John Pilger Quotes

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant, and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

I think America, unfortunately, collectively thinks of itself as the 'chosen people.' To my knowledge, there are no chosen people, we are all human beings.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.

I'll probably lose every friend I've got, but I think the Russians are about the only people who have behaved decently in the conflict with the Ukraine. All the evidence to the contrary seems a bit bogus to me. NATO is trying to use Ukraine to isolate and cripple Russia, and that's completely crazy and very cruel. It seems to me that our side, the English and American people, really want it to go bad there. But there's no need for it to have done so. At least that's what I think. You won't hear a lot of that on Fox News.

I'm getting a little fed up with some of the pessimism that I'm hearing. I know some people who will not be convinced we've really won anything until the media changes. And that isn't gonna happen. They look at the media not liking Trump and they think it's failure. They look at the media ripping Trump and destroying him and they think it's gonna work and it means failure. And I get so fed up. I said, "Do you people not understand we're on the cusp here of one of the most exciting next four years?" The growth potential, the potential of putting America back together.

Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.

I don't think a lot of people have been privy to understanding that there's this talent in hip-hop all over the earth that's just as good. It's just that everything out of the U.S. proclaims to be the best, especially L.A. and New York, being that they're the nerve centers and media capitals of the most predominantly media-emitting country in the world.

For me, it's to be able to see that every life matters. Every life matters - no matter where, no matter how big, no matter how small. I've been able to see that in so many of the trips that we've taken around the world. That's been something that's been so eye-opening to me. I share that concept with everyone I come in contact with, so that we can unite around people. We can unite around one nation under God here, and we can unite that everybody matters. I think in this day and age right now, it's important. People need to be able to see something bigger than themselves.

I don't think Mike Tyson's a bad guy. I think the people, the media, makes him out to be a bad guy.

When you do a computerized poll, where people are comfortable, Donald Trump vote goes up very dramatically. And I think people don't realize the effort by the elite media, the totally dishonest effort to submerge him, has had an effect.

It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish. It's a point of fact that we're doing extremely well.

the systematic abuse with which the newspapers of one side assail every candidate coming forward on the other, is the cause of many honorable men, who have a regard to their reputation, being deterred from entering public life; and of the people being thus deprived of some better servants than any they have.

The media is in the business of finding exceptions to everyday life. Bad things are still the exception. That's good, because once bad things stop being news, we really are in trouble. If people forget that bad is the exception, they think they live in a horrible world. There is so much that works and is right and friendly and warm. But we take that for granted.

I know a lot of you believe that most people in the news business are liberal. Let me tell you, I know a lot of them, and they were almost evenly divided this time. Half of them liked Senator Kerry; the other half hated President Bush.

There are a lot of lessons that people can take from me, that they can start to apply because I don't think that I can beat the Democrat Media Complex by myself.

The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards - I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox - but they're going to portray - they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as the young and dynamic and optimistic and all this. There's going to be this glow about them this summer, that is going to be worth - collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points.

I think we all have a love/hate relationship with the media.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

You need to fight cases in the courts, but you certainly cannot rely on the courts, you need to testify in Congress and lobby your Congress person, but you certainly cannot rely on Congress. You need to speak out in the media, but you cannot totally trust the media either. You need to work within the academy because that's an influential opinion body. I think that one of the lessons that people have learned in the civil rights community is that it is generally not enough to focus on litigation in the courts.

I think that Donald Trump has faced an unprecedented avalanche of critical coverage when he was running and frankly, I think, it in part he owes his victory to that.