Alexander Cockburn Quotes

#1. The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Alexander Cockburn

#2. Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you.

Alexander Cockburn

#3. No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

Alexander Cockburn

#4. The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

#5. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too

Alexander Cockburn

#6. Sometimes at night
when the moon is almost
full and my hands go
numb from writing, I cleanse
myself of her poisoned love.
I welcome the water, the
inevitability of
death and embrace
the long painful road out
of love.

A.P. Sweet

#7. In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Alexander Cockburn

#8. Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:

Alexander Cockburn

#9. No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein.

Alexander Cockburn

#10. The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences

Alexander Cockburn

#11. 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

#12. My mom didn't use face cream, like, nothing at all. She's got great skin and looks very youthful.

Lara Stone

#13. You were a spoiled child who did a cruel thing. You deserved to be beaten and confined to your room, but you didn't deserve to lose everything.

Jeaniene Frost

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Nothing can inspire religious duty or animation but religion.

Alexander Cockburn

#17. From anti-semite to self-hating jew, all in one day

Noam Chomsky

#18. That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

Mark Twain

#19. 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

#20. Regulation of sexual behavior
is the preferred route to wider social
control.

Alexander Cockburn

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Alexander Cockburn

#24. The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.

Alexander Cockburn

#25. No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn

#26. Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger
that would suffice for my eternity!

Victor Hugo

#27. Wear the badge of environmental radicalism, and you're a citizen automatically under suspicion.

Alexander Cockburn

#28. It is absolutely clear that government plays a key role, as a catalyst, in promoting long-run growth.

Fareed Zakaria

#29. An Army is a team. It lives sleeps eats and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit

George S. Patton Jr.

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.

Alexander Cockburn

#34. There is no room for being creative in today's business ... Except for finding creative ways to be inefficient.

Martin Wolf