Some of My Favorite Quotes

Hi Everyone...
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I have picked up from the Internet. Quite informative, interesting, and so very true.

"No people can be both ignorant and free."
-Thomas Jefferson

"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege, and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
- Noam Chomsky

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get the people to stop reading them."
- Ray Bradbury

"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on."
- Michael Parenti

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."
- George Orwell

"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing."
- Neil Postman

"The price good people pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
- Plato

"For ethics to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of others must matter to us."
- Sam Harris

"To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
- Michael Parenti

"To criticize one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism - a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."
- U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright

and finally....

"Free and responsible government by popular consent just can't exist without an informed public."
- Bill Moyers

and the last but not the least, and the most favorite of all...

"The Greatest Enemy of Knowledge is not Ignorance....

.... it is the illusion of Knowledge."

- Stephen Hawking

The Bourne Review

Hmmm.... Well, here comes my first post ....and for it, I thought of writing a review of a movie I recently saw, last Friday.

It was 9 in the evening (IST), I was sitting idle. I suddenly remembered that HBO was going to air one of my most favorite movie, The Bourne Ultimatum.

Ya ya I know, some of you might have seen it... but this is for those who haven't and anyway, I am writing it to start blogging with something.

Okay, so this is the third and final installment to the Bourne series, the first two were Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy. Adapted from the 3 novels with the same name written by Robert Ludlum, the whole series is a fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat action movie with loads of thrills and that one mystery.

Jason Bourne is the person on who this whole series is based upon, the protagonist. This Jason Bourne has actually lost his memory of who he is and where he is from, not even his name. Luckily, he finds a laser with him which contains the bank account number of Swiss Bank. There, in his account, he finds a passport from where he learns his name . But to his horror, he finds many passports with his photograph but with different identities and a gun! He next realizes that there are people who, he doesn't know why, are chasing him, trying to hunt him down, to kill him. Finally, he finds out the people who want him dead are none other than the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) of the United States!!Well this is a brief story of the first part, Bourne Identity.

Now our hero, Jason Bourne, is on the run from the people, trying to figure out why they want him dead, and to remember and recollect his lost memory of who he actually is. He only knows that he's highly skilled, and trained to fight without a weapon, even kill. The story continues in the second part, the Bourne Supremacy. He loses his girl friend (that he made in the first part), who's shot dead in India by another CIA agent (known as "asset") who actually comes for him. He's on the run again in Europe. He recollects a little that he was given assignments to kill some political leaders around the globe.

Now comes the final installment, The Bourne Ultimatum. By this time, he has remembered that he too was an agent (asset) who has done some political murders. He feels guilty for all that he had done, and wants to retrace his steps back to where it all began, to finish where it all started. Meanwhile, a journalist named Simon Ross, working for the Guardian Newspaper, London, is trying to find out who this Jason Bourne is and what does he have to do with a secret operation named "BlackBriar", and also writes some articles regarding Bourne. But he isn't smart enough, and doesn't realizes in what trouble he has pulled himself into. The moment he speaks the word "Black Briar" on his cell phone while talking to someone, a CIA center stationed in London catches the signal of his phone, traces and finds out that it belongs to him. How can they do that? Well, that single word catches the attention of the systems of CIA and sends an alert to the station. (Traces every cell phone, email, sms all round the globe - do they even care for people's privacy?)

Bourne reaches out to him to find out who his source is. Ross tells him that Blackbriar is an upgrade to a previous CIA project named Treadstone. He says it all started with Jason Bourne.
Now, Bourne realizes that there is a huge secret, an ice-berg of which he is only the tip. Some dirty secret is hidden inside the CIA which it doesn't wanna revealed.The rest movie is all about how he finds out his true identity and that dirty little secret.

This movie, I can say, is actually trying to show how the intelligence really works, and it does reveal some of its deepest secrets. Simply superb!!

Anyway, I don't want to tell the whole story here. People who haven't seen the trilogy will lose the excitement of watching them. The story line is perfect. Breath-taking action. Wonderful direction.

I give it a two thumbs up!!