Alexander Cockburn Quotations

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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