Top 55 Michael Parenti Quotes
#1. The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.
Michael Parenti
#2. You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime,
and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of
property.
Michael Parenti
#4. The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.
Michael Parenti
#5. 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
#6. The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.
Michael Parenti
#7. Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.
Michael Parenti
#8. The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.
Michael Parenti
#9. The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.
Michael Parenti
#10. I have never seen John Kerry give anything but an engineered response.
Michael Parenti
#11. No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
Michael Parenti
#13. The last four secretaries of defense have pointed out that defense spending creates jobs. So do pornography, prostitution, and narcotics.
Michael Parenti
#14. Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.
Michael Parenti
#15. A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.
Michael Parenti
#16. The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.
Michael Parenti
#17. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.
Michael Parenti
#18. There is a century-old saying, The dollar votes more times than the man.
Michael Parenti
#19. I'm not one of those critics that believes U.S. foreign policy is confused, or stupid, or misinformed, or well-intentioned but it goes awry. I think it's a brilliant policy filled with many brilliant, terrible, horrible victories.
Michael Parenti
#20. Conservatives insist that government should be " run more like a business." One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.
Michael Parenti
#21. The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.
Michael Parenti
#22. Julius Caesar was an aristocrat who sided with the Roman people. He's not my hero, but he was one of a long line of what we'll call 'populares,' which were popular leaders who tried to institute these reforms that the people were fighting for.
Michael Parenti
#23. I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.
Michael Parenti
#24. In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.
Michael Parenti
#25. Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.
Michael Parenti
#26. You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.
Michael Parenti
#27. The powers that be not only try to control events,
but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves.
Michael Parenti
#28. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.
Michael Parenti
#29. The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.
Michael Parenti
#30. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
Michael Parenti
#31. The god who presides over the Judeo-Christian belief system bears a disquieting resemblance to those imperfect creations known as human beings. This suggests that either he really did fashion us in his own image or we fashioned him in ours.
Michael Parenti
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.
Michael Parenti
#36. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.
Michael Parenti
#37. 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
#38. The [CIA] Agency has owned outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many more.
Michael Parenti
#39. Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.
Michael Parenti
#40. People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.
Michael Parenti
#42. The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.
Michael Parenti
#43. Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in Third World nations be overcome if a new system is to prevail.
Michael Parenti
#44. The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
Michael Parenti
#45. Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
Michael Parenti
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.
Michael Parenti
#49. You dont know your wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.
Michael Parenti
#50. Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
Michael Parenti
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.
Michael Parenti
#54. The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
Michael Parenti
#55. 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
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