Ken, I respectfully recommend your reading some of Chomsky's work. He is recognized as the greatest intellectual mind on the globe today. And to answer your question about obedience he is talking about the few billionaires in the world who control both governments and media.

Amen to Gore Vidal and RobertSRQ You might add The Progressive and Harpers to the reading list.

On the contrary, the people who are worried that we are fast losing our democracy are the ones who most respect and desire it. The problem is that too many have been brainwashed by corporate owned media to think fascism is democracy. If we don't wake up to the fact we'll soon know what the complete lack of democracy truly is. No one is a better fascist than Cheney and Bush.

Come out of the well of darkness and read "1984," "The People's History of the U. S.," "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," "Sorrows of Empire," "Imperial Ambitions," read some of Steinbeck, Sinclair, Kevin Philips, and many other writers from a viewpoint you may not be familiar.

Bernie Sanders is one of the best human beings we could have representing us. To disrespect him is to show depressing ignorance. What he says about the mainstream media is absolute truth. The facts are out there! And do you think those corporations that own the media are going to give you the straight truth? Do you think they are not going to bend your brain in the direction they want you to think? You don't know it but you are thinking just the way the rich and powerful want you to think. Stay that way and you protect their interests at YOUR and OUR expense.

For education's sake, jim k, the American Revolution was leftist, the elimination of 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week was leftist, the elimination of child labor was leftist, social security was leftist, half the parks, bridges, hospitals, highways, etc. in this country today were built by leftists and during a period when money was impossible to make, women suffrage was leftist, Medicare was leftist, free public education was leftist, habeus corpus was leftist, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were leftists. Unless you're a multi-millionaire who doesn't give a damn about the human race you should thank your lucky stars for leftists.

Jim K's statement proves just how effectively the powerful right wingers now fringing on fascism have brainwashed the people through total control of mainstream media. My greatest wonder is how anyone who must know that the media is owned by the largest corporations in America and who have decimated (and more than decimated for that means only 10%) news reporting in favor of opinionating can possibly believe that the media is liberal. How incredible! And how scary that is for continuing liberty.

This good quote is a good example of the rule that words are not responsible for their source.

Every advance in freedom, equality and justice is owed to dissent. And many of those dissenters were socialists. They damn sure were not capitalists.

If the writers of the Constitution had meant what the majority of Americans seem to think, it would have been worded: "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." No, they didn't write that; they prefaced that with "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,...." Just what, in reason's name, do Scalia and all the gun lovers in this country think that means? It means that Scalia and his kind believe just what they want to believe, the hell with the real meaning of words.

Ben was right on most things, including religion and sexuality, and there is much truth in this statement but, standing alone, it is only a half truth.

Very few people have the slightest knowldge of the meaning of socialism. Over and over I read statements calling socialism what is really fascism. You people who think you know strictly from what many fanatics describe need to go to your encyclopedias and LEARN what the two systems mean. Ayn Rand is a fantastic writer and influence but she is more fascist than socialist. If the world were as she would like to see it, the disparity of earnings and worth would be hundreds of times worse than it is. Many of us would be working 16 hours a day, seven days and week and have an average life of 30 or so years. What we need more of in this country is a little compassion and humanity.

This statement is prima facie bulllshit from the beginning. Whether our government spends our money or borrows from others the last reason is to protect others or to protect ourselves; it is to rape and pillage the resources of other countries for the benefit of the oligarchists who run our government, our giant corporations, the World Bank, IMF, Blackwater, and a few other fascist organizations.

How would anyone but an insincere one know whether it's exhausting or not? It may exhaust those who have to share space with the insincere but to the faker??

Another meaningless quotation.

As great humanitarian and thinker as was Ms. Child, I think she missed this one. She must never have attempted to imagine what kind of "attendant spirit" people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and scum like these must have.

I think this is a very poor selection of quotations. It has NO meaning as it is. We need to know what thought preceded it.

And when Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and a few others express independent and fact-based ideas the mass reacts in a mimicry of the power controlled media.

C. S. Lewis an atheist or agnostic??!! Wake up.

School---or learning---is of great importance. Without learning the "job to be done" will not be done as well as it should.

Me Again has it right.

What's the point of printing quotations from an obvious idiot?

Madison's prescience may have been more accurate than he ever imagined. The truth of his statement has become so recognized by the rich and powerful that war has become permanent. Orwell's 1984 is here to stay.

The manipulation or our society is not intelligent; it is rather malignant...and it works incredibly effectively. Look up brasscchecktv to see what Bernays was able to do in Guatemala.

Few men know the truth, as Norwalk evidences.