John Pilger Quotes

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

Terrorism is what the weak use to increase their bargaining power against the strong.

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.

The Chinese concept of rights arose, then, in a context of power. Western nations had become powerful enough, and imposed their will in nakedly aggressive fashion, so that they had to be addressed in their terms. Eventually rights in Chinese thought are attributed not just to nation states but also to individual people.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

The great powers claim that whatever they possess is theirs by right, but whatever we, the smaller countries possess is negotiable.

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

There are plenty of risks when we encourage "investment" or commoditization of natural resources, as power dynamics may mean that poor people (who are often marginalized and have less power) are sidelined by more powerful interests when money is involved.

One of the things that I'm really concerned about is that people who don't have power are not priorities for people in public life. Maybe it's always been that way, but I see it more starkly now.

The enemy has always been able to point the finger of suspicion and/or guilt to Black leaders that they are enriching themselves at the expense of the people.

I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"

It turns out that a lot of women just have a problem with women in power. You know, this whole sisterhood, this whole let's go march for women's rights and, you know, just constantly talking about what women look like or what they wear, or making fun of their choices or presuming that they're not as powerful as the men around. This presumptive negativity about women in power I think is very unfortunate, because let's just try to access that and have a conversation about it, rather than a confrontation about it.

Terrorism': the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.

We all have a large stake in preserving our democracy, but I maintain that those without power in our society, the black, the brown, the poor of all colors, have the largest stake not because we have the most to lose, but because we have worked the hardest, and given the most, for what we have achieved.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

The truth is we have a political system and an economic system controlled by a few extremely wealthy people. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one person has the influence by himself or herself to take on this enormous array of power unless millions of people begin to work together to demand changes.

Relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

I don't want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement.

Everybody knows that the United Nations is not the Secretary-General; he has an important position, but the United Nations is the states within this organization, and to be frank, most of the people say only the five permanent members; this is the United Nations because they have the veto, they can do whatever they want and they can refuse whatever they want, and if there's a reform that is very much needed for this organization.