Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace....They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.
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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. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This
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This ruling, if it stands, threatens to undermine and erode our power as states to hold accountable out-of-state polluters who foul our air, ... Carbon dioxide pollution endangers public health and the environment, just as other harmful emissions. These companies must be held accountable and forced to clean up.
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When we say our rulers, we mean those who are engaged in the manipulation of symbols. We must consider ourselves a symbolic, semantic class of life, and cannot cease from being so those who control the symbols rule us. Bankers, priests, lawyers, politicians, [and news media] constitute one class [of our rulers] and work together. They do not produce any values but manipulate the values produced by others, and often pass signs for no value at all. Scientists and teachers also comprise a ruling class. They produce the main values mankind has, but, at present, they do not realize this. They are, in the main, ruled by the cunning methods of the first class.
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Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blest Seth vexed us with Astronomy.
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The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
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The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites...
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After having won a scepter, few are so generous as to disdain the pleasures of ruling.
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Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send....
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
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He did commiserate with me a little bit, ... I hope that he will be able to give the United States Supreme Court's ruling some coherence, because frankly they are way out of step with what the founding fathers intended.
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Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.
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John 3:1:
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.
(NIV)
NOW THERE was a certain man among the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler (a leader, an authority) among the Jews
(AMP)
There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:
(KJV)
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God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.
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Luke 14:1:
One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched.
(NIV)
IT OCCURRED one Sabbath, when [Jesus] went for a meal at the house of one of the ruling Pharisees, that they were [engaged in] watching Him [closely].
(AMP)
And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, that they watched him.
(KJV)
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The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.
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You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape...
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The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.
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When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
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Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
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Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all.... All other things, ruling, hoarding, build...
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The truth is that every intelligent man, as you well know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society through violence alone. Since th...
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His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part.
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