Oklahoma City Bombing Quotes

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A Manhattan lawyer who describes himself as "America`s leading expert on the militia movement" writes that he hugged his three-year-old kid the night of the Oklahoma City bombing. He told junior that it happened "because they hated too much" For now, let`s accept the premise that one hundred sixty-eight humans died in Oklahoma City because people "hated too much" Now answer these questions if you would be so kind: did a federal sniper shoot Vicki Weaver in the face because he hated too much? Did our government conduct the Tuskegee with syphilis on black soldiers because it hated too much?
Jim Goad (The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats)
Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I'd been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would've been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate.
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
Even a man accused of the worst act of terrorism ever committed in this country - especially such a man - is entitled to the best possible defense. This concept is a cornerstone of our justice system.
Stephen Jones (Others Unknown: Timothy Mcveigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy)
At the time of the 1 996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: "Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize." U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
And what I’m realizing is that when he doesn’t intervene, it doesn’t mean he isn’t there. I think it means just the opposite. He decided not to just sweep down and fix our problems every time something goes wrong. Instead he chose to redeem us eternally by sending his Son.” Tragedies like the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Sandy Hook flipped through Garrett’s mind. The reality of a fallen world was clear. And yet like Jordan said, wasn’t God’s plan really a plan of redemption? Yes, he believed that God was capable of fixing our problems, but he chose instead to rescue and redeem humankind permanently. “Maybe,” he said, trying to put his thoughts into words, “there isn’t
Lisa Harris (Vanishing Point (The Nikki Boyd Files, #4))
Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.
Barry Glassner (The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Muta)
The trial of hapless Timothy McVeigh shared many things in common with the “trials” of other scapegoats from the past. Like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan, McVeigh received inept legal representation. Stephen Jones presented almost no defense, resting after only three and a half days and just twenty-five witnesses. Even establishment talking head attorney Alan Dershowitz would criticize the incompetent defense McVeigh received.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
Since we wrote Mindhunter, the prevalence of certain crimes has changed. Violent crime in general has been on a downward trend, but the number of predatory sexually oriented killers has remained relatively the same. The reason, we believe, is because this type of criminal pathology is not as responsive to societal conditions or improved policing as other criminal enterprises. In the past sixteen years we have become concerned with domestic and international terrorism, a phenomenon that was just beginning when we cited the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing.
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
The F.B.I. Web page on the Murrah bombing lists it as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.” That designation overlooks the Tulsa riots of 1921, in which a white mob, enraged by a spurious allegation that a black teen-ager had attempted to assault a young white woman, was deputized and given carte blanche to attack the city’s prosperous black Greenwood section, resulting in as many as three hundred black fatalities. From one perspective, the Murrah bombing was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, but, as the descendants of the Greenwood survivors know, it was likely not even the worst incident in Oklahoma’s history.
Anonymous
Rescue dogs are trained to perform such responses on command, often in repulsive situations, such as fires, that they would normally avoid unless the entrapped individuals are familiar. Training is accomplished with the usual carrot-and stick method. One might think, therefore, that the dogs perform like Skinnerian rats, doing what has been reinforced in the past, partly out of instinct, partly out of a desire for tidbits. If they save human lives, one could argue, they do so for purely selfish reasons. The image of the rescue dog as a well-behaved robot is hard to maintain, however, in the face of their attitude under trying circumstances with few survivors, such as in the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When rescue dogs encounter too many dead people, they lose interest in their job regardless of how much praise and goodies they get. This was discovered by Caroline Hebard, the U.S. pioneer of canine search and rescue, during the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. Hebard recounts how her German shepherd, Aly, reacted to finding corpse after corpse and few survivors. Aly would be all excited and joyful if he detected human life in the rubble, but became depressed by all the death. In Hebard's words, Aly regarded humans as his friends, and he could not stand to be surrounded by so many dead friends: "Aly fervently wanted his stick reward, and equally wanted to please Caroline, but as long as he was uncertain about whether he had found someone alive, he would not even reward himself. Here in this gray area, rules of logic no longer applied." The logic referred to is that a reward is just a reward: there is no reason for a trained dog to care about the victim's condition. Yet, all dogs on the team became depressed. They required longer and longer resting periods, and their eagerness for the job dropped off dramatically. After a couple of days, Aly clearly had had enough. His big brown eyes were mournful, and he hid behind the bed when Hehard wanted to take him out again. He also refused to eat. All other dogs on the team had lost their appetites as well. The solution to this motivational problem says a lot about what the dogs wanted. A Mexican veterinarian was invited to act as stand-in survivor. The rescuers hid the volunteer somewhere in a wreckage and let the dogs find him. One after another the dogs were sent in, picked up the man's scent, and happily alerted, thus "saving" his life. Refreshed by this exercise, the dogs were ready to work again. What this means is that trained dogs rescue people only partly for approval and food rewards. Instead of performing a cheap circus trick, they are emotionally invested. They relish the opportunity to find and save a live person. Doing so also constitutes some sort of reward, but one more in line with what Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher and father of economics, thought to underlie human sympathy: all that we derive from sympathy, he said, is the pleasure of seeing someone else's fortune. Perhaps this doesn't seem like much, but it means a lot to many people, and apparently also to some bighearted canines.
Frans de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist)
attack, V2K daily. His remarkable story is on his website nanobrainimplant.com
Arthur Berkeley (PHILIP SCHNEIDER: One of the bravest whistleblowers of the 20th century, with overwhelming evidence to confirm that the Oklahoma City and World Trade Centre ... bombings, and 9/11 were false flag attacks.)
Oklahoma City: It is against the law to possess a stink bomb.
Manik Joshi (Weird Laws from Around the World)
The connection between basketball and the bombing may seem like a stretch.
Sam Anderson (Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis)
government finally made amends for its actions at Ruby Ridge.
Lou Michel (American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing)
Finally, we must bear in mind that guns are not the only tools of mass killing. In America, by far the worst mass murder at a school was carried out with dynamite in 1927.68 That attack left forty-five dead and fifty-eight injured. The 1985 Oklahoma City Bombing and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings were other rare exceptions in the United States, but bombs are much more commonly used in countries such as Russia.
John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like
Tananarive Due (The Between)
The government is not interested in a foreign plot. It has its perpetrators and they don’t want anyone or anything complicating it,” Cannistraro postulated in a bold departure from his previous fence-sitting comportment
Jayna Davis (The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing)
While this atrocity “set off a tide of anguish nationwide” (as the Times put it), it struck a particularly painful chord in one midwestern town, reawakening memories of a tragedy that had left a deep and lasting scar on the community. The town was Bath, Michigan, site of the worst school massacre in US history. Perpetrated by a respected citizen, admired by his neighbors and active in local affairs, it claimed more than forty victims, thirty-eight of them children. That carnage was committed not with firearms but with explosives, which also made it the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. It climaxed, moreover, with a horrific suicide bombing.
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
City- Oklahoma City: It is against the law to possess a stink bomb.
Manik Joshi (Weird Laws from Around the World)
Quoting from Theodore Kaczynski's letter to the author: My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of an likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need.
Lou Michel (American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing)
Only later did the media begin to take extremist groups seriously. By then they had committed racist murders in several cities— starting with the liberal Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, who was shot down in his driveway by a white nationalist group—then also bombing a government building in Oklahoma City, shooting Jewish children in a child care center in Los Angeles, and attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
Oklahoma City bombing was the gross destruction of the First Amendment advocated in Senator Charles Schumer’s bill, HR 2580. In this bill, a five-year prison sentence would be given for publicly engaging in unseemly speculation and publishing or transmitting by wire or electronic means baseless conspiracy theories regarding the federal government of the United States. This is clear evidence to me that the proponents of the New World Order are beginning to fear those who are waking up. Looking into Schumer’s other treasonous
J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: The Culling of Man)
Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I’d been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would’ve been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate.
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
The following day August 23rd, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake occurred 84 miles southwest of Washington D.C. This
Arthur Berkeley (PHILIP SCHNEIDER: One of the bravest whistleblowers of the 20th century, with overwhelming evidence to confirm that the Oklahoma City and World Trade Centre ... bombings, and 9/11 were false flag attacks.)
Mothers and fathers walk may walk away from each other, but a grandfather was someone you could count on.
Lou Michel (American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing)