Michael Parenti Quotes

The foreign policy of the United States rests entirely on propagandistic lies.

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

This country was the moral leader of the world until George Bush became president.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

The President has launched a very agressive campaign of self-defense, with the goal of getting Americans to buy into his vision of America on the world stage.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.

There's no way in the world that the United States does not want to spread democratic ideals, but the first thing we have to do is that which is the interest of our security.

Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute -- often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is.

Where is the evidence that Washington's world view sways the multitude of nations? To enlist support for its wars in Korea, Vietnam and in the Gulf, the United States had to resort to a lot of bribery and threats. At the United Nations, the US has, with noteworthy regularity, been on the minority side in voting on resolutions.

... a trick speech, calculated to lead the American people into war and ruin.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.

Promoting democracy is one goal of U. S. foreign policy dating back at least 100 years. But it has always been one goal of many, often negated and outweighed by other competing interests.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

America must always lead on the world stage.

… in this day and age, brands are more powerful than truth and, inexplicably, blindly, Israel is letting itself be branded an apartheid state — and even encouraging it.

War on terrorism reflects, in my view, a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy for a superpower and for a great democracy with genuinely idealistic traditions.

Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

People don't question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.

The U.S. cannot implement a cogent strategy on the world stage if no one is sure whether to take the President seriously.

U.S. foreign aid must be used more strategically to achieve our national security goals.

Let's note, that in what I consider the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime - something not exampled since Jane Fonda sat on the anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to be photographed - Mr. McDermott said in effect, not in effect, he said it, we should take Saddam Hussein at his word and not take the President at his word. He said the United States is simply trying to provoke. I mean, why Saddam Hussein doesn't pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know.

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don't know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.