Alexander Cockburn Quotes

Nothing can inspire religious duty or animation but religion. ~ Alexander Cockburn

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

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security. ~ Alexander Cockburn

Can it be that a generation of school children is growing up heedless of the simple truth that the Pentagon's centrla role for many years has been to buy weapons that don't work, against threats that don't exist? ~ Alexander Cockburn

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

Some lurid things have been said about me - that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth - that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

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

The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin. ~ Alexander Cockburn

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

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

Regulation of sexual behavior
is the preferred route to wider social
control. ~ Alexander Cockburn

From anti-semite to self-hating jew, all in one day ~ Noam Chomsky

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

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination. ~ Alexander Cockburn

There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre. ~ Alexander Cockburn

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

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz. ~ Alexander Cockburn

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry. ~ Alexander Cockburn

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations. ~ Alexander Cockburn

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts. ~ Alexander Cockburn

It must be noted that the non-aggression alone can never be the starting point in justifying moral behavior or serving as a fundamental principle of ethics. There must be a justification of the non-aggression principle before such a case can be made. The very implication of the term "principle" implies that non-aggression serves as the foundation for a system of ethics, which it cannot be. It is certainly not an axiom since it is not a self-evident truth. ~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not good conversationalists. Nothing is more boring than to listen to a person talk in a monotone without feeling. We enjoy a conversation when there is a communication of feeling. We have pleasure in expressing our feelings, and we respond pleasurably to another person's expression of feeling. The voice, like the body, is a medium through which feeling flows, and when this flow occurs in an easy and rhythmic manner, it is a pleasure both to the speaker and listener. ~ Alexander Lowen

I do not think this is so, because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it. ~ Christopher Alexander

Before she could finish that thought, Dare kissed her on the top of the head. "You're more fragile than you realize, Molly Alexander." He caught her chin, turning her face toward him. "Don't push yourself. I want you - that's not going to change. I can't say I won't kiss you, but how far and how fast we go is up to you. ~ Lori Foster

Any politician in a democracy has to be mindful of public opinion. ~ Douglas Alexander

Time trouble is blunder time. ~ Alexander Kotov

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read. ~ Alexander Chee

The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them ... spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odours - of the greatest variety and disparity. ~ Alexander Calder

Alexander was silent. "Now you're really tiny," he said at last. "I'm not tiny," she returned. "You're just outsized." Blushing, she lowered her gaze. ~ Paullina Simons

Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Fickle as water,
our life is as dreamlike as smoke
- at our expense,
fate's private joke.
-The Bronze Horseman ~ Alexander Pushkin

It often happens that those are the best people whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been picking at. ~ Alexander Pope

Many legitimate forms of ownership, mainly cooperative and communal, had not been used to any effective extent mainly because of the imposition of Stalinist restrictions. ~ Alexander Dubcek

In the short walk between his aeroplane and reaching the outside world at Heathrow, Michael Bywater encountered no fewer than 93 separate notices telling him off for things he hadn't done or which hadn't even occurred to him to do. Being bossed and patronised are two sensations that most sophisticated adults would sooner do without and yet we are bossed and patronised, by the media, by politicians, by business, by advertising agencies and the public services, more now than at any other time in our history. Why should this be? ~ Alexander Waugh

The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

Database Development ~ Michael Alexander

Focus on your work. Be the best you that you can be. Develop a thick skin and let things roll off your back. And keep a sense of humor! ~ Megan Alexander

The deliberative sense of the community should govern. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in times of war, which serves in differently the occasions of both parties. ~ Alexander Pope

She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Every story has two sides. So far, we've only heard one. The stupid side." LIFE ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate ... ~ Shana Alexander

Most of these stops and searches are futile. It has been estimated that 95 percent of Pipeline stops yield no illegal drugs. ~ Michelle Alexander

Trust your luck, Taran Wanderer. But don't forget to put out your nets! ~ Lloyd Alexander

There's nothing wrong with Oscar Levant - nothing a miracle won't cure. ~ Alexander Woollcott

I want to be known for good work first. A good story and good delivery is just that - period. ~ Megan Alexander

Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her. ~ Paullina Simons

Society may be post-Christian, but could hardly ignore its Judeo-Christian past; we did not, after all, come from nowhere. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

All it needed was me, and my fear. Because alone in the silence, in the unfathomable darkness, I knew that my own thoughts would drive me mad. My own mind would kill me. ~ Alexander Gordon Smith

Alexander, I don't know what's going to happen to me either. So what? So we find out together. That's what a relationship is. If it is not working, fix it. If life is hard we learn from each other. You don't run off to keep from inflicting yourself on someone else. If it gets too much for me, I'll say so, but you don't get to decide that for me. ~ India Drummond

Virtue may choose the high or low degree,
'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,
She's still the same belov'd, contented thing. ~ Alexander Pope

. I'd known from that first time we'd talked on the steps at my dad's beach house that she was a good girl, and I'd liked that about her – so much. ~ Monica Alexander

The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is, that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool. ~ Alexander Pope

There never was any party, faction, sect, or cabal whatsoever, in which the most ignorant were not the most violent; for a bee is not a busier animal than a blockhead. ~ Alexander Pope

For very long periods I am really patient, and then out breaks my bad temper. It is not so difficult to bear great trials, but these little buzzing mosquitos are so trying. ~ Robert Alexander