Alexander Cockburn

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Regulation of sexual behavioris the preferred route to wider socialcontrol.”

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

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

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

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