All Quotes

"We cannot and we will not negotiate with terrorists. We have nothing but contempt for them. To conciliate differences with these people without them changing their objectives is to condemn our Republic to ultimate strangulation and death."

""Hey, what's the name of that nice young girl, my loyalist supporter?" I said, Mr. President, her name is Annie Ferrer. "Will you give that girl my regards and kisses?" he asked. I said yes, of course — it was really strange."

"You are repetitious and stupid."

"My spirit will rise from the grave and the world shall know that I was right."

"This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are believed to have stolen during his presidency. "It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.""

"Marcos was not a smoker, he was not known as a drinker, he didn’t swear—the strongest expression of irritation people would hear from him was “Lintik!” And he was not much more of a womanizer than most men of his generation and macho culture like to think themselves to be. He was not tall, but trim and athletic for most of his life: a marksman, orator, armed with a photographic memory. Surely we can agree he was a man of talent; we continue to disagree whether he used those talents for anything larger than his own ambitions."

"The Philippines is a nation of 40 million cowards and one son of a bitch."

"We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes."

"The difference lies in the culture of the Filipino people. It is a soft, forgiving culture. Only in the Philippines could a leader like Ferdinand Marcos, who pillaged his country for over 20 years, still be considered for a national burial..."

"The second most corrupt head of government ever (after Suharto)."

"In 2004, Transparency International listed the ten worst kleptocratic rulers of recent times. Mobutu came in third, followed by Sani Abacha (Nigeria, 1993-98; stole US$2-5 billion); Slobodan Milošević (Serbia/Yugoslavia, 1989-2000, US$1 billion); Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti, 1971-86, US$300-800 million); Alberto Fujimori (Peru, 1990-2000, US$600 million); Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine (1996-7, US$114-200 million); Arnoldo Aleman (Nicaragua, 1997-2002, US$100 million); and Joseph Estrada (Philippines, 1998-2001, US$78-80 million). Second was Ferdinand Marcos, Philippine president from 1965 to 1986, who with his wife Imelda — famed for her vast collection of shoes — plundered the Philippine economy through a system of 'crony capitalism', amassing a vast fortune while ordinary Filipinos went hungry. Opponents were arrested by the military — over 60,000 from 1972 to 1977 —- and many tortured and murdered, including opposition leader Benigno Aquino. A popular rebellion in 1986 finally forced him from office and he fled with his wife to Hawaii. Transparency International put his stolen wealth at US$5-10 billion, others much higher. Marcos died in 1989 before he could stand trial."

"President Marcos turned to me and directed his eyes into mine—an instant of history that still replays in my memory—and responded that should we stand our ground, a military confrontation against the rebels is inevitable. And in his baritone voice declared "I don’t want us to be shooting at our own people. We must resolve this peacefully.""

"I think you should cut and cut cleanly. The time has come."

"This generation of Filipinos fought a foreign power that invaded us. I think all of them are entitled to be buried in the Libingan ng Mga Bayani. Regardless of whether medals or no medals he, as a soldier who fought that war, is entitled to be buried in Libingan, and I am not denigrating the people who are denying that right or objecting to it. I don’t think they ever saw the muzzles of the guns of a foreign enemy and confronted them."

"He was hanging on, looking for a life preserver. He was a desperate man clutching at straws."

"The Man of Steal"

"The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast."

"The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power."

"These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics."

"We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics."

"No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline"

"No detail is too minor to note."

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood."

"There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper."

"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."

"When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy them, but now they call this free will. At least the Greeks were being honest."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up."

"In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant. They want you to believe that the new and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you."

"You don't become a journalist because you're good at keeping secrets. Being a Journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media. The Culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos."

"Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable."

"Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride. She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks."

"Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?'"

"These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.""

"Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell."

"Here's Big Brother, singing and dancing, force-feeding you, so your mind never goes hungry enough to think."

"Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself."

"Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf."

"When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says."Johnny Apple seed was a fucking biological terrorist."

"The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.""

"Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job."

"According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy."

"Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.""

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. .... Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story? .... You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?"

"The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most person person is actually the aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys.""

"In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause."

"Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro."

"Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do."

"History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."