Quote

The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.

Michael Parenti

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Parenti
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 1
Historian
Journalist
Political Scientist
New York City
New York
Atrocities
Aggression
Committed
Crime
War
Truth
Firsts
Atrocity
First
Aggressors

More quotes by Michael Parenti

Image
It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.
Michael Parenti
Image
The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
Michael Parenti
Image
Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
Michael Parenti
Image
The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.
Michael Parenti
Image
Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.
Michael Parenti
Image
The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.
Michael Parenti
Image
Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.
Michael Parenti
Image
The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.
Michael Parenti
Image
Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.
Michael Parenti
Image
The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.
Michael Parenti
Image
Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.
Michael Parenti
Image
One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
Michael Parenti
Image
The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
Michael Parenti
Image
When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.
Michael Parenti
Image
Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot we can get more we want it all.
Michael Parenti
Image
Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth.
Michael Parenti
Image
The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
Michael Parenti
Image
America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.
Michael Parenti
Image
The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries.
Michael Parenti
Image
For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character...that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them.
Michael Parenti