prosperity."

"At present, the Board of Education is eager to help the bilingual reader and to encourage the entire student body. It has transplanted "Operation Understanding," one of the slogans of Puerto Rico's former governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, to the mainland."

"The biggest traitor in Puerto Rican history is this lackey, Luis Munoz Marin, who shipped our people by the hundreds of thousands to New York because he could not provide jobs for them; who taught our people to be white middle class americanos, when they were poor, oppressed boricuas; who destroyed the jibaro with operation bootstrap, moving thousands off the land into the slums of San Juan, and Ponce, and let all our money go to u.s. capitalists. He was the apostle of non-violence for profit."

"Our people have experience with crooked politicians full of empty promises. In the 1940's, luis munoz marin and the slogan "Bread, Land, and Liberty." Where is the bread? Where is the land? Where is the liberty? munoz marin was for independence, until he got into office. Then he became a traitor, and a rich man."

"A good civilization, it seems to me, is one which continues to work energetically to create more wealth, but directs this wealth toward the fulfillment of deeper values. Once certain basic needs are satisfied and certain basic comforts are available to all, it turns its attention to the attainment of more meaningful and lasting satisfactions than the mere possession and consumption of merchandise."

"once the basic needs and comforts are provided for, this growing economic energy should be used to create more personal freedom in all its multiple aspects. We have already pointed out what these are: more universities, more museums, more laboratories and libraries, more opportunities for adults to continue their education beyond the mere attainments of techniques for earning a living, more individuality in decisions, better neighborly feeling, better neighborhoods, greater appreciation of, rather than imitation of, the neighbor-in short, more serenity."

"a good civilization, our true final goal."

"The public philosophy of our people should be much more than their political status; much more than their technology and their economy. It is or should be the deepest expression of their unity and their soul."

"Political liberty-under any political status-is in itself only one of the many expressions of human liberty."

"let us dedicate this new decade to the grand enterprise of a great education for Puerto Rico."

"The man who knows something today that he did not know yesterday is today, in that degree, a freer man than he was yesterday, because ignorance is servitude and knowledge is freedom. Parents who know today that they can provide their children with an adequate education are much freer than they were yesterday, if yesterday they lived in uncertainty as to whether or not they could educate their children. If a family knows it can move from a slum to a public housing development and later, as its economic condition improves, to a home of its own, it has greater freedom of spirit than one that despairs of ever being able to improve its lot... In a rapidly growing economic system such as Puerto Rico has and should continue to have, with increasing opportunities for greater economic well-being, all who now have hope, rather than despair, are freer because of this hope."

"When the economic development of Puerto Rico reaches a point where any other political status may be consistent with a prosperous life and a good civilization, the people of Puerto Rico may then take up the question of political status. For they will then be free, truly free, of the coercion of destructive and inexorable economic realities, to decide whether they wish to continue using Commonwealth as a means toward the ideal of the good life, or whether they prefer to use any other status as a means to this end. What I am saying is that a political status should not be a straitjacket, a fetish, an unreasoned prejudice, but a great means toward much deeper and more significant ends."

"A government is not an end in itself. It is a means for the appropriate organization of a political community. Neither is a political status for the same reason-an end in itself."

"Commonwealth status provides us with a means adapted to the high end of creating an excellent civilization here in Puerto Rico. There is talk as to whether the Commonwealth status is or is not permanent. Strictly speaking, nothing in the world is permanent; but, accepting this as a relative term, I will say that the Commonwealth status shall be as permanent as the people of Puerto Rico may desire. It is fruit of our people's freedom of thought, and its permanence or impermanence should be the fruit of our people's continuing freedom to make decisions."

"the best political status for a country has the consent of its people and helps, or at least does not greatly hinder, the growth of its economy. It participates in the development of what is good in its culture-the culture that the people desire for themselves on the basis of this economy."

"But it is repulsive to observe that democracy, precisely because of its principles of human freedom, frequently finds itself in the position of jailing poor people who are not morally perverse, while letting go free the big corruptors, the big racketeers, the big criminals of the numbers racket. Democracy should assiduously search for a way to prevent this. Its great respect for human freedom must not be used as a tool to guarantee impunity to these racketeers and criminals."

"The history of Puerto Rico in the past decades has been that of two drives seeking to merge into one: the drive to abolish poverty and the drive of the people toward the ideal image of themselves."

"I believe that if Puerto Rico had been a federated state of the Union in, say, 1945, at the end of World War II, it would never have been able to attain the economic development, with its consequent social progress, which has been observed and admired by the whole world all these years"

"The objective is, I repeat, a good civilization based on the abolition of poverty. A political status that puts obstacles in the path of that ideal cannot be, so long as it creates obstacles, the status that gives real freedom to the people of Puerto Rico."

"If a good civilization is the final goal, and if we are to devote to it the larger part of this new decade, we must set above all other duties the duty of education education in the school and out of the school: the improvement of all means of communication, such as schools, universities, radio, television, and the press."

"Our society, in its endeavor to improve spiritually, to enlighten its understanding, to understand itself better, must restore to the teacher his legitimate position."

"a man we can regard as a spiritual fellow countryman, a man eminent in music, eminent in human virtues, eminent in liberty. Of all his qualities the least is music-and he is one of the great musicians of the world: Maestro Pablo Casals!"

"Progress in technology is necessary for the economic development of our country in the direction of higher and higher levels that will benefit all Puerto Ricans. But to find relief for the human suffering temporarily caused by this very progress is a necessary duty."

"The distribution of this great wealth-the way in which it is apportioned to profits, wages, and professional salaries, education, health, continuing economic development, social security, recreation, housing, communications is extremely important...I propose that economic justice be maintained or improved as part of the agenda of the future."

"When did an old white guy yelling at me, telling me what to think become news? What gives him the right to tell me what to think? When was the last time he was in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sri Lanka... or anywhere that didn't have a beach?"

"Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, has migrated from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the world of 9/11 conspiracy theory and Putin worship."

"Roberts' history of false-flag assertions is certainly well known... Roberts' piece will intrigue that narrow readership fond of fact-lite, rancidly-posited dot-connecting exercises, and repel just about everyone else."

"Paul Craig Roberts characterizes the resulting attitudes [of Western and U.S. intellectuals] as a "fusion of moral scepticism with the demand for moral perfection...""

"All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security."

"The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome. What they see now is the West preparing its populations for war. It is this perception for which the West is solely responsible that makes the situation today far more dangerous than it ever was during the long Cold War."

"The military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy."

"All of America’s wars except the first—the war for independence — were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril."

"When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world."

"As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby."

"If we add state capitalism to the [[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] administration’s success in eroding both the US Constitution and the power of Congress, we may be witnessing the final death of accountable constitutional government."

"Noam Chomsky recently wrote that America thinks that it owns the world. That is definitely the view of the Bush administration. But the fact of the matter is that the US owes the world. The US “superpower” cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid. I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt “superpower” will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home the troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned."

"The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will."

"Although all human beings experience desires, all are not controlled by them. Those who are not controlled by desire maintain balance in their lives and can thereby attain higher levels of understanding."

"Spiritual mastery is never easy. It takes much more time and personal application than physical development does. Spirtual mastery, however, is the path we are all on. Some of us simply do not choose to believe it."

"Desire is the base of all disharmony in this world."

"Your needs are your choice. Because they are your choice, this means you are not bound by them. You can choose to change your needs."

"How many times have you become very anxious when forced to wait? There are a million things to see. There are a million beautiful sounds to hear. Open your eyes, see--as if for the first time. Find peace in moments of waiting, and you will witness that all life can be perfectly beautiful."

"With every experience in life, you have two choices: One, you can choose to enjoy and learn from the encounter, even if it is something you don't like. Two, you can struggle through the experience, blaming everyone and everything else around you the entire time. What if you were to view any unfavorable experience in a new way? What if you simply accepted the experience as momentary and learned what you could from it? Think how peaceful that experience would become."

"That which goes unsaid eventually goes unthought."

"One fundamental problem is that widely appealing conspiracy theories demand formidable villains, bad guys who can keep a secret and who adroitly understand how the world works in order to seize the future. But our elites instead seem inept at understanding cause and effect. They are recurrently surprised that, for example, their depolicing drives lead to an explosion of riots, murders, and car crashes."

"That diversity is divisive is also a major internal problem for the Democrats. How can they keep their coalition of the margins from turning into a circular firing squad with, say, the fanatical Muslims and gay Jews at each other’s throats? The obvious answer to Democrats has been by giving the fringes of American society a common enemy to hate, fear, and dispossess: core Americans. But this reflex is premised on core Americans being too obtuse to notice, or too polite to mention, all the blood libels being circulated about them. Moreover, the Democrats have set off a Darwinian struggle among their coalition of the fringes to be the top dogs of diversity."

"Do American leaders still believe that they have the moral right to protect the territory of the American people by force? Or will we unilaterally disarm in the Scramble for America?"

"The Democrats’ master plan is simple: to be the Party of Diversity, with “diversity” defined elastically as being the opposite of a core American. And who is a “core American,” you ask? Well, the more you have in common demographically with George Washington or Ben Franklin, the more of a core American you are, and thus the Bad Guy."

"If the Associated Press and the like suddenly changing the rules of capitalization to make clear who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys seems childish, well, it is childish. And that’s a key point to understanding the development of anti-whiteism. Wokeness is a puerile, lowbrow, greed-driven, racist tantrum."