John Pilger Quotes

The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

The nature of politics is to subtract meaning from language.

The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilization, which is the kingdom of God.

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous.

Constructing passive sentences is a way of concealing your own testicles.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

Her beauty cannot be measured with standards of a colonized mind

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power.

We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.

Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

Fear is the most elegant weapon, your hands are never messy

The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.

The popularisation of scientific doctrines is producing as great an alteration in the mental state of society as the material applications of science are effecting in its outward life. Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.