Top 80 Michael Parenti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People who think they’re free in this world just haven’t come to the end of their leash yet.”

— Michael Parenti

2. “You don’t know you’re wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.”

— Michael Parenti

3. “Apathy’s a problem but who cares?”

— Michael Parenti

4. “Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.”

— Michael Parenti

5. “No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.”

— Michael Parenti

6. “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.”

— Michael Parenti

7. “The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.”

— Michael Parenti

8. “Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.”

— Michael Parenti

9. “The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.”

— Michael Parenti

10. “The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.”

— Michael Parenti

11. “America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.”

— Michael Parenti

12. “The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.”

— Michael Parenti

13. “The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible.”

— Michael Parenti

14. “Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.”

— Michael Parenti

15. “Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in Third World nations be overcome if a new system is to prevail.”

— Michael Parenti

16. “Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.”

— Michael Parenti

17. “When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.”

— Michael Parenti

18. “The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.”

— Michael Parenti

19. “The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.”

— Michael Parenti

20. “I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

— Michael Parenti

21. “Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.”

— Michael Parenti

22. “As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.”

— Michael Parenti

23. “One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor – backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. ‘Old money’ is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.”

— Michael Parenti

24. “Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.”

— Michael Parenti

25. “Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.”

— Michael Parenti

26. “The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people’s labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.”

— Michael Parenti

27. “No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.”

— Michael Parenti

28. “A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.”

— Michael Parenti

29. “The god who presides over the Judeo-Christian belief system bears a disquieting resemblance to those imperfect creations known as human beings. This suggests that either he really did fashion us in his own image or we fashioned him in ours.”

— Michael Parenti

30. “Actually, the New Deal’s central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.”

— Michael Parenti

31. “Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.”

— Michael Parenti

32. “Democrats – lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.”

— Michael Parenti

33. “Their quest was not to investigate heterodoxy but to insulate themselves from it.”

— Michael Parenti

34. “The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.”

— Michael Parenti

35. “It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.”

— Michael Parenti

36. “The last four secretaries of defense have pointed out that defense spending creates jobs. So do pornography, prostitution, and narcotics.”

— Michael Parenti

37. “The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.”

— Michael Parenti

38. “Russia became a juicy chunk of the Third World, with immense reserves of cheap labor, a vast treasure of natural resources, and industrial assets to be sold off at giveaway prices.”

— Michael Parenti

39. “A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.”

— Michael Parenti

40. “The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.”

— Michael Parenti

41. “The trick is to steal big.”

— Michael Parenti

42. “Ecology’s implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.”

— Michael Parenti

43. “Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.”

— Michael Parenti

44. “The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.”

— Michael Parenti

45. “I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.”

— Michael Parenti

46. “Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.”

— Michael Parenti

47. “Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security.”

— Michael Parenti

48. “Although it sees the world through much the same ideological lens as do corporate and government elites, the press must occasionally report some of the unpleasantness of life, if only to maintain its credibility with a public that is not always willing to buy the far-right line. On those occasions, rightists complain bitterly about a left bias.”

— Michael Parenti

49. “One mechanism of repression is the grand jury.”

— Michael Parenti

50. “The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.”

— Michael Parenti