Contrary Notions Quotes

“This is the conservative problem: reality itself is radical, so we must not get too close to it. The Third World really is poor and oppressed; the U.S. often does side with Third-World plutocrats; our tax system really is regressive and favors the very richest; millions of Americans do live in poverty; the corporations do plunder and pollute the environment; real wages for blue-collar workers definitely have flattened and even declined; the superrich really are increasing their share of the pie; and global warming really is happening.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication—which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Only when one speaks hypothetically does technology achieve neutrality: “It could be used for good or it could be used for evil.” Such unspecified references to how it could be used overlook the reality of how it actually and regularly is used. The truth is, technology is “neutral” only when conceived in the abstract, divorced from the social context in which it develops. But since it actually develops only in a social context and since its application is always purposive, then we must ask, Cui bono? Who benefits? And at whose expense?”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Conservative religious affiliation is “one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Although it sees the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life, if only to maintain its credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the far-right line. On those occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Ecology’s implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“In 1965 the Indonesian military—advised, equipped, trained, and financed by the U.S. military and the CIA—overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party and its various allies, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the Holocaust.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“But for the most part, the press went about its business of blaming the victims, glorifying the police, and demonizing those who fought back.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Racism is especially useful when channeling the economic fears and anger of Whites away from employers and toward out-groups who are seen as competitors for scarce jobs, education, and housing.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Freethought Today, publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, every month presents two full pages of criminal cases involving scores of clergy and other religious leaders, hypocritical keepers of heterosexual family values, who are charged with sexual assault, rape, statutory rape, sodomy, coerced sex with parishioners and minors, indecent liberties with minors, molestation and sexual abuse of children (of both sexes), marriage or cohabitation with underage girls, financial embezzlement, fraud, theft, and other crimes.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . .”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“They unthinkingly internalize the mainstream pronouncement and then repeat it as their own opinion, as indeed it has become.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“We are not just passive receptors sponging up a flow of images and information. Perception involves organizing stimuli and data into comprehensible units. In a word, perception is itself an act of selective editing.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“There is no guarantee that a socialized economy will always succeed. The state-owned economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered ultimately fatal distortions in their development because of the backlog of poverty and want in the societies they inherited; years of capitalist encirclement, embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms buildup; poor incentive systems, and a lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism. Despite all that, the former communist states did transform impoverished countries into relatively advanced societies. Whatever their mistakes and political crimes, they achieved—in countries that were never as rich as ours—what U.S. free-market capitalism cannot and has no intention of accomplishing: adequate food, housing, and clothing for all; economic security in old age; free medical care; free education at all levels; and a guaranteed income. Today by overwhelming majorities, people in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe say that life was better under communism than under the present freemarket system.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“it is not socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one’s own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Between 1880 and 1931 the courts issued more than 1,800 injunctions to suppress labor strikes. Labor “combinations” (unions) were declared a violation of due process, a way of coercively extracting wealth from decent defenseless rich employers. Collective bargaining, it was maintained, deprived both owner and worker of “freedom of contract.” By 1920, pro-business federal courts had struck down roughly three hundred labor laws passed by state legislatures to ease inhumane working conditions.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Not everything written by mainstream scholars serves the powers that be, but very little of it challenges such powers.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Their quest was not to investigate heterodoxy but to insulate themselves from it.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“The very nature of perception makes it a predominantly subjective experience.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“If profits are going up, then the economy is “doing well”—even if the working public is falling behind in real wages and living conditions, as happened during much of 2001–2007.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“However, the process of legitimation through rectification is a two-edged sword. It must go far enough to demonstrate that the system is self-cleansing, but not so far as to destabilize the executive power.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“What I really lusted after was knowledge and understanding of the world. What had happened over the centuries? What was going on in the far reaches of this and other societies? What meaning, if any, did life have? Maybe that is why I became a social science professor and researcher. As such I cannot say I found the final answer to those sorts of questions.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“Nobody can hate like brothers,” the saying goes, especially brothers (and sisters) who had a hard childhood ruled over by immigrant parents who themselves saw life as a series of impending catastrophes.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

“My father’s mother, Grandma Marietta, was a living portrait of her generation: a short squat woman who toiled endlessly in the home. She shared the common lot of Italian peasant women: endless cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family, with a fatalistic submergence of self. “Che pu fare?” (“What can you do?”) was the common expression of the elderly women.”
― Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader