Lawyers From The United States

"There were various kinds of direct action in the nineteen-sixties: the Civil Rights movement, in which minorities realized that nobody would do anything for them, that they had to do things for themselves; the women's movement, in which women realized they themselves had to do something about their rights; the environmental movement; and other social movements. The point is that people could not get what they wanted through the system — they had to get it directly. It is no wonder that what began as an idealistic concern for those who were deprived of their rights led to a great deal of selfishness by those who were not deprived. And here lies the affinity between the radicalism of the nineteen-sixties and the conservatism of the nineteen-eighties. Both grew from the same soil: They are different responses to the same problem."

"What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today."

"Liberals placed an unreasonable amount of faith in large institutions: unions, foundations, big government, large corporations, and universities. These institutions are based on principles that are antithetical to democracy. They are not democratic, they are hierarchical: Someone is at the top and everybody else is at the bottom. Their policies are not made democratically, they are made at the top. These institutions are also not egalitarian. They operate by administrative discretion and authority, not the rule of law: There is no legislature, no group lawmaking body. The individual in the large organization does not have the kind of constitutional rights that an individual in the society at large has. There are no protections of autonomy and free speech. Employees can be fired for many reasons. We need to constitutionalize large organizations to protect the people within them, to ensure that they can be politically outspoken."

"The liberals were right when they insisted that we had enough food and goods for all of our people. But they did not — and we still do not — know how to distribute those goods in a rational way. We have failed to figure out how to turn this abundance into an advantage. The liberals were also right about labor-saving. If we evenly distributed the work that needs to be done, there ought to be a lot of time left over for everybody to have the leisure that people need. But we have managed to reverse that. Today, a great many people cannot find any work. People are dispossessed and cannot support themselves or their families. Many are homeless. For many others, work has become a rat race: something to be endured, not enjoyed. Today we are witnessing an impoverishment: the apparent drying up of resources for all kinds of things that are badly needed. We seem to have no money for housing, for education, or for health and social services. And yet we have a deficit, and we are told by candidates for public office that we must cut the federal budget even more. This impoverishment is a mystery."

"The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today. The liberals of the nineteen-thirties were diverse, but they had a common vision. They accepted democracy, the free market, and capitalism. However, they thought that unless the market was not corrected or ameliorated, there would be child labor, neglect of the elderly, dangerous and harmful consumer goods, monopolies squeezing people out of business and forcing down wages — in short, there would be the horror of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution before the British began passing social legislation."

"As Reagan conservatism is becoming less popular, people are asking: Where do we go from here? We can also ask: Does the last era of liberalism provide any indications as to where we might or should go from here? The liberalism of the nineteen-thirties emerged after the catastrophe that resulted from the conservatism of the nineteen-twenties. Conservatives had been in power for a long time, and ended by nearly wrecking the country. Liberals came along and performed a rescue operation. Ironically, they are credited with saving the establishment, which they surely did."

"The country we live in is a laboratory. We have one experiment after another. Unfortunately, it is not a laboratory where no one gets hurt: some lives are enhanced, others are ruined. We have to view our society with concern and passion, and see what we can learn from each of our experiments. When we get upset and angry about politics — whether it is conservative, liberal, or whatever — we tend to think in terms of right and wrong, not what we can learn."

"Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness."

"No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain."

"Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?"

"Our history shows that what we must do is assert domination over the machine, to guide it so that it works for the values of our choice."

"The crucial fact to realize about all the powerful machinery of the Corporate State — its laws, structure, political system — is that it possesses no mind."

"One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties."

"there is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants."

"We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive."

"Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us."

"Of all the qualities of human beings that are injured, narrowed, or repressed in the Corporate State, it is consciousness, the most precious and the most fragile, that suffers the most."

"A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it."

"Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up."

"The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves."

"Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society."

"Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions."

"Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community."

"One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something that he has and then sell him something to take its place."

"The end result of this personal and public impoverishment is a hollow man."

"It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil."

"Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholders' rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employees' right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms."

"What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it."

"The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values."

"The great crime of our time, says Vonnegut, was to do too much good secretly, too much harm openly."

"Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them."

"The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power."

"Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth."

"The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism."

"To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost."

"We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants."

"The logic and necessity of the new generation — and what they are so furiously opposed to — must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason" — reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation."

"There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. This is the revolution of the new generation."

"America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut."

"My goal in life is to make people think. If I do that, I've been a success."

"If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today. … I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means."

"One of the problems with fame … is they try to pigeonhole you… like I’m stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life."

"A highly competent Bitch often deprecates herself by refusing to recognize her own superiority.... Bitches are among the most unsung of the unsung heroes of this society. They are the pioneers, the vanguard, the spearhead. Whether they want to be or not this is the role they serve just by their very being. Many would not choose to be the groundbreakers for the mass of women for whom they have no sisterly feelings but they cannot avoid it. Those who violate the limits, extend them; or cause the system to break.... Their major psychological oppression is not a belief that they are inferior but a belief that they are not.... Like most women they were taught to hate themselves as well as all women. In different ways and for different reasons perhaps, but the effect was similar. Internalization of a derogatory self-concept always results in a good deal of bitterness and resentment. This anger is usually either turned in on the self —making one an unpleasant person or on other women — reinforcing the social cliches about them. Only with political consciousness is it directed at the source — the social system.... We must be strong, we must be militant, we must be dangerous. We must realize that Bitch is Beautiful and that we have nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever."

"The most prominent characteristic of all Bitches is that they rudely violate conceptions of proper sex role behavior. They violate them in different ways, but they all violate them. Their attitudes towards themselves and other people, their goal orientations, their personal style, their appearance and way of handling their bodies, all jar people and make them feel uneasy. Sometimes it's conscious and sometimes it's not, but people generally feel uncomfortable around Bitches. They consider them aberrations. They find their style disturbing.... A Bitch is blunt, direct, arrogant, at times egoistic. She has no liking for the indirect, subtle, mysterious ways of the “eternal feminine”. She disdains the vicarious life deemed natural to women because she wants to live a life of her own. Our society has defined humanity as male, and female as something other than male. In this way, females could be human only by living vicariously thru a male. To be able to live, a woman has to agree to serve, honor, and obey a man and what she gets in exchange is at best a shadow life. Bitches refuse to serve, honor or obey anyone. They demand to be fully functioning human beings, not just shadows. They want to be both female and human. This makes them social contradictions. The mere existence of Bitches negates the idea that a woman's reality must come thru her relationship to a man and defies the belief that women are perpetual children who must always be under the guidance of another."

"[E]veryone agrees that a bitch is always a female .... It is also generally agreed that a Bitch is aggressive, and therefore unfeminine (ahem).... Bitches have some or all of the following characteristics … Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-skinned, hard-headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushy, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatening, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous, and turbulent. Among other things.... Bitches are big, tall, strong, large, loud, brash, harsh, awkward, clumsy, sprawling, strident, ugly. Bitches move their bodies freely rather than restrain, refine and confine their motions in the proper feminine manner.... Bitches seek their identity strictly thru themselves and what they do. They are subjects, not objects … Whatever they do, they want an active role and are frequently perceived as domineering. Often they do dominate other people when roles are not available to them which more creatively sublimate their energies and utilize their capabilities. More often they are accused of domineering when doing what would be considered natural by a man."

"Stone ... castigated the educated elites, especially lawyers and judges, who used their skills to become “the obsequious servant of business” and in the process were “tainted with the morals and manners of the marketplace in its most anti-social manifestations.” And he warned law schools that their exclusive focus on “proficiency” overlooked “the grave danger to the public if this proficiency be directed wholly to private ends without thought of the social consequences.” He lambasted “the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served.” He called the legal profession’s service to corporation power a “sad spectacle” and attorneys who sold their souls to corporations “lawyer criminals.”"

"The horse and mule live thirty years And nothing know of wines and beers; The goat and sheep at twenty die, With never a taste of scotch or rye; The cow drinks water by the ton, And at eighteen is mostly done. Without the aid of rum or gin The dog at fifteen cashes in; The cat in milk and water soaks, And then at twelve years old it croaks; The modest, sober, bone-dry hen Lays eggs for nogs and dies at ten; All animals are strictly dry; They sinless live and swiftly die, While sinful, gleeful, rum-soaked men Survive for three score years and ten. And some of us - a mighty few - Stay pickled 'till we're ninety-two."

"Wealth, power, the struggle for ephemeral social and political prestige, which so absorb our attention and energy, are but the passing phase of every age; ninety-day wonders which pass from man’s recollection almost before the actors who have striven from them have passed from the stage. ... What is significant in the record of man’s development is none of these. It is rather those forces in society and the lives of those individuals, who have, in each generation, added something to man’s intellectual and moral attainment, that lay hold on the imagination and compel admiration and reverence in each succeeding generation."

"The law itself is on trial in every case as well as the cause before it."

"Democracy cannot survive without the guidance of a creative minority."