Top 80 Michael Parenti Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Conservative religious affiliation is “one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence.”

— Michael Parenti

52. “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

53. “To complain about how the media are dominated by liberals, Limbaugh has an hour a day on network television, an hour on cable, and a radio show syndicated by over 600 stations.”

— Michael Parenti

54. “But for the most part, the press went about its business of blaming the victims, glorifying the police, and demonizing those who fought back.”

— Michael Parenti

55. “In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.”

— Michael Parenti

56. “History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.”

— Michael Parenti

57. “The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.”

— Michael Parenti

58. “In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning.”

— Michael Parenti

59. “The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. 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

60. “In order that a select few might live in great opulence, millions of people work hard for an entire lifetime, never free from financial insecurity, and at great cost to the quality of their lives. The complaint is not that the very rich have so much more than everyone else but that their superabundance and endless accumulation comes at the expense of everyone and everything else, including our communities and our environment.”

— Michael Parenti

61. “A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell.”

— Michael Parenti

62. “Not everything written by mainstream scholars serves the powers that be, but very little of it challenges such powers.”

— Michael Parenti

63. “We are not just passive receptors sponging up a flow of images and information. Perception involves organizing stimuli and data into comprehensible units. In a word, perception is itself an act of selective editing.”

— Michael Parenti

64. “There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people.”

— Michael Parenti

65. “The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication – which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.”

— Michael Parenti

66. “Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By “rational” I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.”

— Michael Parenti

67. “Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.”

— Michael Parenti

68. “Then there were the distorting effects that unremitting capitalist encirclement had upon the building of socialism. Throughout its entire seventy-three-year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development.”

— Michael Parenti

69. “What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party’s full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-sounding name. As already noted, the SA storm troopers had a militant share-the-wealth strain in their ranks that was suppressed by Hitler after he took state power.”

— Michael Parenti

70. “So far, the prevailing force has not been revolution but counterrevolution, the devilish destruction wreaked by capitalist states upon popular struggles, at a cost of millions of lives.”

— Michael Parenti

71. “How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.”

— Michael Parenti

72. “The very nature of perception makes it a predominantly subjective experience.”

— Michael Parenti

73. “Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents.”

— Michael Parenti

74. “Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state – if there is the political will and a mobilization of popular class power.”

— Michael Parenti

75. “In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.”

— Michael Parenti

76. “In Russia, the number of women murdered annually – primarily by husbands and boyfriends – skyrocketed from 5,300 to 15,000 in the first three years of the free-market paradise. In 1994, an additional 57,000 women were seriously injured in such assaults.”

— Michael Parenti

77. “For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world’s wealth, social revolution is an abomination. Whether it be peaceful or violent is a question of no great moment to them. Peaceful reforms that infringe upon their profitable accumulations and threaten their class privileges are as unacceptable to them as the social upheaval by revolution.”

— Michael Parenti

78. “Sporadic rebellion would be replaced by class-conscious revolution. Instead of burning down the manor, the workers would expropriate it and put it to use for the collective benefit of the common people, the ones who built it in the first place.”

— Michael Parenti

79. “The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification offered by the assassins themselves. I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.”

— Michael Parenti

80. “During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights.”

— Michael Parenti

81. “In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis.”

— Michael Parenti

82. “The real sin of revolutionaries, communist or not, was that they championed the laboring classes against the wealthy few. They advocated changes in the distribution of class power and the way wealth was produced and used. They wanted less individualistic advancement at the expense of the many and collective betterment for the entire working populace.”

— Michael Parenti

83. “The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people’s labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.”

— Michael Parenti

84. “They unthinkingly internalize the mainstream pronouncement and then repeat it as their own opinion, as indeed it has become.”

— Michael Parenti

85. “Racism is especially useful when channeling the economic fears and anger of Whites away from employers and toward out-groups who are seen as competitors for scarce jobs, education, and housing.”

— Michael Parenti

86. “Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract.”

— Michael Parenti