Welcome to Mark Palermo's home page. Musician, journalist,
professional translator, composer,artist, college professor, world traveler, poet and barbershop philosopher. To the left
is an archive of recent columns..
G. Bush Sr. with Carlyle Group Business Associates
"The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living." (John Adams)
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." W.B.Yeats
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does
not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzche
"No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war." Theorore Roosevelt
WWII Italian fascist propaganda poster with a black US soldier (portrayed as an animal) shown desecrating a Church and Christianity
"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me... I don't understand
what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist
dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." William Shirer
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution
of way of life, or say and so things that make people think.
William O. Douglas
"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.
We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. " President Jimmy Carter
"The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old
patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social
misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving
for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness." Wilhelm Reich
"As a result of thousands of years of social and educational warping, the masses of the people have become biologically
rigid and incapable of freedom. They are no longer capable of organizing a peaceful living-together." The Mass Psychology
of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As
a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power
of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Abraham Lincoln
"The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off
and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness
in a compact collective whole. " Eric Hoffer
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where
the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Frank Herbert Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, "Dune"
US science fiction novelist (1920 - 1986)
Click links below for my
poetry, some samples of my artwork, musical compositions, photography and of course a collection of pictures from my travels
around the world. In addition I have included a link to the film festival I established in Lawrence, Massachusetts several
years ago.
"It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny."
Eric Hoffer
Mussolini hanged in MIlan 1945
"The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of
their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an
end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance." Eric Hoffer
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about
oil." Allan Greenspan, former chief, Federal Reserve
"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the
shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."
"Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen,
and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on
something like that?" Barbara Bush on Good Morning America, March 18, 2003
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease
is reflected in the press."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs,
importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become
consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted
and they ought to be sent up." Rush Limbaugh (later busted for drug use)
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come
to hate war. War settles nothing."
General Dwight Eisenhower
"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We
are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
Charles Bukowski
"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing
my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political
and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." David
Rockefeller
“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.
As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty
ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House
will be adorned by a downright moron.” —H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. ...James Minchner
"Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. "Eric Hoffer
"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children. to earn the appreciation
of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends. to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others. to leave the
world a bit better, whether by a healthy child; a garden patch...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have
lived. This is to have succeeded!" - R W Emerson
