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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.

Alexander Cockburn

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Alexander Cockburn
Age: 71 †
Born: 1941
Born: June 6
Died: 2012
Died: July 21
Journalist
Peace Activist
Writer
Scotland
United Kingdom
Alexander Claud Cockburn
Part
Certainty
Self
Committed
Every
Conscience
Hospitable
None
Waging
Whose
Abomination
Virtue
Antiwar
Clear
Deception
War
Shelter

More quotes by Alexander Cockburn

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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.
Alexander Cockburn
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The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
Alexander Cockburn
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In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.
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The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences
Alexander Cockburn
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So much for the crusade against drugs . . . all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.
Alexander Cockburn
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Nothing can inspire religious duty or animation but religion.
Alexander Cockburn
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They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
Alexander Cockburn
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Regulation of sexual behavior is the preferred route to wider social control.
Alexander Cockburn
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There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.
Alexander Cockburn
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Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.
Alexander Cockburn
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Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadenedthe senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.
Alexander Cockburn
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Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery.
Alexander Cockburn
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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.
Alexander Cockburn
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There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.
Alexander Cockburn
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The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
Alexander Cockburn
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No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.
Alexander Cockburn
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A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.
Alexander Cockburn
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Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.
Alexander Cockburn
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No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein.
Alexander Cockburn
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Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you.
Alexander Cockburn