John Pilger Quotes

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

I stand by every word I've ever written. I can back everything up with facts. I have never made the facts fit an agenda, unlike the corporate media. But, if I didn't annoy all the right people all the time, I would be very upset.

Obama was one of the most violent U.S. Presidents. He launched or sustained seven wars and left office with none resolved: a record. In his last year as President, 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, he dropped 26,171 bombs. It’s an interesting statistic; it’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, on mostly civilians.

The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions.

There is no War on Terrorism; it is the speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the , ensuring infinite dangers for us all.

I have always had a great deal of admiration for Bob Hawke and the work he did as ACTU president; in fact it's a shame he's not still ACTU president.
If he is as I found him last week, now that he's bereft of booze and smokes and on a Pritikin diet, I would quite frankly prefer he returned to the booze.

A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.

And anyway, I am pro-Vietnamese, I regard their experience over 30 years as unique. They have had to turn back more intruders and vandals than any country in recent history.
And now as a result of that they are ruined economically and they are facing starvation.

Kim Hill: All this time, then, the United Nations and weapons inspectors have been some kind of puppets of the US.
Pilger: Are you saying that?
Hill: I am asking you whether that is what you are implying?
Pilger: That's a leading question, I wouldn't ...
Hill: How would you describe the activities of the United Nations up until this point?
Pilger: Which area of the United Nations? It's a very big organisation.

Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

I've never seen myself as a campaigning journalist. A maverick, yes. But I'm a reporter and I'll always be a reporter, forever curious. And, I suppose, if anything drives me it's curiosity

If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.

Twenty years ago today, in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gun was fired close to where I was standing. One bullet passed over my shoulder and struck a woman in the face; another lodged in the brain of a man who almost certainly would have become president of the United States.
Robert Kennedy had seen his assassin leap on to a table and take aim; the flash of the little man's shiny yellow jacket remains indelible with me. "No!" Kennedy had screamed, half glancing for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He lay mortally wounded beside a refrigerator, half smiling, tousled hair, eternal youth applied for; the face on the posters.

The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class.

Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a 'former bus driver' and become Saddam Hussein incarnate.... As the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. 'There is food everywhere,' he wrote. 'I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.'