Sacco and Vanzetti

"Consumption is a double-tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation." - Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" (1966, 1972), in Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (Island Press, 1998), edited by John Gowdy

"The Eskimo we know no longer hunt whales, the Bushmen have been deprived of game, the Shoshoni's piñon has been timbered and his hunting grounds grazed out by cattle. If such peoples are now described as poverty-stricken, their resources 'meager and unreliable,' is this an indication of the aboriginal condition - or of the colonial duress?" - Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" (1966, 1972), in Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (Island Press, 1998), edited by John Gowdy

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989); Russian physicist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

"Traditionally the state's initial claim to necessity was that it prevented warfare by erecting firm barriers of defense. As we have seen, this is tommyrot: the Law of Government Size shows that the duration and severity of war has always increased with an increase in state power. Larger states, far from providing peace, merely provide larger wars, having more human and material resources to pour into them." - Kirkpatrick Sale, "The 'Necessity' of the State," in Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.), Reinventing Anarchy, Again

"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." - J.D. Salinger, American author

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, no one is innocent; if you believe the military, no one is safe."

"The basic premise of ecofeminist political analysis is that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built on the domination of nature, and domination of Woman 'as nature'." - Ariel Salleh, chapter one of Ecofeminism As Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (1997); ecofeminist

"Ecological crisis displaces modernist political analyses - liberalism, socialism, feminism. It provokes us to reframe our history, to inscribe a new understanding of ourselves in relation to Nature, so-called, and to ask how can we get to live this new sensibility in practical ways." - Ariel Salleh, chapter one of Ecofeminism As Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (1997)

"In a sense, all women are colonised - by men Right and Left, Catholic, Muslim, communist." - Ariel Salleh, chapter two of Ecofeminism As Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (1997)

Ariel Salleh, "Social Ecology and 'The Man Question'"

"Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it." - George Sand (1804-1876), Consuelo (1912); French novelist, essayist

"A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity." - George Sand, 1837, in Marie Jenny Howe's The Intimate Journal of George Sand (1929)

Jay Sand, The Radio Waves Unnameable: BAI, Bob Fass and Listener-Sponsored Yippie!

"Neutrality is to side with the strongest." - Aksel Sandemose, Danish/Norwegian author

Paul Sannerud, How to Burn an American Flag: A Patriotic Burlesque (play, 1996); U.S. theater professor

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." - George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-born poet, philosopher, critic, novelist

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

"An artist is a dreamer who consents to dream of the actual world." - (attributed to) George Santayana

"Nations struggle against each other on behalf of interests that are not those of Jack or Pierre or Hans or Manolo or Giuseppe, all masculine names to simplify matters, yet these and other men innocently consider those interests to be theirs, or which will be theirs at considerable cost, when the time arrives to settle accounts. The rule is that some eat figs while others watch." - José Saramago (b. 1922), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; Portuguese 1998 Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Communist

On his executioners: "The men who ordain and supervise this show of shame, this tragic charade, are frightened by the word, the power of ideas, the power of the pen; by the demands of social justice and the rights of man. Nor do they have a sense of history. They are so scared of the power of the word, that they do not read. And that is their funeral." - Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa (born: 1927, executed: 1995), Mail & Guardian (May 1995); Ogoni-Nigerian author, environmentalist, activist; executed by Shell Oil

"We all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas. Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginilization and economic strangulation, angered by the devestation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Nor imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory." - Ken Saro-Wiwa, "Closing Statement to the Nigerian Military Appointed Tribunal"

"The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited." - William Saroyan (1908-1981)

"In America - at least the America with which I'm familiar - you are never alone in the street. The walls talk to you. To left and right of you there are advertisement hoardings, illuminated signs and immense display windows...The nation walks about you, giving you advice and orders." - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), "Individualism and Conformism in the United States" (February 1945), Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955; chapter 8); French existential philosopher, novelist, essayist, playwright, Nobel laureate

"The American, whose reason and freedom are called upon at every hour of the day, makes it a point of honour to do as he is asked. It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable and most American; it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest." - Jean-Paul Sartre, "Individualism and Conformism in the United States" (ibid)

"In the United States, communities are born as they die - in a day. The Americans have no complaint to make; the main thing is to be able to carry their homes with them. These homes are the collections of objects, furnishings, photographs, and souvenirs belonging to them, that reflect their own image and constitute the inner, living landscape of their dwellings. These are their penates. Like Aeneas, they haul them about everywhere. The 'house' is the shell; it is abandoned on the slightest pretext." - Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Cities" (Le Figaro, 1945), Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955; Chapter 9)

"In Europe, a street is half-way between the path of communication and the sheltered 'public place.' It is on a footing with the cafés, as proved by the use of the 'terrasses' that spring up on the sidewalks of the cafés in fine weather. Thus it changes its aspect more than a hundred times a day, for the crowd that throngs the European street changes, and men are its primary element. The American street is a piece of highway. It sometimes stretches over many miles. It does not stimulate one to walk. Ours are oblique and twisting, full of bends and secrets. The American street is a straight line that gives itself away immediately. It contains no mystery. You see the street straight through, from one end to the other no matter what your location in it. And the distances in America cities are too great to permit moving about on foot, in most of them one gets about almost exclusively in cars, on buses and by underground. Sometimes, while going from one appointment to another, I have been carried like a parcel from underground to escalator, from escalator to elevator, from elevator to taxi, from taxi to bus and, again, by metro and elevator, without walking a step." - Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Cities" (ibid)

"I have spent Sundays in the American provinces that were more depressing than Sundays anywhere else; I have seen those suburban 'colonial style' inns where, at two dollars a head, middle-class families go to eat shrimp cocktails and turkey with cranberry sauce in silence while listening to the electric organ. One must not forget the heavy boredom that weighs over America." - Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Cities" (ibid)

"The American government is not guilty of having invented modern genocide…The American government is guilty of having preferred a policy of war and aggression aimed at total genocide to a policy of peace, the only other alternative, because it would have implied a necessary reconsideration of the principal objectives imposed by the big imperialist companies by means of pressure groups. America is guilty of following through and intensifying the war, although each of its leaders daily understands even better, from the reports of the military chiefs, that the only way to win is to rid Vietnam of all the Vietnamese.

"It is guilty of being deceitful, evasive, of lying, and lying to itself, embroiling itself every minute a little more, despite the lessons that this unique and unbearable experience has taught, on a path along which there can be no return. It is guilty, by its own admission, of knowingly conducting this war of example to make genocide a challenge and a threat to all peoples. When a peasant dies in his rice field, cut down by a machine-gun, we are all hit. Therefore, the Vietnamese are fighting for all men and the American forces are fighting all of us. Not just in theory or in the abstract. And not only because genocide is a crime universally condemned by the rights of man. But because, little by little, this genocidal blackmail is spreading to all humanity, adding to the blackmail of atomic war. This crime is perpetrated under our eyes every day, making accomplices out of those who do not denounce it.

"In this context, the imperialist genocide can become more serious. For the group that the Americans are trying to destroy by means of the Vietnamese nation is the whole of humanity."

"The declarations of American statesmen are not as frank as those that Hitler made in his day. But honesty is not indispensable; the facts speak for themselves. The speeches that accompany them, ad usum internum, will only be believed by the American people; the rest of the world understands only too well. Friendly governments keep silent. The others denounce the genocide, but the Americans reply to them that they are showing which side they are really on by their unproven accusations. In fact, say the American government, we have done nothing but offer the Vietnamese - North and South - this choice: either you stop your aggression or we break you. There is no longer any need to point out that this proposition is absurd since the aggression is America, so that only the Americans themselves can put an end to it..." Jean-Paul Sartre, "On Genocide"

"...The United States has undeniably committed a crime against peace...The United States has furthermore committed a crime against the fundamental rights of the people of Vietnam." - Jean-Paul Sartre and The International War Crimes Tribunal, "Summary and Verdict of the Stockholm Session" (10 May 1967)

"Because of their systematic employment with the object of destroying the fundamental rights of the people of Vietnam, their unity and their wish for peace, the crimes against humanity of which the government of the United States of America has rendered itself guilty, become a fundamental constituent part of the crime of aggression, a supreme crime which embraces all the others according to the Nuremberg verdict." - Jean-Paul Sartre and The International War Crimes Tribunal, "Summary and Verdict of the Stockholm Session" (10 May 1967)

Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit (play, 1944)

Siegfried Lorraine Sassoon (1886-1967), "The Hero," (1917); English poet, soldier

Siegfried Sassoon

"War is hell and those who initiate it are criminals." - Siegfried Sassoon

Jack Saunders; U.S. writer

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your body upon the gears and the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." - Mario Savio

Mario Savio, "Graduation Speech" (June 10, 1988)

Eric Schlosser, "Reefer Madness" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1994. See also, part 2: "Marijuana and the Law [The Atlantic Monthly, September 1994]); journalist

Eric Schlosser, "In the Strawberry Fields" (The Atlantic Monthly, November 1995)

Eric Schlosser, "Eric Schlosser's 'In the Strawberry Fields' " (speech, May 16, 1996; The Atlantic Monthly)

The way you leap from a slowly moving train
I take leave of myself.
I say goodbye to the sleeper, its folded-down beds,
its manner of reading landscapes.
I choose fields stripped of their harvest,
look for the inn
where motionless women await the arrival of the lame.
I speak the first lines
of a poem that has nothing to do with this.
I declare that I refuse
to die notwithstanding the honorable terms
I am given.
I tell the waitresses, the maids, the nurses
and charitable lay sisters
to keep away, I distrust their generosity.
Of some children
holding clouds at the end of ropes like balloons
I ask forgiveness
as if I'd sinned against their innocence.
I've jumped the track. I've branched off
from this journey that never gets you anywhere
or anyone.
Meanwhile the train, deranged from being uninhabited,
is ignoring the orders. It hurtles yonder
like nobody's business.

"We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos." - Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Women's Bureau under Hitler, explaining the Jewish policy of the Nazis

"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident." - Schopenhauer

"Previous to the rise of capitalism, people had a very leisurely attitude towards time and did not see time as a scarce resource. But with the development of market systems and the growth of the economic value of time and of puritanism - which stressed the need to save time and the idea that being idle was a sin, that you had to spend every moment productively, i.e., making money - people came to have a very different attitude to time." - Juliet Schor, "The Overworked American: The Decline of Leisure," interviewed by David Barsamian (Z Magazine; January 20, 1993); author, lecturer, professor

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other." - Carl Schurz (1829-1906), German-American journalist

"The renunciation of nuclear weapons is vital to peace." - Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), German-born French missionary surgeon, scientist, activist, Nobel Peace Prize recepient

"I am an uncompromising pacifist...I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family." - Rosika Schwimmer (1877-1948), citizenship court hearing (1928); Hungarian writer, editor, pacifist, suffragist

"The cold war is over, but both cold war institutions and cold war mind-sets live on." - Science for Peace exhibition, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki: Fifty Years of Deceit and Self-Deception" (November 7, 1995)

"The police killed 187 people in NYC alone from 1992 to 1996. Yet when they shoot us in the back, choke us to death or push us off a roof, they want us to believe that this is not based on a conscious, well thought out, pre-meditated policy of oppression, hatred and fear." - Dread Scott, "New Poster from Dread Scott" (Refuse & Resist!, 1997?); U.S. artist, posterist

Dred Scott (1795-1858)

"Any woman who has a great deal to offer the world is in trouble. And if she's a black woman, she's in deep trouble." - Hazel Dorothy Scott (1920-1981), in Margo Jefferson's "Great (Hazel) Scott," Ms. (1974); West Indian-born U.S. jazz pianist/singer, actress

"The modern use of the term 'left' derives from the French Estates General of 1789, when the nobility sat on the king's right, and the 'third estate' on his left. It might have been the other way around." - Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left (Essex, UK: Longman, 1985)

"Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed." - Vida D. Scudder (1861-1954), The Privilege of Age (1939); U.S. social reformer, English literature scholar, writer, educator

"Laws are like spiders's webs: they catch the weak and the small, but the strong and the powerful break through them." - Scythian, one of the Seven Wise Men of Ancient Greece - [I don't know if this is right, since I've never heard any of the Wise Men called by this name, but quoted in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (1979, 1998), by Jeffrey Reiman]

"We...are committed to the protection of life, which is threatened in today's world by war and the arms race, abortion, poverty, racism, capital punishment, and euthanasia. We believe that these issues are linked under a 'consistent life ethic.' We challenge those working on all or some of these issues to maintain a cooperative spirit of peace, reconciliation, and respect in protecting the unprotected." - Seamless Garment Network's "Mission Statement"

"Politics isn't something you put in a box. Politics is everyday life, everything you do. Buying a pair of underpants is politics. You're making a choice. If it's right, you help everyone. If it's wrong, you help the bosses screw us." - The Seduction of Mimi (1972 Italian film), written and directed by Lina Wertmüller (b. 1928, Italy)

"We are mad, not only individuals, but nations also. We restrain manslaughter and isolated muders; but what of war and the so-called glory of killing whole peoples? Our greed has no limit, nor our cruelty. When crimes are committed stealthily by individuals they are less harmful and less monstrous; but deeds of cruelty are done every day by command of senate and popular assembly, and servants of the state are ordered to do what is forbidden to the private citizen. The same deeds which would be punished by death if committed in secret are applauded when done openly by soldiers in uniform. Man, the gentlest of animals, is not ashamed to glory in blood-shedding and to wage war when even the beasts are living in peace together." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the younger (c. 104-65 BCE), Letters 95 (1st century A.D.)

"Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don't you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness? And which does the most mischief Heaven only knows. If people can say, 'Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,' they think it is all right." - Anna Sewell (1820-1878), Black Beauty (1877); English writer

"Lord God, forgive white Europe!" - Léopold Sédar Senghor (b. 1906), "Prayer for Peace" (1945); Senegalese poet

"Assimilate, but don't be assimilated." - Léopold Sédar Senghor

"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." - Rod Serling

"God save the Queen, the fascist regime..." - Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"

"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought, 'What the hell good would it do?' " - Ronnie Shakes

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." - William Shakespeare

"A lot of people don't know what that program [COINTELPRO] was all about, that the FBI and other government agencies actually set out to squash the black liberation movement by any means necessary, whether it meant killing people outright...imprisoning people - and a lot of those people are still in prison - blacks, Puerto-Ricans, Native Americans. The prisons are used as tools of oppression, and the COINTELPRO program was just one part of it." - Assata Shakur (b. 1947), Essence (February 1988); African-American civil rights leader (currently exiled in Cuba)

"England and America are two countries separated by the same language." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950); Irish playwright, Nobel laureate

"The police officer, like the soldier who stands behind him, is mainly occupied today in enforcing the legalized robbery of the poor which takes place whenever the wealth produced by the labor of a productive worker is transferred as rent or interest to the pockets of an idler or an ilder's parasite. They are even given powers to arrest us for 'sleeping out,' which means sleeping in the open air without paying a landlord for permission to do so." - George Bernard Shaw, "Socialism and Liberty," The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism (1928)

["I went to the Statue of Liberty. I see that you also build monuments to your great dead."] - George Bernard Shaw

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience?" - George Bernard Shaw

"Democracy is a form of government that subtitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." - George Bernard Shaw

"It is certainly curious that so outspoken a journal as The Nation [U.S. political magazine] should have survived for 60 years in a country where truth is tarred and feathered, lynched, imprisoned, clubbed, and expatriated as undesirable three times a week or so." - George Bernard Shaw (1925)

"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it." - George Bernard Shaw, "Preface" to Pygmalion (1916)

"Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst." - George Bernard Shaw

"The haughty American nation...compels the colored man to shine its shoes and then demonstrates his physical and mental inferiority by the fact that he is a shoe shiner." - George Bernard Shaw

"Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness." - George Bernard Shaw

"Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation." - George Bernard Shaw

"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them." - George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (play)

"Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy." - George Bernard Shaw

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race." - George Bernard Shaw

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

"He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either." - George Bernard Shaw

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul." - G.B. Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, "Capital Punishment" (The Atlantic Monthly, June 1948)

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." - G.B. Shaw

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." - G.B. Shaw

"Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it." - G.B. Shaw

"Vivisection [the act of cutting into or dissecting the body of a living animal, especially for the purpose of scientific research] is a social ill because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character." - George Bernard Shaw

"Man is the only animal of which I am thouroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party, no nation, no class: in short no reason for destroying anything it does not want to eat." - George Bernard Shaw

"We were here first." - Lou Sheldon, prominent member of the religious right (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/13/93).

Rough wind, that moanest loud
   Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
   Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, -
   Wail, for the world's wrong!

"Chaos is not brought about by rebellion; it is brought about by the absence of political stuggle." - Susan Jean Sherman (b. 1939), "Women and Process" (in Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack, eds., Learning Our Way, 1983); U.S. writer

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." - General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), "Letter to His Wife" (July 1864); American Union general

"How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? That is why God will upset the world - because it is sore all over. Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore." - Pretty Shield (1858-1935), in Frank Bird Linderman, Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows (1932); Crow medicine woman

"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." - William Shirer, writer

"The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky." - Solomon Short

"The first rule is that the Third World largely doesn't exist for the American media until the White House, almost always for national security reasons, decides to put one of the Third World countries on the map. Rule number two is that once this threat to national security is over, the Third World country in question once again falls off the news agenda until the next crisis situation arises." - Ken Silverstein, "Media Reporting on the Third World" (Z Magazine); journalist, writer, editor, founder of CounterPunch

Ken Silverstein, "America's Private Gulag" (Loompanics Unlimited Publishing)

"Look! Plain donuts, powdered donuts, ooh, even cinnamon donuts! How's THAT for freedom of choice?" - (fictional character) Homer Simpson, The Simpsons (TV cartoon)

"I'm an amendment to be, yes an amendment to be, / and I'm hopin' that they'll ratify me. / There's a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom. / I wanna make it legal for policemen to beat 'em, / cause there's limits to our liberties. / 'Least I hope and pray that there are, / cause those liberal freaks go too far." - The Simpsons, "Episode 3F16," written by John Swartzwelder

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." - Upton Sinclair, referring to his book The Jungle

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder." - Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion (1918)

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991); Polish-born Yiddish writer, Nobel Prize Laureate

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974)

R.U. Sirius, "Just Say Nothing"; U.S. writer, co-founder of Mondo 2000, founder of Revolting!

"Anybody who doesn't believe that we're trapped hasn't taken a good look around. We're trapped in a sort of mutating multinational corporate oligarchy that's not about to go away. We're trapped by the limitations of our species. We're trapped in time. At the same time identity, politics, and ethics have long turned liquid." - R.U. Sirius, "30 Cyber-Days in San Francisco 1.6: The R.U. Sirius Interview: It's Better to be Inspired than Wired," by Jon Lebkowsky (CTheory, 24 April 96)

"The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it." - Sitting Bull (1831-1890), quoted from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

"We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human." - Jacquelyn Small, in Anne Wilson Schaef, Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much (1990)

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." - Adam Smith (1723-1790)

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith

"It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of valuable property...can sleep a single night in security." - Adam Smith

"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college." - Lillian Eugenia Smith (1897-1966), in Redbook (1969); U.S. novelist, civil rights worker, social critic, educator, editor

"It [the security alarm] appeals, like the carions or church bells of old, to the sense of duty that undergirds all social order, to those nobler instincts of citizenship, reciprocity, and the commonweal by which we band ourselves into stable, productive nations. Naturally, coercion is involved. Amplified with colossal buzzers, pneumatic sirens, and rapid-fire, wall-bolted gongs, the din of a detonated store alarm blaring, ringing, clanging away in the night forcibly conscripts everyone within earshot into the defense of property that isn't theirs and from which they themselves, let us pause to remember, derive neither profit nor reciprocal protection. All the logic of patriotism is there." - Nelson Smith, "A Partial History of Alarms" (The Baffler, Winter 1997-1998; reprinted in Harper's Magazine, March 1998)

"The world is now so thoroughly and irreversibly owned that each new generation arrives into a state of increasingly aggraved mutual trespass. And in such a state the laws configuring social relations appear to us more and more like a shrill, misfiring system of coercion into which we are all unwillingly deputized." - Nelson Smith, "A Partial History of Alarms" (The Baffler, Winter 1997-1998)

"Who today actually responds to these mechanical invokers of civic duty? When a car alarm shrieks under our window at night, don't we all simply curse, pack the pillows over our ears, and burrow back to sleep?...sleeping until startled awake by yet another alarm: the beep, jingle, or buzz of our bedside alarm clock, that most intimate of all security devices, the alarm by which property itself secures our daily labor, guarding its ever-expanding claims against the trespass of our dreams." - Nelson Smith, "A Partial History of Alarms" (The Baffler, Winter 1997-1998)

Patti Smith, "Piss Factory"

"Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?" - Ray Gwyn Smith (b. 1944); Welsh-born U.S. painter, poet

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." - C.P. Snow (1905-1980), British novelist, scientist

Sasha Sokolov (b. 1943), "Persona Non Grata" (Russian text published in Kontinent #49, 1986)

"Few markets can ever have been as competitive as those that flourished in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, when infants became deformed as they toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country. And there is no lack of examples today to confirm the fact also that well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity." - Robert Solo

Jack Solomon (b. 1954), "Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising," The Signs of Our Time (1988); educator, author

"Illusions of freedom get in the way of exploring how we might be able to transform the present into a really different future. Amid constant delusionary babble, the language of choice is key. We are kept preoccupied and even mesmerized by a profusion of prefab "choices" - on store shelves and showroom floors, on table TV systems, on newsstands, on election ballots - choices have been pre-selected for us." - Norman Solomon

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilization wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." - Susan Sontag (b. 1933), in Partisan Review (1967); U.S. essayist, writer, critic, filmmaker

Georges Sorel (1847-1922); French social philosopher

" 'And everybody praised the Duke who this great fight did win.' 'But what good came of it at least?,' quoth little Peterkin. 'Why that I cannot tell,' said he, 'But 'twas a famous victory.' " - Robert Southey (1774-1843), After Blenheim; English Romantic poet

Robert Southey, "Wat Tyler" (1794)

"Our commitment remains to the enthronement of genuine democracy...and to the permanent removal of the military from our lives, in whatever guise they may appear." - Wole Soyinka, "Wole Soyinka has been Charged with Treason by the Nigerian Government" (The Guardian, 15 March 1997)

"The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism." - Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka, "Writing, Theater Arts, and Political Activism: Conversation with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka," by Harry Kreisler (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley; April 16, 1998)

"Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth." - Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972)

"While reformists advocate the ballot box, liberals have their lobbying and their letter writing, bureaucrats have their work through 'the proper channels' and socialists have their vanguard parties, we anarchists have direct action...Ideally,...it seeks to establish a society without capitalism, patriarchy or State, where people govern themselves democratically without domination or hierarchy." - Rob Sparrow, "Anarchist Politics & Direct Action"

Anne Spencer (1882-1976); African-American Harlem Renaissance poet

Art Spiegelman

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." - Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677); Amsterdam-born rationalist philosopher

"As long as mankind continue to pay so-called 'national debts' - that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered - so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murders and blood-money loan-mongers for masters." - Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870; Chapter 19); Massachusetts lawyer who fought against slavery and the constitutionality of the American govrn't

Lysander Spooner, "Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty" (1875)

"The highway is alive tonight but nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes." - Bruce Springsteen, "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (album The Ghost of Tom Joad, 1995)

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slave of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits." - Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920's, and the second wealthiest man in Great Britain at the time

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), "The Solitude of Self" (1892); U.S. suffragist

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Stanton's Address, Delivered at the Seneca Falls Convention" (July 19, 1848)

"When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Letter to Julia Ward Howe" (October 16, 1873)

"The highway was a gorgeous disappointment. It promised everything and took you nowhere." - Brent Staples (b. 1951), Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994); African-American journalist, essayist

"Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war." - Starhawk (b. 1951), Truth or Dare (1987); U.S. peace activist, ecofeminist, witch

"As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation." - Star Trek: "The Prime Directive"

"More and more I am certain that the only difference between man and animals is that men can count and animals cannot and if they count they mostly do count money." - Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937); U.S. expatriate writer, literary salon host

"You are all a lost generation." - Gertrude Stein, letter to Ernest Hemingway (1926)

"Counting is the religion of this generation, it is its hope and its salvation." - Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937)

[See also: "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" (1906); by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso]

"One of the American Indian tendencies which led to our distress was their abiding passion for survival." - John Steinbeck (1902-1968), "E Pluribus Unum" (America and Americans, 1966); U.S. novelist, Nobel laureate

"This land was no gift. The firstlings worked for it, fought for it, and died for it. They stole and cheated and double-crossed for it...The whole thing is crazy. Every single man in our emerging country was out for himself against all others - for his safety, his profit, his future. He had little care for the land; he ripped it, raped it, and in some cases destroyed it. He cut and burned the forests, fired and plowed the plains, dredged the beautiful rivers for gold, leaving a pebbled devestation." - John Steinbeck, "E Pluribus Unum" (America and Americans, 1966)

"Must hunger become anger and anger fury before anything will be done?" - John Steinbeck

"From the first we have treated our minorities abominably, the way the old boys do the new kids in school. All that was required to release this mechanism of oppression and sadism was that the newcomers be meek, poor, weak in numbers, and unprotected - although it helped if their skin, hair, eyes were different and if they spoke some language other than English or worshipped in some church other than the Protestant." - John Steinbeck, "E Pluribus Unum" (America and Americans, 1966)

"For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror." - John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War (1958)

"Americans overindulge their children and do not like them; the children in turn are overly dependent and full of hate for their parents." - John Steinbeck, "Paradox and Dream" (America and Americans, 1966)

"We are able to believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon everyone else." - John Steinbeck, "Paradox and Dreams" (America and Americans, 1966)

"We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the sound rules for the governance of heaven. A man hungry and unemployed..., a man beaten by a brutal policeman, a woman forced into prostitution... - all bow with reverence toward the American Way of Life...We scramble and scrabble up the stony path toward the pot of gold we have taken to mean security. We trample friends, relatives, and strangers who get in our way of achieving it..." - John Steinbeck, "Paradox and Dreams" (America and Americans, 1966)

"The American Revolution was different from the French Revolution and the later Russian Revolution in that the revolting American colonists did not want a new kind of government, they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves." - John Steinbeck, "Genus Americanus" (America and Americans, 1966)

"America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people." - Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), U.S. writer, activist, journalist

"The less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery." - Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983)

Gloria Steinem, "Hollywood Cleans Up Hustler" (New York Times Op-Ed, January 7th, 1997)

"The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep." - Clinton aide and media propagandist George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

"There is no such thing as modern art. There is art — and there is advertising." - Albert Sterner (1863-1946); German-born U.S. painter/artist

"We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it." - Robert Louis Stevenson, Ethical Studies

Austin Steward (1793-1860), Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman... (1857)

Austin Steward, "Correspondence of Austin Steward"

"The state calls its own violence 'law,' but that of the individual 'crime.' " - Max Stirner (1806-1856)

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (1907)

"In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres, freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at; and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only 'useful citizens' out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people." - Max Stirner, "The False Principle of Our Education"

"By the way, did you all see the wonderful ad on television that played four times a day throughout the 1980's that said 'Do not fight, do not go to war, it is not the right thing to do,' that the government organized and put together? How many people saw that ad? Has anyone ever seen an ad put on television with our tax dollars saying war was not a good thing? Yet there have been hundreds of ads paid for with our tax dollars put on there to condition us to see war as a good thing." - John Stockwell, former CIA agent, author

"It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. We [the CIA] are responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world." - John Stockwell

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms." - John Stockwell

"History is the history of war - of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationals to send the young people off to fight." - John Stockwell

John Stockwell, "The CIA and the Gulf War" (speech, February 20, 1991)

John Stockwell, "The Secret Wars of the CIA"

John Stockwell, "The Inner Workings of the National Security Council and the CIA's Covert Actions in Angola, Central America and Vietnam"

Lucy Stone (1818-1893); U.S. suffragist, abolitionist

Oliver Stone, "History and the Movies: Conversation with Oliver Stone," by Harry Kreisler (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley; April 17 & June 27, 1997); U.S. filmmaker

"War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero." - Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), Travesties (play); (Czech-born) U.K. playwright

"A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell." - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), in Cathrene P. Gilbertson, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1937); U.S. novelist, abolitionist, social reformer, theologian

Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl"

"They say the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat? We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs and we're building for them yet." - Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970), U.S. journalist, writer, communist

"I came to condemn capitalism, not through any oppression endured by me personally, but through that very deification of efficiency which capitalism had taught me, for its own purposes." - Anna Louise Strong, I Change Worlds (1935)

"What the Spanish War began the World War accomplished: America became the world's banker and ceased to be the world's pioneer!" - Anna Louise Strong, I Change Worlds (1935)

"The yuppie idea of a future ain't my idea of a future. Your safe car, and home, and job, and all the time rushing between the three..." - Joe Strummer (b. 1952), British punk musician (The Clash), Melody Maker (23 July 1988)

"Ninety percent of everything is crap." - Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985); science fiction writer

"Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, from England to India, by guided missile. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." - Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General, 23 June 1959

"I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted." - Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explaining why the U.S. should export toxic wastes to "Third World" countries.

"Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's Superman. Yes, it's Superman. Strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman! Who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, a mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights the never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way." - Superman, U.S. television show

"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinden, former Chief of Staff of The New York Times, when asked to give a toast to the "free press" at the National Press Club in 1953

William J.F. Syad (b. 1930); Somalian poet

"Charity which flows from your surpluses is merely the return of stolen goods." - Saint Symeon

"Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life." - Thomas Szasz (1920-?); The Untamed Tongue: a Dissenting Dictionary

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