Get Involved

TOGB was created in November, 2007 as a single web page to express the overall idea. I (Cole,) have not created websites of any complexity. As such, I could use help to create a Petition page, and provide Membership features that allow people to join the group so we can stay in touch via email bulletins, etc. There is a fully functional blog page which is in its infancy. So if you would like to offer some expertise in any of these areas, it would be greatly appreciated.

As a crucial facet of this endeavor, I will need contact names and phone numbers for people who are on a Director level or higher for organizations such as The Union of Concerned Scientists; The Natural Resources Defense Counsel; Amnesty International; Worldwatch Institute; Doctors Without Borders; American Civil Liberties Union, etc.

If you or anyone you know is connected to an exceptional Individual of high moral character, such as Gore Vidal, Bill Moyers, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Boxer, Bernie Sanders, or Amy Goodman, etc, that would also be very helpful.

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free: Goethe.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you: Jean-Paul Sartre.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.: Clarence Darrow.

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with: Eleanor Holmes Norton.

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered: Dorothy Thompson.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will: Frederick Douglass.

"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face." -- Justice Potter Stewart : (1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: Walker v. Birmingham, 1967

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem.": Howard Zinn, from 'Failure to Quit'

"With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority"
-- Stanley Milgram, 1965 Milgram was a psychologist who performed a series of experiments that proved conclusively that obedience to authority was so ingrained in the average US citizen they were prepared to cause lethal harm to others when instructed by authority figures to do so. All those who took part were first asked if they would be capable of killing or inflicting severe pain on their fellow human beings. 100% replied categorically 'no'.

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams- (1722-1803), (known as the "Father of the American Revolution.")

"The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government." -- Daniel Webster - (1782-1852) US Senator

... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy: Alex Carey: Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. [1941]: Edward Dowling.

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time. Noam Chomsky.

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men: Plato.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross: Sinclair Lewis

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." "I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag." -- Major General Smedley Darling Butler - (1981-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933

"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." -- Herbert Sebastien Agar - (1897-1980) Source: The Time for greatness, 1942

"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth." -- Peter Abelard (1099-1142) Source: Sic et non, c. 1120

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.": - Aldous Huxley - (1894-1963) Author

The soft, the complacent the self-satisfied societies will be swept away with the debris of history - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it." -- John Locke (1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA. 1693

"There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." - George W. Bush(1946- ) 43rd US President: Source: In a speech on August 7, 2002

"The war made possible for us the solutionof a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times." - Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister - Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943

'If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.' Paul Wellstone

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. (1790): John Philpot Curran.

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men: Voltaire.

Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least: Wendy Kaminer.