William Blum Quotes (17 Quotes)

From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. . . . In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.

I hope it helps my book sales. I'm swamped with media interviews.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.

We bomb homes, and these people have families -- and the U.S. refuses to apologize for these civilian deaths. The absence of concern makes their actions almost equal to a deliberate targeting of civilians.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Freeing the World to Death Essays on the American Empire.

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.

I think bin Laden shares that view, and that is why I'm not repulsed by his embrace of my book, because that is one of my major themes.

On the other hand, I'm part of a movement which has a very, very ambitious goal of slowing down ... the American empire and keeping it from continuing to do the many terrible things it does all over the world. We have to reach the American public, and to do that we have to have access to the mass media.

He sees anti-American terrorist attacks as under the category of retaliation. In previous tapes he's used that word -- retaliation. I don't like what they do, but it's understandable intellectually.

I was amazed and amused. It's good publicity for the book.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

He made a mistake, he got them mixed up.

America's state religion, is patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder or rape.

On the one hand, I have nothing but distaste for any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by that kind of fundamentalism.

This has given me much more access to the mass media than I ever would have had. And for this reason I'm glad that this happened.