• “Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.” Friedrich Nietzsche #
• “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonl … #
• “Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
• “When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.” Eug … #
• “The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.” Edvard Teller #
• “A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
• “Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
• “Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even f … #
• “Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” Thomas Jefferson #
• ”You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.” James Thurber #
• “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, … #
• “If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the s … #
• ”Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without l … #
• “History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure … #
• “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Mar … #
• “Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.” John Simon #
• “Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.” Sen … #
• “Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” George Bernard … #
• “In democracy everyone has the right to be represented, even the jerks.” Chris Patten #
• “When the government fears the people, that is LIBERTY. When people fear the government, that is TYRANNY.” Author Unknown #
• “It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.” Marcus Tullius Cicero #
• “Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.” Charles Caleb Cotton #
• “Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” African proverb #
• “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Ma … #
• “Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.” John Stuart Mill #
• “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” Laurens van der Post #
• “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker #
• “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Saul Bellow #
• “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle #
• “Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.” Thomas A. Edison #
• “Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as ‘sentimental’, ‘impractical’, or ‘womanish’, etc., by those whose fun, profit or … #
• “To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them a … #
• “Democracies don’t prepare well for things that have never happened before.” Richard A. Clarke, former White House counter- terrorism chief. #
• “Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and … #
• “Good government could never be a substitute for government by the people themselves.” Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, British Prime Minister #
• “A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.” Bill Vaughan #
• “Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
• “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. #
• “It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.” John Mayard Keynes #
• “Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” Clement Atlee #

Our client, Jerry White, co-founder of Survivor Corps, just guest-blogged over at the Anderson Cooper 360 blog, How to stop the violence: Feel the pain, check it out:

The morning papers and nightly news are filled with reminders the world can be an unpredictably dangerous place. Earthquakes in China, cyclones in Myanmar, tornados in the heartland, war in the Middle East and gang violence in our cities. There are fundamentally three types of threats to human survival and security: disasters, disease or violence. The third is the most disturbing—deliberate victimization and cruelty.

We are at war, and the number of people engaged in violence is growing daily. At the moment, there are 39 armed conflicts raging, and more than 80 percent of those injured and killed are civilians, not soldiers. To stop this man-made epidemic, we must work together. No one survives alone.

I’ve wrestled with the issues of how to overcome crisis and suffering throughout my life. When I was 20, I stepped on a landmine while hiking in northern Israel. I lost my leg, and spent months recovering in an Israeli hospital, learning firsthand what it takes to overcome. I wrote about what I have learned about survivorship and resilience in I Will Not Be Broken: 5 Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis.

There are five basic steps a person must undergo in order to complete the cycle of recovery from trauma. First, we must face facts: this awful thing has happened and we can’t turn back the clock. Second, we must choose life. It is still worth living, but we must actively choose and hope for a better future. Third, we must reach out – isolation will kill us; we need each other. Fourth, we must get moving – no one else can do our physical or emotional rehab for us. Finally, we must give back. Turning around to help those who are struggling alongside us will boost our serotonin levels and complete the cycle of our own healing. Givers, not takers, end up thriving.

It’s hard to read the papers and watch the news at times… tempting to turn the channel. But empathy is key to our personal and global survival. Only by recognizing the pain in ourselves do we begin to see others in pain as our brothers and sisters. As we work through our own pain, we find it satisfying, and even healing, to reach out and help others, replacing the cycle of violence and suffering with one of growth and peace.

–Jerry White, cofounder of Survivor Corps – a worldwide network of people helping each other overcome the effects of war and violence—and author of I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis. All net proceeds from sales of I Will Not Be Broken benefit Survivor Corps programs to help survivors recover worldwide.

I just found a reference to me over at Ad Your Comment Here:

“I feel like there were a few others because I had this friend, Chris Abraham, who was researching blogging at the time and who basically requested my friendship in just about every place you could think of.”

Well, I thought about how I spread the SNS love. Right now I am into Flugpo, but there has been Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Friendster, Jaiku, Pownce, and Tumblr. I heard this story where all the sexually-transmitted diseases in the world are propagated by truckers. They have these trucking routes. Well, I fancy myself the syphilitic trucker of the social networks. Oh, I am so proud. So proud! (Via Marketing Conversation)

From Wikipedia:

The Darfur Conflict is an ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, mainly between the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited from local Arab tribes, and the non-Arab peoples of the region. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, is providing arms and assistance and has participated in joint attacks with the group. The conflict began in February 2003.

The conflict has been described by the Western media as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” In September 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 50,000 deaths in Darfur since the conflict’s beginning, mostly by starvation. In October, the organization’s head gave an estimate of 71,000 deaths by starvation and disease alone between March and October 2004. While a recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have already died[1], the United Nations estimates that 180,000 have died in the past eighteen months of the conflict [2]. More than 1.8 million people had been displaced from their homes. Two hundred thousand have fled to neighboring Chad.

Although the large majority of resultant refugees are non-Arab black Africans fleeing Arab Janjaweed attacks [3], there are also Arab victims and non-Arab perpetrators. In addition, both sides are largely black in skin tone, and the distinction between “Arab” and “non-Arab” common in Western media is heavily disputed by many people, including the Sudanese government. Moreover, these labels have been criticized for sensationalizing the conflict into one of racial motivations, where some experts instead attribute the causes to competition between farmers and nomadic cattle-herders who compete for scarce resources. In reality, though differences in lifestyle, as well as Arab or non-Arab status seem somewhat superficial, they are the basis upon which the government has decided who shall suffer bombings, mass killings and systematic rape by its proxy militias. This violence has forced people to flee into the desert, on the order of hundreds of thousands. Accurate numbers of dead have been difficult to attain, due to the government’s efforts to cover up these atrocities.

In the summer of 2004, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, travelled the refugee camps of Darfur with the Sudanese foreign minister. A team of American investigators stayed behind to interview people in the camps, and later, Powell testified before the U.S. Congress that genocide was being perpetrated in Darfur. The Sudanese government has denied claims that it is involved, though, Powell and his team found that the government is clearly and directly involved in committing the genocide. In addition to the Bush Administration, many others, such as Senator John Kerry also denounced it as a genocide. [4]

The UN, prior to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, called the Darfur conflict the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis. However, intervention by the UN is unlikely as the governments of key members of the Security Council are pragmatically and ideologically constrained in their ability to respond to the conflict. The Russian government, with its weakened economy, struggles to meet its internal security dilemnas regarding its persistent border conflicts. United States force deployments in Iraq and elsewhere make intervention a difficult proposition. The United States also faces difficulty stemming from its commitment to the peace process ending the Second Sudanese Civil War, which it fears may be derailed. Finally, setting up No-Fly Zones is logistically difficult considering the remoteness of Darfur, the lack of infrastructure in potential airbase neighbors, and the issue of airspace rights for flyovers to Darfur from other neighbors.

Moreover, in both of these nations, along with Britain and France, a strong lobby exists opposed to intervention in countries whose internal strife is not clearly related to the nation’s own interest (America and France having suffered demoralizing losses in Vietnam, as well as in Somalia and Algeria, respectively). The lack of capable foreign peacekeepers during the Rwanda and Liberia crises is a more recent example.

Those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region on all sides of the conflict will probably be held accountable. However, it is currently undecided whether prosecution will commence via the International Criminal Court, or via a provisional tribunal, such as the one used after the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and in the Balkans. The Bush administration currently opposes the ICC option and supports the special tribunal mechanism.