"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." - Pauline Kael (1919-1991), U.S. film critic

"All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is for." - Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (1965)

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize." - Pauline Kael

"Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough." - Pauline Kael

"Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition. The big one to survive the war was the Bogart figure - the man with a code (moral, aesthetic, chivalrous) in a corrupt society. He had, so to speak, inside knowledge of the nature of the enemy. He was a sophisticated, urban version of the Westerner who, classically, knew both sides of the law and was tough enough to go his own way and yet, romantically, still do right. Brando represented a reaction against the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap...There was no theory, no cant in his leadership. He didn't care about social position or a job or respectability, and because he didn't care he was a big man; for what is less attractive, what makes a man smaller, than his worrying about his status? Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American." - Pauline Kael, "Marlon Brando: An American Hero" (Atlantic Monthly, March 1966)

"The pretty little helicopters delivering the bloody casualties are a surreal image, all right, but part of the authentic surrealism of modern warfare." - Pauline Kael, "M*A*S*H Movie Review" (The New Yorker, Januaury 24, 1970)

"I think that we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us." - Franz Kafka (1883-1924), "Letter to Oskar Pollack" (January 27, 1904); Czech writer

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954); Mexican painter

"Let me give you...the thesis of Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers), a professor of history at Yale University. He says that empires rise and fall in three stages. Stage one is when you have a vibrant economy. Rome at the juncture of rivers. London at the juncture of seas. The U.S. at the juncture of two great oceans. A great seagoing economic power is stage one. Stage two is when that economic power becomes a military power. They don't want to trade with Carthage; they want to destroy Carthage. London doesn't want to trade with India; they want to dominate India. That's stage two. Stage three is when the military budget gets so big that it consumes the goose that laid the golden egg: the economy. It was the economy that made the empire possible. But the military gets so big that the whole empire implodes. That's what happened in the Soviet Union. We saw this fantastic implosion taking place because they consumed the goose that laid the golden egg. It's the same thing now with the U.S. I would say that we are in phase three. The U.S. is in phase three because of the size of our budget. Look at the fact that it is now eating up our seed corn. The top scientists don't work like Edison or Fulton did. They work building hydrogen warheads. So I think that we are definitely entering phase three, and that is what's causing the 'angry white males' to lash out at the most helpless sectors of our society, rather than recognizing that we are witnessing the aging of the empire. The empire is falling apart because the military is consuming its own seed corn, the economy." - Michio Kaku, "The Legacy of Nuclear Weapons" (Lumpen Magazine); Japanese-American nuclear physicist, writer, educator, activist

"No mass appeal. Ergo no profit. Ergo no use. The current World Credo." - Lucille Kallen (b. 1932), The Tanglewood Murder (1980); U.S. detective story writer

"One fact of the Persian Gulf War seems to have been recorded in invisible ink: the United States is the first nation in history to have intentionally bombed an operating nuclear reactor." - Suzy T. Kane, "Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium"

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

"Standing armies (miles perpetuus) shall in time be totally abolished. For they incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war; they incite them to compete with each other in the number of armed men, and there is no limit to this. For this reason, the cost of peace finally becomes more oppressive than that of a short war, and consequently a standing army is itself a cause of offensive war waged in order to relieve the state of this burden. Add to this that to pay men to kill or to be killed seems to entail using them as mere machines and tools in the hand of another (the state), and this is hardly compatible with the rights of mankind in our own person." - Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (1795)

"Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity has been achieved." - Immanuel Kant

"Elections stopped being political events a long time ago. They are better described as venture capital projects. You put together a team of investors and entrepreneurs to exploit the U.S. government as if it were a gold mine in Peru. The team that wins the franchise gets to mine the ore and sell shares to others. As the shaft gets deeper, the price for access gets higher." - Pete Karman

"Wealth covers sin - the poor / Are naked as a pin." - Kassia (ca. 9th century), "Epigrams" (9th century), in Women Poets of the World (1983, edited by Joanna Bankier and Deidre Lashgari); Byzantine Greek poet

"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free." - Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957); Greek author

"Behold what is happening all over the world today! Oh where is the swift vengeance of Jehovah that it does not fall upon the hosts of those who are marshalling machine-guns against hungry-stricken peoples? It is the complacency of madness to call such acts 'preserving law and order.' What oceans of blood and tears are shed in their name! I have come to loathe traditions and institutions that take away the rights of the poor and protect the wicked against judgment." - Hellen Keller (1880-1968), in a letter to Eugene Debs, March 11, 1919 (Gentle Rebel: Letters of Eugene V. Debs); U.S. activist, educatior, writer, suffragist, pacifist

"The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and the exploiters of labor." - Hellen Keller, 1911

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedldee." - Hellen Keller, 1911 letter to British suffragist

"Militarism...is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, and the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fail." - Hellen Keller, The Story of My Life (1902)

"People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant." - Helen Keller

Mike Kelley (b. 1954), "Shall We Kill Daddy?"; U.S. conceptual artist

"We reject violence completely, because the structural violence caused by this decision to place these missiles or to continue the arms race on both sides is violence." - Petra Karin Kelly (1947-1992), Bavarian-German feminist, civil rights activist, antinuclear and antiwar activist

"God is the author of the U.S. Constitution." - Republican prez candidate Jack Kemp (Christianity Today, 12/13/85)

"Where a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive." - Florynce Kennedy (b. 1916), "Institutionalized Oppression vs. the Female" [in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970)]; U.S. activist, lawyer

"Ich bin ein Berliner!" ["I am a jelly donought!"] - Prez John F. Kennedy in Berlin

"All philanthropy...is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer." - Ellen Karolina Sofia Key (1849-1926), The Century of the Child (1909); Swedish writer, activist

"Everything, everything in war is barbaric...But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being." - Ellen Key, War, Peace, and the Future (1916)

"Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one." - Ellen Key

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." - John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946); British economist

"[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous - and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed..." - John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

"There are many reasons why America doesn't attract me. First, I don't like America. It's too big. There are too many people. Everybody runs around too quickly. There's too much commotion, too much uproar. Everybody pretends too hard that they're happy there. But I don't believe in their happiness, I think they're just as unhappy as we are, except that we still talk about it sometimes but they only say that everything's fine, that it's fantastic. It gets on my nerves on a day-to-day basis, and unfortunately directing is life on a day-to-day basis. You have to spend half a year in a place, in a country, in order to do something. And if I were to be confronted for a whole year with people saying that everything's fantastic then I simply couldn't stand it." - Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996), "I Don't Like the Word 'Success'" (Chapter 4), Kieslowski On Kieslowski (London, Boston: faber and faber, 1993; edited by Danusia Stok); Polish film director

"I'm afraid of America. Whenever I'm in New York I always have the feeling that it's going to cave in and all I can think about is how to avoid being there when that happens. The same goes for other places in America. You don't get all those people and all that noise in the streets of California as you do in New York but, in turn, there's a huge number of cars going to and fro and I always have serious doubts as to whether there are any Americans inside. You know, who's inside? I've always got the impression that those cars drive themselves. So I'm simply frightened of that country, and I always have the feeling that I'm on the defensive when I arrive there. I've even been to small provincial places there and I'm still frightened and always excape. I close myself in. I simply run away to my hotel, and usually sleep..." - Krzysztof Kieslowski, ibid.

"In the business I work in, as in many other businesses, other walks of life let's say, other branches of culture - if not all - you can't be clean to the end. It's impossible - at least I don't know of anyone who is - simply because of the rules of the game in this profession. It's not merely making films. You spend so much time on it that it's a large part of your life, demanding all sorts of compromises and all sorts of departures from your own point of view. Here, in the West, the reasons are usually to do with money, commercialism, and with what seems to be an apt name - public censorship, that is, taking the public's taste into account to such a degree that this taste becomes a sort of censor. I've got the impression, which isn't perhaps well regarded, that public censorship is even more restricting than the political censorship which we were subjected to in Poland during Communism." - Krzysztof Kieslowski, "The Feature Films," Kieslowski on Kieslowski

On his film A Short Film About Killing (1988): "I think I wanted to make this film precisely because all this takes place in my name, because I'm a member of this society, I'm a citizen of this country, Poland, and if someone, in this country, puts a noose around someone else's neck and kicks the stool from under his feet, he's doing it in my name. And I don't wish it. I don't want them to do it. I think this film isn't really about capital punishment but about killing in general. It's wrong no matter why you kill, no matter whom you kill and no matter who does the killing." - Krzysztof Kieslowski, ibid.

"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority." - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), "Strength to Love" (1963); African-American civil rights activist, Nobel Peace laureate

"When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions of civil services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them, but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("The Trumpet of Conscience," 1967)

"Man has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must beomce as abhorrent as eating another's flesh." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Why We Can't Wait," 1963)

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for someone else's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advices the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'" - Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Alabama" (April 16, 1963)

"The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?," 1967)

"This war [Vietnam] turns the clock of history back and perpetuates white colonialism. The greatest irony and tragedy of it all is that our own nation which instigated so much of the revolutionary spirit in this modern world is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them." - Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Atlanta, Georgia; 8/16/67)

"Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in the mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community," 1967)

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of this nation until the bright day of justice emerges. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one." - Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream" Speech (August 28, 1963)

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I thing that's pretty important." - Martin Luther King, Jr. (Wall Street Journal, 11/13/62)

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Strength to Love," 1963)

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Strength to Love," 1963)

"Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which makes philanthropy necessary." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people." - Henry Kissinger, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the popularly elected government of Salvadore Allende

Elliot Klein, "Did I Leave the Left or Did the Left Leave Me?" (SisterLife); U.S. feminist, social activist, pro-life advocate

Joe Klein (Anonymous), Primary Colors

Phil Knight, "On the Cutting-Room Floor," by Michael Moore; CEO of Nike

Robert Knight

ALBANIA,
I seem to feel upon my face
the soft brushing of a forest brunch
the fingers of your woods
fingers of fresh leaves sprinkled with dew
the tears of our delightful sky
and secret moisture from our earth
tempering the fervors that consume
this human clay of mine
where ashes of my fathers
live and suffer once again...

White Visitant, enough for me
before I cross the high frontiers
and free myself from this encumberance of clay
if you but show me far, far off amid the mist
of earthly days moving towards sunset
my native mountains
now at last encircled
with flaming veil of free dawns.

"Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed." - Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), letter (1944), The Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955, edited by Hans Kollwitz); German sculptor, graphic artist

"I cannot fathom how anyone can sit [in front of a TV] and tolerate the contempt shown to us in that slush of breathless 'messages,' trivial news, canned laughter, humorous weathermen, and all the rest." - Hans Koning (b. 1924), Notes on the Twentieth Century (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1997); Holland-born anti-war activist, journalist, novelist

"The white race took it for granted that it was meant to rule the world..." - Hans Koning, "Notes on the Twentieth Century" (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1997)

Samuel Edward Konkin III, The New Libertarian Manifesto; Agorist libertarian

"We're seeing an enormous increase in inequality in the United States and in the world. There's a massive reallocation of wealth from people who do productive work to people who simply have money. The figure that helps to underline just how extreme this inequality is becoming is the observation that 358 billionaires in the world have combined assets roughly equal to the combined annual income of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people (that's nearly 1/2 of the world's population), and that concentration is continuing...90% of the value of shareholder equity in the United States is owned by the richest 10% of households. 47% is owned by the top 1% of households. The bottom 80% of households own 2%." - David C. Korten

"In 1886, in a stunning victory for the proponents of corporate sovereignty, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution - although the constitution makes no mention of corporations - and is thereby entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech and other constitutional protections extended to individuals. Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they acheived, in the words of Paul Hawken, "precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse." The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding inportant issues." - David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (excerpts)

David Korten, "Sustainability and the Global Economy: Beyond Bretton Woods" (Forests, Trees and People Web Site)

"We'd go home and make up movies like the ones we'd just seen or the ones that were on TV night after night. We'd use our Christmas toys - the Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades, the little green plastic men with bazookas. They blasted holes through the enemy. They wiped them out at thirty feet just above the coffee table. They dug in on the front lawn and survived countless artillery attacks. They burned with high-propane lighter fluid and a quarter-gallon of gasoline or were thrown into the raging fires of autumn leaves blasting into a million pieces." - Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (1976); Vietnam War veteran, war protester, writer

"I am the living death / the memorial day on wheels / I am your yankee doodle dandy / your john wayne come home / your fourth of july firecracker / exploding in the grave" - Ron Kovic

"Liberals don't much like commercial speech because it's commercial, conservatives mistrust it because it's speech." - Alex Kozinski (b. 1950; Romanian-born U.S. appeals court judge) and Stuart Banner (law professor), "Who's Afraid of Commercial Speech?" (76 Virginia Law Review 627, 1990)

"The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call in enemy nations 'state indoctrination.'" - Jonathan Kozol

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." - Cheris Kramarae (educator, feminist) and Paula Treichler (educator, feminist)

"How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read." - Karl Kraus (1874-1936); German-Austrian essayist, lyricist, dramatist, social critic; publisher of satirical magazine Die Fackel (1899-1936)

"War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off." - Karl Kraus

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." - Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), Freedom from the Known, pp.51-52

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - Krishnamurti

Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981), "The Bridge Between East and West" (The Atlantic Monthly, December 1962); Croatian poet, dramatist, novelist, encyclopedist

"Virtual colonialism is the end game of post-capitalism. Just when we thought that the age of European colonialism had finally come to an end, suddenly we are copied into the second age of virtual colonialism: a reinvigorated recolonization of planetary reality that reduces human and non-human matter to a spreading wake of a cosmic dust-trail in the deepest space of the blazing comet of virtual capitalism." - Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, "The Political Economy of Virtual Reality: Pan-Capitalism" (CTheory); authors, political science professors

Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), The Conquest of Bread (1906); Russian anarchist, geographer

"Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is...death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement. The choice lies with you!" - Peter Kropotkin

"The government eventually resorts to the employment of the cruellest and most violent members of the society to control everyone else..." - Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928), "An Interview with Michel Ciment" (1972); U.S.-born English film director

A Clockwork Orange film script (1971); written and directed by Stanley Kubrick

Tuli Kupferberg (b. 1923), "Interview by Theresa Stern" (Perfect Sound Forever, June 1997); U.S. poet, pacifist, musician (of '60s band The Fugs)

"#54: Organize your own army and advance on Washington." - Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1966)

"They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men." - Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821-1879), Picture of American Culture (Frankfurt, 1855); German

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane." - Akira Kurosawa, Japanese film director

"The notion that anybody has a continued interest in alternative economic formations - alternative to capitalism - is shocking and appalling to people. There's a real anger I've seen in audiences for Slavs! [play], in places like Baltimore and Los Angeles, a very cold reception that I think is based on the absolute certainty, as people have been promised over and over by the media, that we don't have to think about these issues at all anymore. The idea that someone is still writing plays about them is hopeless. I don't think that anybody's going to kill me because I say I'm a socialist, but I think people find it risible." - Tony Kushner, "Coming Out as a Socialist," by Chris Hawthorne, June 10, 1996 (Salon Magazine); U.S. Pulitzer winning playwright

"For millennia, women have dedicated themselves almost exclusively to the task of nurturing, protecting and caring for the young and the old, striving for the conditions of peace that favor life as a whole. To this can be added the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most..." - Aung San Suu Kyi, "Opening Keynote Address" (August 31, 1995); Burmese dissident, peace activist, Nobel Peace Laureate, human rights activist

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Quotations: L
i fratelli de Socio