Quotes From Influential Men

This is my collection of quotes from the movers and shakers of this world that I believe shed light on why the world is what it is today. If you have a quote that you would like to add to this list, please write it in the comments section of this post!

2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G-20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.”
— Herman Van Rompuy, the first president of the European Union.

“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”
— Chou En-lai, former Chinese premier

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
–Johann Wolfgang Goethe

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it… The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; To lie outright; To pervert; To vilify; To fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his county and his race for his daily bread.
– John Swinton, newsman and former editor at The New York Times

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.”
— Edward L. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud who studied his uncle’s work. (Quote gleaned from “Flat Earth News” by Nick Davies

“We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. … The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.”
— J. Edgar Hoover (Elks Magazine, August 1956.)

“A holy war will now begin on America, and when it is ended America will be supposedly the citadel of freedom, but her millions will unknowingly be loyal subjects to the Crown. Your churches will be used to teach the Jew’s religion and in less than two hundred years the whole nation will be working for divine world government. That government that they believe to be divine will be the British Empire. All religions will be permeated with Judaism without even being noticed by the masses, and they will all be under the invisible all-seeing eye of the Grand Architect of Freemasonry.”
— British General Charles Cornwallis to General George Washington

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“It’s not the votes that count,
it’s who counts the votes.”
— Josef Stalin

“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

— Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it
is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people
don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter
in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or
no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger.”

— Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before
he was sentenced to death

“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they
ought to have.”
— Richard S. Salant, Former President CBS News.

“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of
public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other
forms of propaganda.”
— General Douglas MacArthur

“If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may
believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year
when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so.
Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your
propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his
enemy.”

— A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns
Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)

“The first casualty of war is truth.”
–Rudyard Kipling

“Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to
restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true
if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real
or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all
peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from
this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented
with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for
the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world
government.”
— Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers
meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss
delegate to the meeting.

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy
the American’s freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the
citizen of his plight.”
–John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 10 days before his
assassination.

“It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an
aversion to any ‘conspiracy theory of history;’ for a search for
‘conspiracies’ means a search for motives and an attribution of
responsibility for historical misdeeds.”
–Murray N. Rothbard, in The Anatomy of the State

“The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything.”
–Nelson Rockefeller

“I want to own nothing and control everything”
–J D Rockefeller

“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a
one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the
same tent, all under their control…. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I
am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations
old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
–Larry P. McDonald, US Congressman, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines
747 that was shot down by the Soviets

“The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen….At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.”

–John F. Hylan, 1922, then mayor of New York City

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question it’s methods or throw light upon it’s crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.
— Abraham Lincoln

“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field
of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that
there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so
interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak
above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
–Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom (1913)

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great
industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of
credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our
activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the
worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated
Governments in the civilized world – no longer a Government by free
opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the
majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of
dominant men.”
–President Woodrow Wilson (The president whose administration passed the
Federal Reserve Act)

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from
behind the scenes.”
–Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is
imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
–Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, in a novel he
published in 1844 called Coningsby, the New Generation

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am
convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the
breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits
amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me
that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall
ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is
your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families,
and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.”
–Attributed to President Andrew Jackson, who in 1836 forced the closing
of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter.

“The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions
the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice
who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers.”
–Congressman Louis T. McFadden (Rep. Pa)

“We have, in this country, one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board. This evil institution has impoverished the people of the United States and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it”.
— Congressman Louis T. McFadden in 1932 (Rep. Pa)

“I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the
Empire, … The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the
British Empire. And I control the money supply.”
–Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1777-1836)

“These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the
teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a
monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all
business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax
exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does
not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.”
–Frederick C. Howe, in Confessions of a Monopolist (1906)

“If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the
events affecting our nation’s well-being should be good for America. If
we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally
make a mistake in our favor. We . . . are not dealing with coincidence
or stupidity, but with planning and brilliance.”
–Gary Allen, from his book None Dare Call It Conspiracy

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet
it was planned that way.”
–Franklin D. Roosevelt

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot
survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable,
for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves
amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through
all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the
traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his
victims, and he wears their face and their garments, he appeals to the
baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a
nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the
pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no
longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
–Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 BC

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both
instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly
unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in
the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the
darkness.”
–Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
–Joseph Stalin

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses
over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its
speaker a raving lunatic.”
–Dresden James

“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
–George Orwell

“If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
–Anatole France

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States.

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller, Bilderberg Meeting, June 1991 Baden, Germany

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.”
–Henry Kissinger

“No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a Luciferian Initiation.”
David Spangler, Director of Planetary Initiative, United Nations

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
— Strobe Talbot, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.

“We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent.”
— Statement by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member James Warburg to The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17th, l950

“The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans.”
— British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, 1876

“The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers, which are cited to justify it.”
— President John F. Kennedy
Address to newspaper publishers
April 27, 1961

“From the days of Sparticus, Weishaupt, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”
— Winston Churchill, stated to the London Press, in l922.

“For a long time I felt that FDR had developed many thoughts and ideas that were his own to benefit this country, the United States. But, he didn’t. Most of his thoughts, his political ammunition, as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advanced by the Council on Foreign Relations-One World Money group. Brilliantly, with great gusto, like a fine piece of artillery, he exploded that prepared “ammunition” in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people, and thus paid off and returned his internationalist political support.”
— Curtis Dall, FDR’s son-in-law as quoted in his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law

“The depression was the calculated ‘shearing’ of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market….The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.”
— Curtis Dall, FDR’s son-in-law as quoted in his book, My Exploited Father-in-Law

“The United Nations is but a long range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One-World revolutionaries, hungry for profit and power.”
— Curtis Dall, FDR’s son-in-law

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.”
— Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

“Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government – a bureaucratic elite.
— Senator William Jenner, 1954

“The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future.”

— U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater in his l964 book: With No Apologies.

“The Council on Foreign Relations is “the establishment.” Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also announces and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship.”
— Former Congressman John Rarick 1971

“The term Internationalism has been popularized in recent years to cover an interlocking financial, political, and economic world force for the purpose of establishing a World Government. Today Internationalism is heralded from pulpit and platform as a ‘League of Nations’ or a ‘Federated Union’ to which the United States must surrender a definite part of its National Sovereignty. The World Government plan is being advocated under such alluring names as the ‘New International Order,’ ‘The New World Order,’ ‘World Union Now,’ ‘World Commonwealth of Nations,’ ‘World Community,’ etc. All the terms have the same objective; however, the line of approach may be religious or political according to the taste or training of the individual.”
— Excerpt from A Memorial to be Addressed to the House of Bishops and the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church in General Convention (October 1940)

“The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for “the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.”
— Harpers, July l958

“… when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.”
— H. G. Wells, in his book entitled The New World Order (1939)

“I you tell a lie long enough, loud enough and often enough, the people will believe it.”
Adolf Hitler

“People are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.”
Adolf Hitler

“It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
— Henry Ford

“The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.”
— Henry Ford

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
Strobe Talbot, President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.

“We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world.”
— Professor Arnold Toynbee, in a June l931 speech before the Institute for the Study of International Affairs in Copenhagen.

“The government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semioccult power which….pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.”
– British military historian MajorGeneral J.F.C. Fuller, l941

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
– A letter written by FDR to Colonel House, November 21st, l933

“The case for government by elites is irrefutable”
– Senator William Fulbright, Former chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated at a 1963 symposium entitled: The Elite and the Electorate – Is Government by the People Possible?

“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation
that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing
falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any
refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war
is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process
of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916,
Ch.9

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” — Senior advisor to Bush talking to journalist Ron Susink (See www.hermes-press.com/suskind.htm to read this quote in context.)

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
— Quote from Morpheus in the film, The Matrix

“In a developed society…the seizure of political power is not possible until after the seizure of cultural power.”
Antonio Gramsci (Italian Party Communist leader)

“Revolutions are effected in two ways, by force and by fraud.”
– Aristotle

“One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.”
– Psychologist Barbara Marx Hubbard – member of Task Force Delta; a United States Army think tank

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
– Edward R. Murrow”

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
– George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

“It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.”
– Unknown Source

“It can be held certain that information that is withheld or suppressed contains truths that are detrimental to the persons involved in the suppression.”
– J. Edgar Hoover

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire

“Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!”
– Leonardo Da Vinci

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
– Benito Mussolini

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
– Hitler

“And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival… It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist… The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
– George Orwell, 1984

“The United States has got some of the dumbest people in the world. I want you to know that.”
— CNN’s Ted Turner’s comment to a group of foreign journalists in 1996

“It is fortunate for those in power that people do not think.”
–Adolf Hitler