"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."

"A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend."

"Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war againt terrorism."

"Academic freedom should protect the right of a professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority viewpoint–no matter how distasteful to the majority."

"Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."

"My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know by experience that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles, under all circumstances."

"Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd."

"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles."

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."

"Under democracy one party always devolves its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule–and both commonly succeed, and are right."

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot calim to be defenders of minorities."

"Supposedly, that's what we're fighting in Iraq, a religious extreme government that is not letting people live freely. And that's exactly what George Bush seems to want to do here in the United States."

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"Marriage has been undermined by divorce, so don't tell me about marriage. Don't blame the gay and lesbian, transgender and transsexual community."

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

"This administration led this nation into war based on lies. I think that this Congress, and the American people, have a right to know what information this Administration had, and how they justify their public comments. Now is the time for truth-telling."

"Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy's defeat.
"These same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result of it on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction – it's very strange."

"These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest."

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends."

"Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

"Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue."

"I never had much confidence in the attention span of elected officials for any kind of deep thinking about important issues. When they pop off after what I call a bumper strip headline, they almost always give a superficial response."

"As legal things, nonhuman animals are treated today as human slaves were treated once and continue to be treated in those few places in which human slavery is unlawfully practiced."

"Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops. We will ask questions and we will defend our democracy."

"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are being used by the owning elites as a publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad."

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

"...it is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge."

"As [UK] ambassador to Colombia, I watched the endless Anglo-US campaigns against drug traffickers and I know they will never work... I have come to realise that the war is unwinnable, costly and counter-productive."

"Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."