Alexander Cockburn Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The pack slumbered and only a few watchdogs rattled their chains.

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?

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

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

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

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

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.

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.

There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.

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

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.

Nothing can inspire religious duty or animation but religion.

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.

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

The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences

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.

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.

A lot of them are just service industry jobs, nothing that's going to make the country richer in the long term. Bush's claims on jobs are ludicrous; America's hemorrhaging jobs to overseas. The industry face of the country has disappeared. Look at Ford; Ford is about to fire 50,000 people. GM has fired 50,000. That's a total of 100,000 people. Can you imagine how many jobs that translates to?

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