Quotes

Some quotes that have jumped out from the noise:

"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind", George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

"Terrorism is not a substitute for war, but a preparative. The purpose of instilling terror is to force a polarisation of conflict by making neutrality an impossibility, so that armed confrontation becomes inevitable." - Germaine Greer, "The awful day Australia stopped being everyone's best mate", The Melbourne Age, 2002/10/21

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, as recorded by Sallust circa 42 BC (Emphasis mine. Please email me if you have full translation of this quote in context)