Alexander Cockburn quotes

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination. (Alexander Cockburn)

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Alexander Cockburn

No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein.

Alexander Cockburn

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Alexander Cockburn

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Alexander Cockburn

No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

Alexander Cockburn

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Alexander Cockburn

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.

Alexander Cockburn

The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.

Alexander Cockburn

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

Alexander Cockburn

Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you. (Alexander Cockburn)

Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

Alexander Cockburn

The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.

Alexander Cockburn

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

Alexander Cockburn

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

Alexander Cockburn

We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.

Alexander Cockburn