Journalists From The United States

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

"Cockburn’s personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing – debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin’s gulags, claiming that ‘the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class’, when aspects of his father’s convictions can be glimpsed."

"Alex kept the radical faith, steadily, constantly, going to the ends of the earth to cover the next story of revolt and revolution, going to the far corners of the United States to uncover the news that Americans were not taking it anymore. If a crowd had gathered, and if they were raising the red flag, or any flag of protest, that was enough for Alex. He would report their struggle, usually in The Nation, but also in the pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Esquire, the Village Voice and (for a brief period as remarkable as it was ironic) the Wall Street Journal."

"No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul."

"There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend."

"We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too."

"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination."

"The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it."

"A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience."

"No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein."

"Daniel De Leon, the head of the Socialist Labor Party in the United States, translated Woman Under Socialism into English, and felt compelled in his introduction to disassociate himself from Bebel's more unconventional views of women. In a statement that echoed Engels in its sentiments (but was far more rigid), De Leon argued: “For one, I hold there is as little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation, by reason of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings to its development. For one, I hold that the monogamous family-bruised and wounded in the cruels rough-and-will have its wounds staunched, its bruises tumble of modern society healed, and, enabled by the slowly acquired moral forces of conjugal paternal, and filial affection, bloom under socialism into a lever of mighty power for the moral and physical elevation of the races." When De Leon repeatedly admonished women that feminism must be subordinated to the (masculine) needs of the working-class revolution, he spoke for the typical American male socialist. He informed women that "the history of Class Rule throws its light before the feet of the Woman's movement; it explains the errors, accounts for them, that the movement slips into; the emotional vagaries with which the movement is often marred; its futile tears; its frequently barren efforts"; and he ridiculed the assumption of feminists "that woman was smitten down because of her sex. She was not." At great pains to point out that women had no special problem related to their femaleness, he constantly reminded them that their true mission lay in assisting working-class men to create the socialist revolution."

"I felt DeLeon understood Marx very well abstractly but knew little about the practical needs of the labor movement. The last time I talked with DeLeon I told him I was moving to Philadelphia and was willing to accept the secretaryship of the S.L.P. local there, which had been offered me, but that I could not go along with their principles wholeheartedly. As a good friend of mine, DeLeon accepted what I said without anger, but would not change his methods."

"Go out into the field and bring in the rest of the workers, that they may be fully equipped for their great mission. We will wrest what we can, step by step, from the capitalists, but with out eye fixed upon the goal; we will press forward, keeping step together with the inspiring music of the new emancipation; and when we have enough of this kind of organization, as Brother DeLeon said so happily the other day, when we are lined up in battle array and the capitalists try to lock us out, we will turn the tables on the gentlemen and lock them out. We can run the mills without them but they cannot run them without us."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"If a law or an election, distasteful to the ruling class, was forced through; if, for any one of the thousand and one causes, apt to arise whenever actual oligarchic power is draped in the drapery of democratic forms, the Ruling Class of Rome found it prudent to yield in Forum and Senate Hall;-- in such cases the Colleges of Priests would conveniently discover some flaw in the auspices, some defect in the sacrifices. That annulled the election or the law, as "condemned by the gods.""

"The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), formed after the collapse of the First International in 1872, decided to organize black workers in order to solve the problem of competition. But SLP leaders believed, as did their predecessors in the First International, that once the socialist revolution came, all race problems would disappear. SLP leader Daniel DeLeon put it succinctly: "There was no such thing as a race or Negro question'... there was only a social, a labor question...so far as the Socialist and labor movements were concerned." It was an odd position to take, especially by the 1890s when lynching increased, racial segregation became law, and African-American citizens who worked so hard for the Republican Party in the days of Reconstruction were suddenly disfranchised. Of course, black people fought back, joining unions of farmers and workers, forming armed self-defense organizations, and building religious, fraternal, educational, and political institutions that ultimately became sources of power and inspiration for the stony road ahead."

"We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionaries. We Socialists do not propose change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society, let the form take care of itself."

"Socialism rejects the premises and the conclusions of anarchy upon the State and upon government. What socialism says is "Away with the economic system that alters the beneficent functions of the central direction authority from an aid to production into a means of oppression." And it proceeds to show that, when the instruments of production shall be owned no longer by the minority, but shall be restored to the Commonwealth; that when, as a results of this, no longer the minority or any portion of the people shall be in poverty and classes, class distinctions and class rule shall, as they necessarily must, have vanished, that then the central directing authority will lose all its repressive functions and is bound to reassume the functions it had in the old communities of our ancestors, become against a necessary aid, and assist in production."

"It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is "organization" and "organization."That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the pure and simmplers have been going about saying to the workers: "Organize! Organize!"and after they have been saying that, and have been organizing"and "organizing" for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their "organization" parttakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up."

"Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred."

"As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle."

"Our system of production is in the nature of an orchestra. No one man, no one town, no one state, can be said any longer to be independent of the other; the whole people of the United States, every individual therein, is dependent and interdependent upon all the others. The nature of the machinery of production; the subdivision of labor, which aids cooperation and which cooperation fosters, and which is necessary to the plentifulnesss of production that civilization requires, compel a harmonious working together of all departments of labor, and thence complete the establishment of a central directing authority, of an orchestral director, so to speak, of the orchestra of the cooperative commonwealth."

"Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. With a full appreciation of and veneration for moral impulses that are balanced with scientific knowledge, it eschews, looks with just suspicion upon and gives a wide berth to balloon morality, or be it those malarial fevers that reformers love to dignify with the name of "moral feelings""

"These “directors,” and the capitalist class in general, may perform some “work,” they do perform some “work,” but that “work” is not of a sort that directly or indirectly aids production, any more than the intense mental strain and activity of the “work” done by the pickpocket is directly or indirectly productive."

"[On Senator Jesse Helms] I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will."

"[On General William Boykin] I hope he's not long for this world."

"In teaching me the way to live It taught me how to die."

"Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!"

"The union of lakes, the union of lands, The union of States none can sever, The union of hearts, the union of hands, And the flag of our Union forever!"

"Woodman, spare that tree! Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me, And I 'll protect it now."

"A song for our banner! The watchword recall Which gave the Republic her station: "United we stand, divided we fall!" It made and preserves us a nation!"

"Pain is hard to bear," he cried, "But with patience, day by day, Even this shall pass away."

"What is fame? Fame is but a slow decay— Even this shall pass away."

"Pleasure comes, but not to stay; Even this shall pass away."

"So, lest I be inclined To render ill for ill,— Henceforth in me instil, O God, a sweet good-will To all mankind."

""What is wealth?" the king would say, "Even this shall pass away"."

"I won a noble fame; But with a sudden frown, The people snatched my crown, And, in the mire, trod down My lofty name."

"But I account it worth All pangs of fair hopes crost— All loves and honors lost,— To gain the heavens, at cost Of losing earth."

"Twirling your blue skirts crossing the sward Under the towers of your seminary Go listen to your teachers, old and contrary Without believing a word. Tie the white filets then about your hair And think no more of what will come to pass Than bluebirds that go flying in the air Or chattering on the grass. Practice your beauty, blue girls, ere it fail, And I with my loud lips will publish Beauty that all our powers cannot establish It is so frail. For I could tell you a story which is true; I know a lady with a terrible tongue, Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfections tarnished — Yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you."

"And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, "Wake her from her sleep!" And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death."

"God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No belly and no bowels, Only consonants and vowels."

"And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard. You know how dangerous, gentlemen of threescore? May you know it yet ten more."

"Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree. Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills, The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three, And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills."

"Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole, But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning, In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning."

"Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing."

"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."

"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."

"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."