I was sad to hear of his passing...

”Power does what it wants, and now they’re just more naked about it. Now they just put it right out front and say, ‘This is what we’re doing to you folks’. It’s, you know, this country is finished. It’s been sliding downhill a long time.“
“And everybody’s got a cell phone that makes pancakes, so they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to make any trouble. The people have been bought off by gizmos and toys in this country, and no one questions things anymore.”
www.youtube.com/watch



"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things
and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an
irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you
have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They
own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and
control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate,
the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in
their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they
control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you
by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying
to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for
themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't
want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical
thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of
critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.
That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough
to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting
fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know
what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run
the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept
all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours,
reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that
disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for
your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it
back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you
know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because
they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I
are not in *the big club.*"

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937–June 22, 2008)