Eugene McCarthy

There’s a whole filtering process that enables people to rise through the system into managerial roles only if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve successfully internalized the values demanded by private power.

Sometimes it’s difficult to accept, to recognise one’s own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

I prefer to be in the grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.

I believe there’s too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.

The business classes are very class-conscious-they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The first role of government is to help people who are in crisis or need. That’s why we have government.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions…

There are on occasions, as we know, when resources are abundant, but they are expended so incompetently that the advantage is nullified.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was ‘the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’

To the extent that Trump’s programs are coherent, they fall into the same general category of those of Paul Ryan, who has granted us the kindness of spelling them out: increase spending on the military…and cut back taxes, mainly on the rich, with no new revenue sources.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone’s phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

For 18 years I have resisted talking about current events. I am not going to start now.