Random Thoughts Random (Mostly Political) Thoughts
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-A-
"Since Florida has enacted their concealed carry law, the Florida murder rate has dropped by 29%. Nationwide, the murder rate rose 11% over the same period..."
-- ABC News, 1995-Mar-12, reporting on 1994 FBI crime statistics"It goes against our nature to believe the worst, to assume we are being deceived, or to be always on guard against such deception. And every power seeker from Sun Tsu to Gorbachev knows this implicitly."
-- Larry Abraham, The Greening (1990), co-author of None Dare Call it Conspiracy"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-- Lord Acton"Fear is the foundation of most governments."
-- John Adams"Democracy ... while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
-- John Adams, 1815"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation."
-- John Adams"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.
-- John Adams"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
-- John Quincy Adams"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776."He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections."
-- Samuel Adams [letter to James Warren, November 4, 1775]"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule."
-- Samuel Adams, 1772"If taxes are laid upon us without our having a legal representation where they are laid, we are reduced from the character of free subjects to the state of tributary slaves."
-- Samuel Adams"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
-- Samuel Adams (1722-1803), letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776"We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
-- Aesop, Greek slave & fable author"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
-- Howard Aiken, designer of the Mark I relay computer"Only six computers will ever be sold in the commercial market"
-- Howard Aiken, designer of the milestone Mark I relay computer"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."
-- Herm Albright, Reader's Digest, June 1995"It is my right to be uncommon...if I can; I seek opportunity...not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stole calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud, and unafraid; to think and act for myself; enjoy the benefits of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, 'This I have done, and this is what it means to be an American.'"
-- Dean Alfrange"Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument."
-- Ethan Allen"If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the events affecting our nation's well-being should be good for America. If we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally make a mistake in our favor. We . . . are not dealing with coincidence or stupidity, but with planning and brilliance."
-- Gary Allen, from his book None Dare Call It Conspiracy"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other."
-- Oscar Ameringer, "the Mark Twain of American Socialism.""A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way."
-- Fisher Ames, author of the words of the First Amendment"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson"I do not believe that the government should have its long nose poked into the private consensual relationships between people."
-- John Anderson, Independent presidential candidate, 1980"It doesn't matter who you vote for. The government always gets in."
-- Anonymous"Clinton sits on the White House seat
While many work to ensure his defeat
But only few know,
He's on the third row
Of the American Power Elite."
-- anonymous"If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow."
-- Arab Proverb"We are going to do something terrible to you - you will no longer have an enemy."
-- Georgi Arbatov, once adviser to President Gorbachev, quoted in the International Herald Tribune, 1990-Mar-16, p.4"Hitler's rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations... if they had not had the confidence of the masses."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms."
-- Aristotle, "Politics""Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."
-- Aristotle"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle"CLINTON HAS POWERFUL BUDDY IN U.S.S.R. - NEW HEAD OF KGB"
-- headline from Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1991"Spike Lee is obviously more stupid than anyone can be by accident."
-- Dick Armey"Hillary bothers me a lot. I realized the other day that her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists."
-- Dick Armey, of Hillary Clinton"The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been."
-- Alan Ashley-Pitt"The safe way is the right way."
-- Attica Prison sign hanging in an inmate common area"Thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which, though the waves beat continually, yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted."
-- Marcus Aurelius-B-
"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea"
-- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)"By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education.... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments."
-- Russell Baker, "School vs. Education""I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself.... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
-- Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
-- from article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, 1796, unanimously approved by the United States Senate, presumed to have been authored by treaty negotiator Joel Barlow (a friend of Thomas Jefferson)"Every dollar spent to punish a drug user or seller is a dollar that cannot be spent collecting restitution from a robber. Every hour spent investigating a drug user or seller is an hour that could have been used to find a missing child. Every trial held to prosecute a drug user or seller is court time that could be used to prosecute a rapist in a case that might otherwise have been plea bargained.
--- Randy E. Barnett, "Curing the Drug-Law Addiction""The Pen is mightier than the Sword. The Court is mightier than the Pen. The Sword is mightier than the Court."
-- Rey Barry"Beware of him who promises something for nothing."
-- Bernard Baruch, international banker, key backer of Woodrow Wilson's candidacy, head of the War Industries Board, war profiteer, and coiner of the term "Cold War""When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
-- Frederic Bastiat, early French economist"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
-- Frederic Bastiat French Economist (1801-1850)"If every person has the right to defend - even by force - his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly."
-- Frederic Bastiat, The Law, Paris, 1850"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
-- Frederic Bastiat"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
-- Frederic Bastiat"For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce."
-- Peter T. Bauer"To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns."
-- Frances M. Beal"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
-- Charles Austin Beard, historian"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicide, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree."
-- Ceasare Beccaria, 18th century criminologist, in On Crimes and Punishments"A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong."
-- Milton Berle"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
-- Hector Berlioz"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the [public] is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
-- Edward Bernays writing in Propaganda, l928, from "Food & Water Journal""To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of mental illness."
-- William Blase"Free men have arms; slaves do not."
-- William Blackstone (1723-1780), English jurist and professor of common law at Oxford"Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier."
-- Blore's Razor"Maybe that's because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government."
-- David Boaz (in response to Joycelyn Elders)"That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong."
-- William J.H. Boetcker"Prediction is especially difficult. Especially about the future."
-- Niels Bohr"We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place."
-- Daniel Boorstin"Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year."
-- Victor Borge"Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture."
-- Judge Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
-- Frank Borman"The first and most important step toward...success is the feeling that we can succeed."
-- Nelson Boswell"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistable forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense [...] the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war [...] The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history - war [...]"
-- Randolph Bourne (1886-1918), essayist, in The State (unfinished essay)"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
-- James Bovard, Civil Libertarian"But I don't want to defend myself."
-- reportedly uttered by a Brady Law supporter"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928"They [The makers of the Constitution] conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade...there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."
-- Nathaniel Branden's essay, Common Fallacies About Capitalism"The story was also told of an English valet in the 1930's who used his evening off to attend Communist Party meetings. But one week, after a speech on redistribution of wealth, he defected from the Party -- and his employer asked him the reason for his change of heart. 'Well, sir,' said the valet, 'last Friday our speaker explained to us that if all the wealth were divided equally we would each have fifty pounds.'
'What's wrong with that?' asked his employer.
'Well, sir,' said the valet, 'I've already saved fifty-five pounds.'"
-- Kirk Brothers"No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love."
-- Rita Mae Brown, novelist"If you can't say 'Fuck', you can't say, 'Fuck the government'."
-- Lenny Bruce"Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
-- William Jennings Bryan"The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry."
-- William F. Buckley"Happiness is wanting what you have and not wanting what you don't have."
-- Shakyamuni Buddha, 500 BC"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
-- Shakyamuni Buddha"Armed women deter rapists over 400 times each day."
-- bumper sticker"A gun is like a seatbelt; when you need it you need it now!"
-- bumper sticker"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
-- Edmund Burke"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free;
if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."
-- Edmund Burke"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke 1729-1797"Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair."
-- George Burns"The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible."
-- George Burns"Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years."
-- George Burns"Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies."
-- Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
-- William Burroughs"When George Bush was campaigning for the presidency, as incumbent vice president, one of his stops was in Chicago, Illinois, on August 27, 1987. At O'Hare Airport he held a formal outdoor news conference. There Robert I. Sherman, a reporter for the American Atheist news journal, fully accredited by the state of Illinois and by invitation a participating member of the press corps covering the national candidates had the following exchange with then Vice President Bush.
Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are Atheists?
Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak in the Atheist community. Faith in god is important to me.
Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are Atheists?
Bush: No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?
Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on Atheists.
"I've set a clear doctrine: America makes no distinction between the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. If you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists, and you're an enemy of the United States of America."
-- George W. Bush"If this were a dictatorship, things would be a lot simpler. As long as I was the dictator. Heh heh heh."
-- George W. Bush, 2000-Dec-18, in Washington DC, on the occasion of a public appearance with Democratic Congressional leaders"There ought to be limits to freedom. We're aware of the site, and this guy is just a garbage man."
-- George W. Bush, commenting on the website www.gwbush.com"Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure."
-- Samuel Butler-C-
"[...] Even more preposterous than that was the attitude of Johannes Kruger, the revered founding father of the Union of South Africa. Until his death in 1904, Kruger, a fundamentalist Christian, clung tenaciously to the long discarded belief that the earth is flat and at the center of the universe. It is said that when he assumed the office of Prime Minister he assembled a large group of theologians, soothsayers and so-called scientists who were given the ridiculous assignment of proving that the earth is flat."
Louis W. Cable from "Skeptic's Corner" at http://home.inu.net/skeptic/coper.html"Presumably, Clinton concluded that it was better that the passengers (especially the ones in steerage) go down rather than the ship's captain."
-- from the editors' introduction to The Clinton Legacy, edited by Colin Campbell of Georgetown University and Bert Rockman of the University of Pittsburgh, both public policy professors"Australian Leadership elites in politics, the bureaucracy, academia, big business, the churches and the media have effectively cut themselves adrift from the interests of majority of Australians. Many have betrayed the trust of the people they are supposed to represent.
As part of this process the elites, while they may mouth concern for the country, have given up thinking in terms of the national interest to pursue an internationalist agenda. This agenda is eroding the foundations of our nation and marginalising the majority, which has less and less say in its destiny.
The bulk of the media, charged with a watchdog role in the public interest, have become active agents in this process. Academics, artists and others who are supposed to be independent-minded have become propagandists and intellectually corrupt hirelings."
-- Graeme Campbell and Mark Uhlmann"The street price of heroin and cocaine is less than one-fourth of what it was in 1981. The purity of heroin available on the street has increased more than fourfold since 1981. Incarceration for drug arrests has risen tenfold since 1981. The number of drug-overdose deaths has increased more than fivefold since 1981. The proportion of high school seniors reporting that drugs are readily available has doubled since 1981. This is not victory. This is failure."
-- Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA), at the GOP "Shadow Convention" in Philadelphia, the week of 2000-Jul-30"Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better."
-- Camus"Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand."
-- Thomas Carlyle"When the oak is felled the forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown silently by an unnoticed breeze."
-- Thomas Carlyle"A reporter once asked me why I didn't talk a lot about race. I said because I'm a neurosurgeon...You see, when I take them to the operating room and cut the scalp and take off the bone slab, I'm operating on the thing that makes that person who they are. The cover doesn't make them who they are. When are we going to understand that?"
-- Dr. Ben Carson"A truly moral nation enacts policies that encourage personal responsibility and discourage self-destructive behavior by not subsidizing people who live irresponsibly and make poor choices."
-- Dr. Ben Carson"There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that's not going to be very helpful for usin the the long run...Sombody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to the bullies."
-- Dr. Ben Carson"Let's say sombody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now."
-- Dr. Ben Carson"Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself,'Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.'"
-- Lillian Carter (mother of Jimmy Carter)"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these."
"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
-- George Washington Carver
-- Douglas Casey (1992)"The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. This is not a charge. My opinion of that revolution is not at issue. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power.... No one could have been more dismayed than I at what I had hit, for though I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power."
-- Whittaker Chambers (born Vivian Jay Chambers in 1901, Soviet agent turned right wing Christian activist, and exposer of Soviet agent, trusted aide to FDR, and UN co-architect, Alger Hiss), 1952"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
-- G.K. Chesterton"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand."
-- Chinese Proverb"Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers."
-- Frank Chodorov"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."
-- Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor (linguistics), and neo-Nazi of a sort"Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting. But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. Literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional rights."
-- Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor (linguistics), and neo-Nazi of a sort, in a 1993-Dec-6 interview with David Barsamian"American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics."
-- Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor (linguistics), and neo-Nazi of a sort"Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you."
-- Winston Churchill"Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge."
-- Winston Churchill"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, and an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
-- Winston Churchill"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
-- Winston Churchill"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future."
-- Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons"Most people stumble over the truth, now and then, but they usually manage to pick themselves up and go on, anyway."
-- Winston Churchill"This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure."
-- Winston Churchill"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
-- Winston Churchill"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
-- Winston Churchill"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-- Winston Churchill"If you are young, and not liberal, then you don't have a heart. If you are old, and not conservative, then you don't have a brain."
-- Winston Churchill"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt."
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BC"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear"
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 BC"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence"
-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark - Mapp vs. Ohio"All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery - fortunately, as all now feel - but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people: namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life."
-- excerpt from the decision of the Court in Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 83 (1911)"The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it... No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law, and no courts are bound to enforce it."
-- 16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256"The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity."
-- Grover Cleveland (President of the US 1885-1889 and 1893-1897)"From now on, every state in the country will be required by law to tell a community when a dangerous sexual predator enters its midst."
-- Bill Clinton, 1996-May-17 (included for irony)"I can do any Goddamned thing I want. I'm President of the United States. I take care of my friends and I fuck with my enemies. That's the way it is. Anybody who doesn't like it can take a hike."
-- Bill Clinton, in a White House staff meeting, as reported by Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson in his column on 1999-Apr-8, regarding sicking the IRS on Ken Starr"It has occurred to me really that every one of us has this little scale inside, you know. On one side, there's the light forces and the other side there's the dark forces.... If the scale tips dark even for a little bit, things turn badly for people and those with whom they come in contact. And it can happen for communities and for a whole country."
-- Bill Clinton"To realize the full possibilities of this economy, we must reach beyond our own borders, to shape the revolution that is tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations and individuals, and economies an cultures: globalization. It's the central reality of our time."
-- Bill Clinton, State of the Union address, 2000-Jan-27"violence is wrong"
-- Bill Clinton, 1999-Apr-21, the day after the Littleton, Colorado high school massacre, and the NATO bombing of the high rise party and broadcasting headquarters of the Milosevic family in Belgrade"Write down the name of that motherfucker. When I'm back in office, he's a dead man."
-- Bill Clinton, to a campaign worker, as reported by Samuel Wilson, a former political worker in Clinton's second campaign for governor, in an interview with Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson, regarding a local townsperson encountered on the campaign trail who called Clinton a "two-bit politician""When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks."
-- Bill Clinton, quoted by George Stephanopoulos in his book All Too Human, regarding his Somalia deployment misadventure"I'd like to kill all of these sons of bitches and just be done with it."
-- Bill Clinton, in a White House staff meeting during the impeachment process, as reported by Doug Thompson in his Capitol Hill Blue column of 1999-Apr-8"I am in support of the NRA position on gun control."
-- Bill Clinton, 1982, in a letter to the NRA"Hey, I'm a pretty lousy President."
-- faux Bill Clinton, in The Simpsons (Fox Television), 2000-Feb-6"As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley."
-- Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, on his Georgetown mentor, in his nomination acceptance speech, 1992-Jul-16"I'll rule this country by executive order if Congress won't adopt my agenda."
-- Bill Clinton, 1998-Jul-4"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...that we forget about reality."
-- President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, "NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful"' by Debbie Howlett"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."
-- Bill Clinton, May 29, 1993, The White House"the purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people"
-- Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993"I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I have changed government policy solely because of a contribution."
-- President Clinton, March 10, 1997"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."
-- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993"The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they're not."
-- Hillary Clinton, 1992 60 Minutes interview"It is important that you do not say that you [are] calling because the campaign asked you to, but because you are outraged with what was said about her."
-- campaign aide to Hillary Clinton, in a ca. 2000-Jul-19 bulk email asking the candidate's supporters to protest allegations that Clinton had once used the phrase "fucking Jew bastard" in anger"The principle of the Gothic architechture is infinity made imaginable."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge"A great man must be mindful of nine things: to see beyond when he looks, to listen beyond when he hears, to be gentle in looks, to be respectful in manners, to be true to his words, to take pride in his works, to ask when in doubt, to think of the consequences when in anger, to think of justice and fairness when accepting an advantage."
-- Confucius 551-479 B.C."In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of."
-- Confucius"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind."
-- Joseph Conrad"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed"
-- The Constitution of the United States, sovereign standing law"Civilization and profits go hand in hand."
-- Calvin Coolidge"Patriotism is easy to understand in America: it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country."
-- Calvin Coolidge"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles."
-- Col. Jeff Cooper, from The Art of the Rifle"A troubling number of teachers at all levels regard the bulk of American history and heritage as racist, sexist, and classist, and believe their purpose is to bring about social change..."
-- Helen Cordes, Utne Reader, July-August '91, p.52 excerpted from TIME magazine"The mistake Republicans have made over the years is treating Democrats like adults."
-- Ann Coulter, 2001-Feb-14, at the 28th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Crystal City, Virginia"Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez-faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging."
-- George S. Counts, author of Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?, from the final 1934 volume of a 17 volume Carnegie Foundation funded study exploring the use of public schools for the purpose of socialist indoctrination"To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground."
-- Stephen Covey"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another."
-- Luciano de Crescenzo"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
-- David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35"By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere."
-- Billy Crystal"To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
-- e.e. cummings, "A Miscellany""We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
-- e.e. cummings"Armed women equals polite men."
-- Charles Curley"Handguns should be the province of the military or law enforcement or a special segment of people"
-- Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran"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."
-- John Philpot Curran, 1790-D-
"It is only the atheist who adopts success as the criterion of right."
-- Robert Lewis Dabney, American theologian"You cannot doubt the obligation you owe to God to obey him, and the perfect right he has to require just such a measure of obedience as he may see fit."
-- Robert Lewis Dabney, in a letter to his sister"A liberal is a man who will give away everything he doesn't own."
-- Frank Dane"My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying."
-- Rodney Dangerfield"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."
-- Dante, The Inferno"The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless."
-- James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."
-- James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union"Don't be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so."
-- Belva Davis"If the President of the United States robs a liquor store, since that is not one of his official duties, [he] would be able to stay in office, under that [`official duties'] theory?"
"Absolutely."
-- Lanny Davis' response to Steve Gill of WLAC in Nashville, 1999-Jan-29"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
-- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), American socialist"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962"When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable."
-- René Descartes"The children who know how to think for themselves, spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."
-- John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools."Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future [...] where people will be defined by their associations." 1896
-- John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools."Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty .. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out."
-- Phyllis Diller"a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today."
-- Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) in 1983, describing the ATF"Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children."
-- Walt Disney"On March 5, 1991 Bonnie Elmasri called a firearms instructor, worried that her husband - who was subject to a restraining order to stay away from her - had been threatening her and her children. When she asked the instructor about getting a handgun, the instructor explained that Wisconsin has a 48-hour waiting period. Ms. Elmasri and her two children were murdered by her husband twenty-four hours later."
-- Jeff Dissell, from "More Women and Children Killed By The Brady Bill""The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans."
-- Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister, 1876"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
-- Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, in a novel he published in 1844 called Coningsby, the New Generation"If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results."
-- Jack Dixon"I don't care what the public wants, I'm going to give it what it needs!"
-- Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime...
Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."
-- William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937, from Facts and Fascism, George Seldes, p. 122, and Trading with the Enemy, Charles Higham, p. 167"The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad."
-- Thomas Dolby (English pop music maestro)"The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it."
-- James A. Donald"A bereaved mother whose son was shot and killed nearly two years ago -- and who spoke out against gun violence and memorialized shooting victims at the "Million Mom March" rally in Washington, D.C., last Mother's Day -- was herself convicted of shooting a man she wrongly believed was her son's killer."
-- Jon Dougherty of WorldNetDaily, the opening paragraph of a 2001-Feb-5 article"For Hegel, history was a slaughter bench; for Chambers, it had become an emergency room. He has not been adequately served by a biographer unwilling or unable to understand the nightmare of Cold War epistemology, the place where politics and pathology become indistinguishable. "
-- Ann Douglas, in her review of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus"Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
-- Frederick Douglas, Civil Rights Activist, 1857"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
-- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
-- Justice William O. Douglas"Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas."
-- William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, 1953"Everything that can be invented has been invented"
-- Charles H. Duell, US Commissioner of Patents, 1899"There is not really any such thing as federal money. Every dollar spent at the state or federal level got there by the sweat of someone's labor. Even the funny money created out of thin air carries with it a future taxpayer obligation to pay."
-- Senator David Duke R-Colorado, from Media Bypass, March 1996"The communist party must control the guns."
-- Mao Tse Dung"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints."
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (Simon & Schuster, 1968), p.72"The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority."
-- Will Durant"My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe."
-- Jimmy Durante-E-
"It is, of course, true that if we continue to lose our freedoms, concentration camps on U.S. soil would eventually become a reality."
-- Thomas R. Eddlem, in the John Birch Society's New American, 1997-Feb-17, "PATRIOT BEWARE!""Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
-- Thomas Edison"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
-- Thomas Edison"Religion is all bunk."
-- Thomas Edison"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
-- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921"Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children."
-- Albert Einstein"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy [...]"
-- Albert Einstein, in Why Socialism?, Monthly Review, New York, May 1949"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
-- Albert Einstein"If we hold fast to the concept and practice of unlimited sovereignty of nations it only means that each country reserves the right for itself of pursuing its objectives through warlike means. Under the circumstances, every nation must be prepared for that possibility; this means it must try with all its might to be superior to anyone else. ...
This alone is on my mind in supporting the idea of "World Government", without any regard to what other people may have in mind when working for the same objective. I advocate world government because I am convinced that there is no other possible way of eliminating the most terrible danger in which man has ever found himself [sic]. The objective of avoiding total destruction must have priority over any other objective."
-- Albert Einstein, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, FEB 1948 an open letter in reply to criticism from his "Russian colleagues" included in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein; Carl Seelig, editor page 150"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking ... is freedom."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower"It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school."
-- Joycelyn Elders (see David Boaz' response)"We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time."
-- T.S. Eliot"The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"That which we persist in doing becomes easier - not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"People only see what they are prepared to see."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journals" (1831)"We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends -- the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it."
-- Friedrich Engels"To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable"
-- Epictetus (55-135CE), exiled Roman slave and Stoic, from Discourses, I,2"[...] We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come. [...] Destiny which some introduce as sovereign over all things, [the Epicuran ideal] laughs to scorn, affirming rather that some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For [the Epicuran ideal] sees that necessity destroys responsibility and that chance or fortune is inconstant; whereas our own actions are free, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach. [...]"
-- Epicurus (341-270BCE), Greek philosopher, theoretical particle physicist, objectivist, proponent of the theory of material particulate soul, and feminist, from "Letter to Menoeceus"-F-
"Americans are now certifiably insane. They are crazy. They are suffering a mass psychosis. They have lost their own ability to discern right from wrong."
-- Joseph Farah. editor of WorldNetDaily, 1999-Apr-12"It's illegal to say to a voter "Here's $100, vote for me." So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs."
-- Don Farrar - average guy, age 51"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
-- William Faulkner"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
-- William Faulkner"So what is the first thing he would do to decrease violent behavior? Quick answer. `We've got to dismantle the NRA.' And what to do with Charlton Heston? `Shoot him - with a .44-caliber bulldog," he says with a laugh."
-- Howard Feinstein, New York Post writer, reporting the views of (racist, rich, peddler of psychopath training films, black, and establishment Liberal) Spike Lee, in "Spike Takes On 'Sam' & The NRA" (New York Post, 1999-May-22 - Feinstein interviewed Lee at the Cannes Film Festival in France; the type of handgun Lee identifies was used in the Son of Sam slayings)"The president acted immorally, he acted recklessly, he acted disgracefully. He willfully misled the American people, the members of his Cabinet, his staff and the judicial system."
-- Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it."
-- Richard Feynman"I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it."
-- W. C. Fields"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald"My family can't live in good intentions!"
-- Ned Flanders"The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion."
-- Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), quoted by James Burgh (1714-1775), in "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses," (London, 1774-1775)"I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS."
-- Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
-- Henry Ford, a man admired by Adolf Hitler"As an avid sportsman and as Governor of the State of Louisiana, I have been extremely interested in the recent politically-motivated lawsuits against your industry, especially the ill-advised suit by the mayor of New Orleans. I know I speak for the majority of Louisiana citizens and businessmen when I say that lawsuits such as these are very, very wrong. It is wrong to blame the responsible manufacturer of a legitimate and non-defective product for the criminal use of that product. It is wrong to ignore your industry's success in support of firearms education and accident prevention and to dismiss the role of your industry in providing quality products for hunting, target shooting, self-protection and law enforcement."
-- Louisiana Governor M. J. "Mike" Foster, in a letter to the National Shooting Sports Foundation urging them to hold The 2001 Shot Show in New Orleans"To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth . . . to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can only answer with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one."
-- Michel Foucault, renowned French Marxist and deconstructionist intellectual, enunciating the disdain of the establishment for humanity"Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine?"
-- Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman"84 percent of Americans believe God answers their prayers. More than half believe in miracles."
-- Fox News, 2000-Apr-22"If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
-- Anatole France"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
--Anatole France"Our greatest battles are that with our own minds."
-- Jameson Frank"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759"All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth-that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?"
-- Benjamin Franklin, To Colleagues at the Constitutional Convention"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
-- Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1952)"...it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored."
-- Milton Friedman, Professor (Emeritus) of Economics at the University of Chicago and Hoover Institution Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, and Nobel laureate"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."
-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that ... the severity of each of the contractions -- 1920-21; 1929-33, and 1937-38 -- is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements."
-- Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, p.45"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books."
-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist"The power to determine the quantity of money...is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power ... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank."
-- Milton Friedman"Underlying most arguments against the free marketis a lack of belief in freedom itself."
-- Milton Friedman"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting to decide what's for lunch."
-- Marshall Fritz"We had become one mind. And it wasn't Manson's mind. We had become another, something that goes beyond the individual, I don't know what to call it."
-- Charles Manson follower Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme ("Red")"I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed."
-- Robert Frost"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
-- Robert Frost"You have freedom when you're easy in your harness."
-- Robert Frost"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery."
-- Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path"To expose a 4.2 trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business."
-- Buckminister Fuller-G-
"A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished."
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor, "Newsweek""I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back."
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor"...all of us here at the policy-making level have had experience with directives... from the White House.... The substance of them is that we shall use our grant-making power so as to alter our life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."
-- H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., President, Ford Foundation, to Norman Dodd, Congressional Reese Commission, 1954"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo Galilei"All we have to decide is what to do with the time we are given."
-- Gandalf to Frodo, The Fellowship of the Ring"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-- Muhandas Gandhi"It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result."
-- Muhandas Gandhi"A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble."
-- Muhandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948)"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-- Muhandas Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446."If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis ... In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
-- Richard N. Gardner, in Foreign Affairs, April 1974"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
-- James A. Garfield"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of someone else."
--Judy Garland"There is no reason for anyone in this country, for anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use, a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the constitution."
-- NBC News president, Michael Gartner, USA Today, 1992-Jan-16/p>"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates, in 1981"I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."
-- Charles de Gaulle, French general & politician"What we have is two important values in conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both."
-- Richard Gephardt"I want to go back to Jeff Greenfield's point when you're working inside. It's not that Cabinet members are so delighted to be there that they're willing -- they blind themselves to it. I think rather it is that people who work inside these administrations, as he well remembers, work so hard, they pour their life and soul into this 14, 16 hours a day that they want to believe. They want to believe the best, and they just don't want to believe that the worst is being tossed at somebody. In -- in Watergate, the cover-up worked better inside the Nixon White House and worked longer inside the Nixon White House than anywhere else.
-- David Gergen, editor-at-large, "U.S. News & World Report," on the Larry King Show (CNN), 1999-Mar-8"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."
-- Kahlil Gibran"A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation."
-- George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
-- Jean Giraudoux"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."
-- Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City, quoted in New York Newsday 1998-Apr-20, "Taking Liberties: Courts, critics fault Rudy on free speech, public access""Act right now so that you will look good on color television in the year 1999."
-- Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels, April 1945"When I hear the word `culture,' I get out my revolver."
-- Paul Joseph Göbbels, Nazi minister of propaganda"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."
-- Johann Von Goethe"Without haste, but without rest."
-- Johann Von Goethe"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
-- Johann Von Goethe"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have."
-- Barry Goldwater"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
-- Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the Republican Convention; 1964"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
-- Barry Goldwater"...I would like to be clearly understood...we, the Soviet people, are for socialism.... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy."
-- Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988"More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life [...]"
-- Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988"When anybody brings about as much positive change in such a short period of time as President Bill Clinton has brought, it's bound to discombobulate some people. It's bound to shake them up."
-- Vice President Albert Gore, 1999-Jan-20 rally in Buffalo NY"I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House."
-- Al Gore, October 1996"Prosperity For All"
-- Gore stump speech stage backdrop banner, first week of 2000-Nov"The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it."
-- Remy de Gourmont"Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the `modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth (Eugene Boehler, Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft, Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)"
-- J. Orlin Grabbe, from The Collapse of the New World Order"While some self-defense is in order, it is important to keep in mind that an apocalypse now and then is good for us, however uncomfortable it might be in the interim. For the alternative is a universally-imposed gray global bureaucracy that relentless squeezes the last iota of individual initiative and freedom out of the system."
-- J. Orlin Grabbe, from The Collapse of the New World Order"There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.."
-- Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, to a class of CIA recruits in Langley, 1988-Nov"You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world."
-- Sheila Graham"Socialism is religion in the sense that it too is a faith with its mystics and rituals; religion, because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Christians, the faith in man and in his great strengths as a unique spiritual reality."
-- Italian Communist Party strategist Antonio Gramsci, 1916"It is true that despite an increase in gun ownership in Australia over the past 15 years, there has been a decline in the murder and suicide rates."
-- Melanie Granger, for the Hon. Daryl Williams, Attorney General of Australia and Minister for Justice, from a Letter to Ross Wilmoth dated 27/8/97"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins."
-- Mafia informant Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, on gun control, in an interview by Howard Blum that appears in the September 1999 issue of Vanity Fair magazine"I mean, I do think, bluntly, when you are inside the bubble of power, when you sniff every day the heady scent of power, whether it's the White House or a governor's mansion or a big corporation or a media giant, it's much easier to be blinded to the flaws of the principal, because to say something about those flaws means you are no longer going to be in the room with the car with the private jet. Once you leave that, it's astonishing how -- how much clearer the atmosphere is, and somehow the flaws are seen much more clearly."
-- Jeff Greenfield, syndicated columnist and CNN senior analyst, on the Larry King Show (CNN), 1999-Mar-8"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value."
-- Alan Greenspan, 1967"Every moment in planning saves 3 or 4 in execution."
-- Crawford Greenwalt"At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory controls on the private ownership of firearms are irrelevant to the problem of armed crime: yet that is precisely what the evidence shows. Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a particular type of weapon. The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is minute, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. Controls have had serious effect on legitimate users of firearms, but there is no case, either in the history of this country (Britain) or in the experience of other countries in which controls can be shown to have restricted the flow of weapons to criminals, or in any way reduce crime."
-- Chief Inspector Colins Greenwood, West Yorkshire Constabulary, Police Review, Britain after six months of study of firearms control systems at Cambridge University"Criminals don't register their guns."
-- Murray Grismer, spokesman of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers, and a 13-year veteran of the police force in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country."
-- Texas Guinan. 19th century American businessman"If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest."
-- George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff"Juden haben waffen! Juden haben waffen!"
-- "Jews have arms", the astonished outcry of a retreating German soldier in 1942, cited by Israel Gutman in Resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, "A publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum"-H-
"Although I am a strong political conservative, I now believe that the costs of our fruitless struggle against illegal drugs are not worth the modest benefits likely to be achieved."
-- Prof. Ernest van den Haag, contributing editor, National Review"There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the [German] people were not brainwashed about gun ownership and had been well armed. ... Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis."
-- Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor"Power over a man's subsistence is power over his will."
-- Alexander Hamilton"The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right."
-- Alexander Hamilton"We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system.... It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."
-- Robert H. Hamphill, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no Law, no Court can save it...Where do you stand Citizen?"
-- Judge Learned Hand (1961)"[...] we agree with the National Rifle Association that assault weapons right now play a small role in overall violent crime."
-- A Handgun Control, Inc. representative, in Congressional testimony"Pragmatism is the convenient conclusion reached by those who lack the patience or intelligence to formulate a consistant ideology."
-- Mark Hanley"A proper claim of the privilege against self-incrimination provides a full defense to prosecutions either for failure to register under 5841 or for possession of an unregistered firearm under 5851."
-- Justice Harlan, Supreme Court of the United States, in Haynes v. United States, 390 U.S. 85 (1968), recognizing a special and expansive immunity for felons from the National Firearms Act regulation of machine guns (and other assorted firearms and firearms-related devices), and by extension from any firearm registration regime"Bureaucracy is the preferred weapon of those who distrust the voice of the people... public employment is a cancer gorging itself on the decreasing number of productive workers."
-- Edward Harper (journalist, novelist), Unintended Consequences (Rutledge, 1999)"Over the years I have come to believe that the intellectual either of the right, left or center, will never be able to accept that means are the only thing out there, and the goals are an ever receding chimera."
-- Edward Harper (journalist, novelist), Unintended Consequences (Rutledge, 1999)"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening. [...] The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
-- William T. Harris - U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing."
-- Ralph M. Hawtrey, Secretary of the British Treasury"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."
-- John Hay, 1872"Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible."
-- Friedrich A. Hayek"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
-- Robert HeinleinThe true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
--Nelson Henderson"It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts ... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it."
-- Patrick Henry"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."
-- Patrick Henry, from "Against the Federal Constitution", 1788-Jun-5"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?"
-- Patrick Henry"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."
-- George D. Herron"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
-- Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."
-- Herman Hesse"Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism."
-- Herman Hesse"Communism is not [and never was] a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people."
-- Anthony J. Hilder"Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit."
-- Conrad Hilton"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."
-- Heinrich Himmler"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA -- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."
-- Heinrich Himmler"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to permit uprising."
-- Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan, August 29, 1558."Since 1934, only one legally owned machine gun has been used in a crime of murder, and a law enforcement officer committed that crime."
-- The History Channel, Modern Marvels, Weapons at War: The Machine Gun"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
-- Adolf Hitler"Who owns the youth owns the future!"
-- Adolf Hitler"The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1923"The whole of National Socialism is based on Marx"
-- Adolf Hitler"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I"A covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For (as I have shown before) no man can transfer or lay down his right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment, the avoiding whereof is the only end of laying down any right; and therefore the promise of not resisting force, in no covenant transferreth any right, nor is obliging. For though a man may covenant thus, unless I do so, or so, kill me; he cannot covenant thus, unless I do so, or so, I will not resist you when you come to kill me.
For man by nature chooseth the lesser evil, which is danger of death in resisting, rather than the greater, which is certain and present death in not resisting. And this is granted to be true by all men, in that they lead criminals to execution, and prison, with armed men, notwithstanding that such criminals have consented to the law by which they are condemned."
-- Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), English political philosopher"the people I put in jail have more honor than the top administration in this organization."
-- Bob Hoffman, ATF agent, to Mike Wallace, on 60 Minutes, 1993-Jan"The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught."
-- Nicholas Von Hoffman, liberal columnist at the Washington Post"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1913"Anything that seriously disturbs human society is absolutely not allowed to exist."
-- Li Hongzhi, founder of Falun Gong"the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
-- J. Edgar Hoover, 1956, speaking of communism"I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap."
-- Bob Hope"You see, the left isn't forgiving or civil. Instead they are violently, feverently committed to their unholy war to tear down American democracy and replace it with their version -- an Americanized version -- of communism."
-- David Horowitz, 2000-Jan-31"I don't think there's any reason on Earth why people should have access to automatic and semiautomatic weapons unless they're in the military or in the police."
-- Australian Prime Minister John Howard, in the Los Angeles Times, "Australia's Answer to Carnage: a Strict Law", 1997-Aug-27"The new version of rights are not any kind of rights that our founders fought for and created a government over, and the idea that law should be an instruction manual telling us exactly how high our railings should be and how many square feet the nursery school is, is not anything that existed in our country when I was growing up. It's a brand new invention, and it doesn't work."
-- Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, on C-SPAN's Booknotes 1995-Feb-12"These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation."
-- Frederick C. Howe, in Confessions of a Monopolist (1906)"The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested."
-- William Dean Howells"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
-- Victor Hugo"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which... historically has proven to be always possible."
-- Hubert Humphrey, United States Senator 1960"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)"The real menace of our republic is the invisible government which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over our city, state and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses, generally referred to as 'international bankers."'
-- John F. Hylan, 1911, then mayor of New York-I-
"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."
-- Robert Ingersoll"Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power."
-- Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the Los Angeles Times, 1992-Oct-15, commenting on the response of the Japanese public to government corruption-J-
"Communism equals murder. Everywhere. Always."
-- Jeff Jacoby, columnist at the Boston Globe, 1995-Dec-7"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
-- attributed to President Andrew Jackson, who in 1836 forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter"If Congress has the right to issue paper money, it was given to them to be used by... [the government] and not to be delegated to individuals or corporations."
-- President Andrew Jackson, Vetoed Bank Bill of 1836"One man with courage makes a majority."
-- Andrew Jackson"America is not like a blanket--one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt--many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread."
-- Henry M. Jackson"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
-- Dresden James"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
-- Dresden James"This business about gun control is a joke really. I come from Switzerland where everyone is taught how to treat weapons sensibly and with care. In Switzerland everyone keeps a gun in their own home and we don't have any problems with them."
-- Mrs Emma Jay, 70, Northern New South Wales, Australia, Friend of Port Arthur mass shooting victim Jim Pollard, as reported in The Age 19/7/96 page A7"No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent."
-- John Jay, Address to the People of Britain, 1774"We believe--or we act as if we believed--that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, of their posterity, in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority."
-- Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:357"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."
-- Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1820. FE 10:175"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned: This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
-- Thomas Jefferson"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-- Thomas Jefferson"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
-- Thomas Jefferson"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-- Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40"... the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to P.S. Dupont De Nemours, 24 April 1816"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
-- Thomas Jefferson"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves."
-- Thomas Jefferson"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."
-- Thomas Jefferson"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
-- Thomas Jefferson"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."
-- Thomas Jefferson"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."
-- Thomas Jefferson"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
-- Thomas Jefferson
-- Thomas Jefferson"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed"
-- Thomas Jefferson"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
-- Thomas Jefferson"I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."
-- Thomas Jefferson"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
-- Thomas Jefferson"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
-- Thomas Jefferson"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the right of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-- Thomas Jefferson"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks."
-- Thomas Jefferson's advice to Peter Carr, his nephew and ward, in a letter written in Paris in 1785-Aug-19, cited in the Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, p.318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967)"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
-- Thomas Jefferson"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless...From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be going down hill. It will not be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
-- Thomas Jefferson"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."
-- Thomas Jefferson"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably thro' every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery."
-- Thomas Jefferson, July 1774, Papers 1:121-135, A Summary View of the Rights of British America"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."
-- Thomas Jefferson"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing..."
-- Thomas Jefferson"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
-- Thomas Jefferson"It has long been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression,... that the germ of dissolution of our Federal Government is in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary--an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed."
-- Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Hammond, 1821. ME 15:331 (more Jefferson here)"Bill Clinton is not the problem. The dismally stupid American people are the problem. It's they I fear.
Let us take comfort in the fact that majority opinion in this country has seldom pioneered greatness. It has nearly always been the minority who cherish freedom. What we are witnessing is a predictable cycle--a law of political science as every bit as unalterable as the law of gravity--as so eloquently explained by Prof. Tyler two centuries ago: that democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government, not due to any one corrupt leader, but to the rule of the masses who become dependent on government. Is it any wonder that the Founding Fathers tried to prevent democracy? Yes. We are nose diving into socialism, not because of Bill Clinton, but because of many of the people surrouding you in rush hour traffic.
It's the masses we must march against, and I can think of no better way than to vote Libertarian and abandon the Republicrats. In addition challenge every Clinton defender you know to name the three branches of the federal government and explain the function of each. When they can't (which in my experience is nearly all of them), simply dismiss them as unqualified to form a serious opinion."
-- poster "JJ", 1999-Feb-11, from the georgiapolitics Message Board"Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions."
-- Judge Earl Johnson Jr."Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for."
-- David Starr Jordan-K-
"You can't pay people for doing nothing without forcing others to do something for nothing."
-- J. Kesner Kahn"Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all ye know on earth, and al ye need to know."
-- John Keats"People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. The question, `Where are you from?' doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting. They live somewhere near a Gap store, and what else do you need to know?"
-- Garrison Keillor"The President's essential character flaw isn't dishonesty so much as a-honesty. It isn't that Clinton means to say things that are not true, or that he cannot make true, but that everything is true for him when he says it, because he says it. Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite. He is the existential President, living with absolute sincerity in the passing moment."
-- Michael Kelly, "The President's Past," New York Times Magazine, 1994-Jul-31"Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold."
-- Michael Kelly"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society"Australians have never given their consent to the dangerous experiment of turning their country into the utopian dream of the multinational state. This dream, as yet unsuccessful in any corner of the globe, is being ruthlessly imposed on Australians in lieu of their informed consent. As some of the results of multiculturalism begin to emerge, the experiment, already unpopular, grows daily less popular but the social engineers continue to insist that multiculturalism works in much the same way that they slavishly admire the emperor's clothes."
-- E J Kempster"At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good."
-- Senator Edward Kennedy, D-MA, 2002-Feb-4, in a statement he read into the Senate record (the New England Patriots had just won the Superbowl)."Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-- John F. Kennedy, 1962"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings."
-- John F. Kennedy, address to newspaper publishers, 1961-Apr-27"The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."
-- John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 10 days before his assassination. Several days before this speech, Kennedy ordered an initial issue of Treasury Department metal certificates. Three days after the speech, he proposed to Nikita Khrushchev that the United States and Soviet Union embark on a joint program to land men on the moon - Khrushchev received this proposal favorably. Also shortly before his assassination, Kennedy vowed to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency, which he blamed for the Bay of Pigs disaster."Well, the stock market is by licensed brokers [...]"
-- Andrew Ketterer, attorney general of Maine, on Public Radio's "Here and Now" , 2000-Jun-19, explaining why he will initiate civil forfeiture proceedings against participants in a pyramid scheme sweeping New England, but not against the stock market."If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it."
-- Charles F. Kettering"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens..."
-- John Maynard Keynes"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river."
-- Nikita Khrushchev"The demise of substantive due process, apparent in the 1950s, is a fact today insofar as the validity of economic legislation is concerned, although in a few isolated cases, involving the obligation of contracts, and perhaps expanding in the regulatory takings area, the Court has demonstrated that some life is left in the old doctrines."
-- Killian and Costello, Introduction to The Constitution of the USA - Analysis and Interpretation 1996 GPO printing, the US Senate and the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress"Knowledge and action are twins, each glorifying the other."
-- Joseph Kimhi, "Shekel HaKodesh""If sexual relations between consenting adults are not part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution, then the American democracy is in trouble."
-- Coretta Scott King"A right delayed is a right denied."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr."There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought."
-- Charles Kingsley"Power has a certain attraction."
"Is it an aphrodisiac?"
"Yes, it is."
[...]
"The secret bombings in Cambodia - do you regret this today?"
"No."
[...]
"On the main lines of our policy, I wouldn't change anything."
-- Henry Kissinger, in an interview with Leslie Stahl on the CBS news program 60 Minutes, first aired 1999-Mar-7"I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy."
-- Henry Kissinger, appearing on CNBC, 2000-Dec-13"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer."
-- Henry Kissinger"Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad."
-- Henry Kissinger"When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the 'anti-gun' thesis. ... It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. ... [But] the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U.S. ... Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. ... The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse." -- Prof. Gary Kleck, Florida State University School of Criminology, from a speech given to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, as reported by Don B. Kates, Jr. in "Shot Down", National Review, March 6, 1995, pages 49-54
"Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation."
-- Fletcher Knebel, historian"America has many more guns than England, and a lower violent crime rate. Switzerland has many more guns than Germany, and a lower violent crime rate. England had much less crime in 1900, when the nation had no gun laws, than it does in 2000, when England has some of the most repressive gun laws in Europe. Gun prohibition leads to boldness by criminals, and passivity by the innocent - and therefore to many more violent crimes committed against the innocent."
-- David B. Kopel, in an interview with Carlo Stagnaro for Zola Times 2000-Oct-23"Liberalizing concealed carry laws won't lead to a return to the Wild West - though it wouldn't be bad if it did. ... in 19th Century cattle towns, homicide was confined to transient males who shot each other in saloon disturbances. The per capita robbery rate was 7% of modern New York City's. The burglary rate was 1%. Rape was unknown."
-- David Kopel, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 1994-Feb-28, in "Have Gun, Will Eat Out""Antigun advocates have always faced an uphill battle in this country. Americans have, to begin with, a constitutional right to gun ownership. Today, half of American households exercise this right, owning a total of about 250 million guns; and over 99 percent of those households do so in a responsible manner. To fight for major restrictions on an item that plays such a valued part in the lives of so many people looks like a nearly impossible task. So if you're really committed to the effort, and you want to win, what do you do? Simple: You lie."
-- Dave Kopel"People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media."
-- Ted Koppel"There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality."
-- Charles Krauthammer"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic."
-- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn"I will never understand this peculiar American custom of intensely pagan worshipping of the man-made laws, 99% of which are an obvious inhuman abomination sprung into life by the most criminal and psychopathic part of the population irresistibly attracted to power over other human beings."
-- Boris Kuperschmidt-L-
"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
-- Anne Lamot"No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence."
-- Ann Landers, former director of Handgun Control, Inc."What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."
-- Edward Langley"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks."
-- Doug Larson (English middle-distance runner who won gold medals at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, 1902-1981)"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur."
-- Latin for "Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.""One man with a gun can control 100 without one. [...] Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms."
-- V.I. Lenin, from Collected Works, Vol. 35, 4th ed., p. 286. Congressional Record, April 28, 1970, p. H3601"According to its form a strong revolutionary organization may also be described as a conspirative organization - and we must have the utmost conspiracy for an organization of that kind. Secrecy is such a necessary condition - that all other conditions (number, and selection of members, functions, etc.) must all be subordinated to it."
-- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov "Lenin," Chto Dyelat ("What Is to Be Done?")"Democracy is indispensable to socialism."
-- V.I. Lenin"The goal of socialism is communism."
-- V.I. Lenin"Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat."
-- Alex Levine"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation."
-- C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1943)"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C.S. Lewis"The regional Federal Reserve Banks are not government agencies.... but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations."
-- Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (9th Cir. 1982)"Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et pauperem."
Let your mouth be open for those who have no voice, in the cause of those who are ready for death.
Let your mouth be open, judging rightly, and give right decisions in the cause of the poor and those in need.
-- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9"World War I had far reaching implications for America that still haven't seen the light of day. This was the beginning of the fall of the American republic, the rise of the American democracy, the loss of American innocence and the death of the American dream through a still undeclared federal bankruptcy. Most Americans have been asleep to the truth ever since."
-- Johnny Liberty"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."
-- G. Gordon Liddy"What's the difference between a liberal and a conservative? A liberal will interpret the constitution, a conservative will quote it!"
-- Rush Limbaugh"...You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer..."
-- Abraham Lincoln"Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
-- Abraham Lincoln"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed."
-- Abraham Lincoln, shortly before his assassination"No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide."
-- Abraham Lincoln"We the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."
-- Abraham Lincoln"Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way."
-- Abraham Lincoln"You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
-- Abraham LincolnI have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had absolutely no other place to go.
--Abraham Lincoln"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
-- Abraham Lincoln"...From now on depressions will be scientifically created."
-- Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913, on the Federal Reserve Act"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his."
-- John Locke, 1690"I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8 by 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey."'
-- Bill Lockyer, California Attorney General, on Kenneth Lay CEO of energy producer Enron"Why should America adopt a policy of near-zero tolerance for private gun ownership? [...] [W]ho can still argue compellingly that Americans can be trusted to handle guns safely? We think the time has come for Americans to tell the truth about guns. They are not for us, we cannot handle them."
-- Los Angeles Times, 1993-Dec-28"Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than most people believe. Consider New York, with more than 2.6 million children under the age of 10. From 1993 to 1997, the Centers for Disease Control report that there were only six accidental gun deaths in that age range - an annual rate of 1.2 deaths. Yet, with over 3.3 million adult New Yorkers owning at least one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.
[...]
Guns clearly deter criminals: Americans use guns defensively around 2 million times each year - five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997. And 98 percent of the time, simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.
[...]
Recent research that I have done, examining juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides for all the states in the United States from 1977 to 1996, found that safe-storage laws had no impact on either type of death. However, what did happen was that law-abiding citizens were less able to defend themselves against crime. The 15 states that adopted these laws during this period faced over 300 more murders and 3,860 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased dramatically."
-- John R. Lott, senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws"How many evils have flowed from religion!"
-- Lucretius (~98-55BCE), Roman poet who categorically denied the reality of the supernatural"Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. In particular, we find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 treatment states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states."
-- Jens Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000-Aug-2"At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer."
-- Marshall Lumsden (a bit of hyperbole, but the message is clear)-M-
"Those who by valorous ways become princes, like these men [`Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like'], acquire a principality with difficulty, but they keep it with ease. The difficulties they have in acquiring it rise in part from the new rules and methods which they are forced to introduce to establish their government and its security. And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them."
-- Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince"There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation."
-- James Madison"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
-- James Madison"A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country..."
-- James Madison"Democracy is the most vile form of government ... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
-- James Madison, 1787, Federalist Paper #10"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- President James Madison, "Notes on Virginia""What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?"
-- James Madison"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."
-- James Madison, Federalist Paper #62"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
-- James Madison"Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
-- James Madison, Federalist #10"Let us begin to measure one another in terms of contributing to each other's success."
-- John W. Magaw, Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 1994-Aug"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election ... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States."
-- Sen. George W. Malone, 1957"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
-- Nelson Mandela"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy."
-- Charles Manson, leader of a murderous cult of entirely unskeptical followers"...[W]hat shall be the supreme law of the land... only laws that are made in pursuance of the constitution have that rank. . .All laws repugnant to the Constitution are void of law."
-- Marbury v. Madison, 5 US 137 at Sec. 180, (1803)"That which is cannot be true."
-- Herbert Marcuse, summarizing a core principle of Hegel's dialectical "logic," the immediate intellectual ancestor of Marxism, in Reason and Revolution (1941, Boston: Beacon Press)"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx"I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury."
-- Groucho Marx"For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him."
-- Karl Marx"The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived."
-- Karl Marx"Religion is the opium of the masses."
-- Karl Marx"Democracy is the road to socialism."
-- Karl Marx"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism."
-- Karl Marx"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
-- Karl Marx"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer."
-- Karl Marx, Capital (1867) Volume 1, Chapter 15, "Machinery and Modern Industry," enumerating a critical Marxist dementia. The inventive mind is the preeminent source of wealth, of course."Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."
-- Karl Marx, from The Communist Manifesto"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials."
-- George Mason"To disarm the people--that was the best and most effective way to enslave them."
-- George Mason, founding father who led opposition to adoption of the US Constitution before the addition of the Bill of Rights"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."
-- W. Somerset Maugham"...there is a new religion in the world. The god of this new religion is government, and the ritual the worshippers perform is legislation."
-- Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?"I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within."
-- General Douglas MacArthur"Business Week says that each year in the US there are more than 100,000 new laws, rules and regulations enacted."
-- Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?"Imagine if a scientist claimed he had made up a law of physics or chemistry. He'd be carted away to a lunatic asylum. As we'd expect, much of political law is complete fantasy."
-- Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?"In other words, governments do not collect taxes to provide services, they provide services as an excuse to collect taxes."
-- Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?"Remember the words of Chairman Mao: `It's always darkest before it's totally black.'."
-- John McCain, 1999-Sep-17, on Jay Leno's show, discussing his presidential election prospects"No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels."
-- J.R. McCulloch, economist (1789-1864) Principles of Political Economy"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control.... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
-- Larry P. McDonald, US Congressman, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets"The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers."
-- Congressman Louis T. McFadden"This has got nothing to do with common sense, this is about politics."
-- Hon Bill McGrath MLA, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Deputy National Party Leader, at the Annual General Meeting of the Ballarat Arms and Militaria Collectors Society Inc., August 1996 (as recorded on videotape)"In the US the sanctimonious maxim that 'Ignorance of the law is no excuse' puts every citizen at risk. That may have been a sound rule in simpler times, when the catalog of punishable offenses was limited to traditional offenses like murder, robbery, rape and larceny, but it becomes a sinister joke when applied to the five-foot shelf of the US criminal code and the even more voluminous statutes of individual states."
-- Charles Meachling, Jr., US State Dept., Cambridge Law professor"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-- H.L. Mencken"There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
-- H.L. Mencken"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."
-- H.L. Mencken"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous...The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."
-- HL Mencken"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H.L. Mencken"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."
-- H.L. Mencken"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-- H.L. Mencken"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable..."
-- H.L. Mencken"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken"Whenever A annoys or injures B on pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."
-- H. L. Mencken"In growing up, the normal individual has learned to check the expression of aggressive impulses. But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival."
-- Stanley Milgram, Yale social psychologist, in Obedience To Authority"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
-- John Stuart Mill, 1859"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection."
-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty"Conversancy with Hegel tends to deprave one's intellect."
-- John Stuart Mill"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men (plus a few women). This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order. [...] A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment -- the ruling class -- is not supposed to be discussed."
-- Arthur S. Miller, George Washington University Professor of Law (deceased)"By the way, don't worry about Obamacare. Libs will eventually do it in when they realize participation will involve a Photo ID."
-- Dennis Miller"Money can't buy you happiness .. But it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery."
-- Spike Milligan"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."
-- Montesquieu"For many people security is a heavy weight around them that won't let them consider a serious change in direction."
-- Thomas Moore"A man always has two reasons for doing anything -- a good reason and the real reason."
-- attributed to J. P. Morgan"...the increase in the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks from 143 million dollars in 1913 to 45 billion dollars in 1949 went directly to the private stockholders of the [Federal Reserve] banks."
-- Eustace Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy"Although Communism, like other `isms,' had origined with Marx's association with the House of Rothschild, it enlisted the reverent support of John D. Rockefeller because he saw Communism for what it is, the ultimate monopoly, not only controlling the government, the monetary system and all property, but also a monopoly which, like the corporations it emulates, is self-perpetuating and eternal. It was the logical progression from his Standard Oil monopoly."
-- Eustace Mullins, chapter 10 The Rockefeller Syndicate, of Murder by Injection"The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. [...] They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results."
-- Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, 1923"Under the surface, the Rothschilds long had a powerful influence in dictating American financial laws. The law records show that they were powers in the old Bank of the United States."
-- Gustavus Myers, History of The Great American Fortunes-N-
"A lot of people who go into law school have a strong sense of right and wrong and a belief in moral truths. Those values are destroyed in law school, where students are taught that there is no right and wrong and where such idealistic, big-picture concepts get usurped. They actually come to disdain right-versus-wrong thinking as unprofessional and naive."
-- Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, No Contest, p.334 (1996)"Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was SHUT UP."
-- Joe Namath"The pig if I am not mistaken supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon. Let others say his heart is big I call it stupid of the pig."
-- Ogden Nash"`She joined the Communist Party during the Depression, attracted by its support for social welfare programs like food subsidies, unemployment aid, and social security.' Today, of course, that's why people join the Democratic Party."
-- from National Review, quoting the 2000-Jan-24 New York Times obituary of environmentalist Hazel Wolf"The only way to discourage the gun culture is to remove the guns from the hands and shoulders of people who are not in the law enforcement business."
-- The New York Times, 1975-Sep-24"The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth - in Morocco - to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund."
-- from a full-page advertisement by the government of Morocco, in the New York Times, April 1994"We hate our politicians so much that even if they tell us they lied, we don't believe them."
-- Peter Newman"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr, Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary (NYC), as quoted by George Stephanopoulos"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies."
-- Nietzsche"The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery."
-- Albert Jay Nock"After the 1994 election, there was a lot of talk about getting rid of the Department of Education, which had a budget of $24.4 billion at the time. Roughly five years later, the department is still kicking, and a budget of $35.6 billion has just been approved. ... In 1993, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole was asked about judicial activists while on a radio call-in show. 'If you give us a majority and we don't produce, then you ought to throw us out,' he responded. Well, it's been five years. Isn't it time to start producing?"
-- Free Congress Foundation's John Nowacki"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities."
-- Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher"According to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, only 36 percent of U.S. households had guns in 1999 - down from 51 percent just six years earlier."
-- editorial in the New York Post, 2001-Mar-13-O-
"I don't care if you want to hunt. I don't care if you think it's your right. I say: `Sorry, it's 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison."'
-- Television talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell"America is run by members of the federal reserve board, by a few powerful senators and congressmen who chair important committees and by the sitting president and his close advisers. The Supreme Court Justices also have some say, especially if any of the power brokers get out of hand and start wielding too much influence. [...]
Chaos is what the powerful in America fear the most. Belief in the system is what they want the most."
-- Bill O'Reilly, in his 2000-Dec-6 column for WorldNetDaily"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-- P. J. O'Rourke"For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money."
-- P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist. Parliament of Whores, "The Winners Go to Washington, D.C." (1991)."Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
-- P.J. O'Rourke"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
-- P.J. O'Rourke"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."
-- SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933"If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation."
-- The Old Farmer's Almanac"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell"Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war"
-- George Orwell, 1984"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
-- George Orwell"The further society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."
-- George Orwell"Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."
-- Frank Outlaw-P-
"Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does."
-- US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991"Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was."
-- US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991"That government is best which governs least."
-- Thomas Paine"From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?"
-- Thomas Paine"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defence. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside.... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; . . . the weak will become prey."
-- Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in "Thoughts on Defensive War", in The Pennsylvania Magazine, July 1775"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it."
-- Thomas Paine, Rights of Man ("Conclusion")"To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not."
-- Thomas Paine, 1792"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
--Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)"The importance of an honest, stable, gold money supply is to ensure that relative scarcity, demand and production efficiency of goods and services are accurately represented through their actual market prices. Prices are information."
-- Boston T. Party"Congress had no authority to grant a private consortium of banks the monopoly privilege to create the nation's currency."
-- Boston T. Party"Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, happiness, which is everything in the world."
-- Blaise Pascal"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-- Blaise Pascal"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."
-- William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, ca.1694"Don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom."
-- General George S. Patton"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-- George Patton"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
-- Congressman Ron Paul, 1987"I'm a politician, and as a politician I have the perogotive to lie whenever I want."
-- Charles Peacock, ex-director of Madison Guaranty, the Arkansas S&L at center of Whitewatergate."Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)"He could rage at the `hypocrisy of the capitalist system.' He could refer to a representative in England of an American philanthropy as `the one who distributes the Rockefellers' blood-stained money"' -- Joseph E. Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt, 18 Nov 1783"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, [Nov. 18, 1783]"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
-- Plato"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-- Plato, 347, BC"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."
-- Plato, circa 400 BC"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
-- Plato, circa 400 BC"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners."
-- Ernst Jan Plugge, Dutch network security consultant"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
-- Plutarch"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
-- Plutarch"Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed, and a picture presented which by its crude coloring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy is beyond question.
A moment's reflection would tell any reasonable person that such obvious bias cannot possibly represent the truth. But the moment's reflection is not allowed; lies are circulated with great rapidity. The unthinking mass accept them and by their excitement sway the rest.
The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in wartime in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned."
-- Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, 1928"Clinton engaged in a pattern of criminal behavior and obsessive public lying, the tendency of which was to disparage, undermine, and even subvert the judicial system of the United States, the American ideology of the rule of law, and the role and office of the President."
-- Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Harvard University Press, 1999)"But focusing solely on guns is not the right question, according to Joe Morse, president of Seacoast Firearms in Hampton. Morse pointed out that New Hampshire has the second lowest homicide rate in the country, while Granite Staters own the most guns per family of any state in the nation."
-- the Portsmouth Herald, 1999-Apr-22 (shortly after Columbine), "Gun laws debated", by Steve Jusseaume"he has built the doomsday machine, in order to make trains run on time."
-- Daniel Pouzzner, personal correspondence 2000-Feb-9, on Henry Kissinger"Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power, and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents."
-- Daniel Pouzzner"Most gun-grabbers want to disarm you because they believe you must share their sickness, which they are sure would drive them to murder or suicide were they armed with a gun."
-- Daniel Pouzzner"The thing I keep running into with libertarians is that they are purposely blind to the following: if you start with a weak state and a laissez-faire economy, eventually megacorporations will coalesce and become a defacto state, usually fascist and obviously not held accountable by the democratic process. And the megacorps will mold and embolden the state so that it has the authority and agenda to serve them. I don't have to wonder about the viability of this theory, since I have discovered that the US is more or less living proof."
-- Daniel Pouzzner, from personal email"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be, at every operation and at every transaction, taxed, stamped, registered, numbered, counted, noted, measured, assessed, authorized, licensed, admonished, prevented, forbidden, corrected, reformed, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, fleeced, drilled, extorted from, exploited, monopolized, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at slightest resistance and first word of complaint, to be sacrificed, betrayed, harassed, repressed, disarmed, hunted down, clubbed, abused, fined, sold, and, to crown it all, to be outraged, ridiculed, mocked, derided, dishonored. THAT is government; that is its justice, that's its morality."
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon"Bill Clinton's greatest "gift" is his ability to strip all dignity from our most precious institution, to reduce everything, including himself, to a cheap joke."
-- Wessley Pruden, Washington Times editor-Q-
"... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."
-- Prof. Carroll Quigley, author of Tragedy and Hope (1966)"I am now quite sure that Tragedy and Hope was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom"
-- Carroll Quigley, in a letter to a friend"There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an institutional Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies ... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-- Dr. Carroll Quigley"I am firmly of the opinion [...] that there never was a paper pound, a paper dollar, or a paper promise of any kind, that ever yet obtained a general currency [as money] but by force or fraud, generally by both. That the army has been grossly cheated; that the creditors have been infamously defrauded [some closed their shops to prevent being paid off with worthless paper money]; that the widows and fatherless have been oppressively wronged and beggared; that the gray hairs of the aged and the innocent, for want of their just dues, have gone down with sorrow to their graves, in consequence of our disgraceful depreciated paper currency."
-- Josiah Quincy, written to George Washington, quoted in Albert S. Bolles, The Financial History of the United States, vol. I (New York: D. Appleton, 1896, 4th ed.), p. 132."Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel."
-- John Quinton, American actor/writer-R-
"The Clinton administration didn't cause these fires, but their policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis. I don't think it's a conspiracy, but it's a philosophy they have that leads to explosive fires that destroy everything."
-- Marc Racicot, governor of Montana, in an interview appearing in the New York Times 2000-Aug-12, decrying the mismanagement that led to the summer's catastrophic wildfires"[...] For example, Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the Treasury and chief architect of the Bretton Woods agreement and the World Bank and first director of the International Monetary Fund, was not, as he claimed, one of the red-baiter's victims but a Soviet agent regularly reporting to the KGB."
-- Ronald Radosh, Senior Research Associate, Center for Communitarian Policy Studies, George Washington University, in the LA Times 1998-Nov-9"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."
-- Ayn Rand"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
-- Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government"Get the hell out of my way!" [John Galt]
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."
-- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness"Listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master."
-- Ayn Rand"Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation--and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering."
-- Ayn Rand"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."[Francisco d'Anconia]
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged"We the people tell the government what to do. It doesn't tell us."
-- Ronald Reagan"Republicans believe every day is 4th of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15."
-- Ronald Reagan"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
-- Ronald Reagan"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
-- Ronald Reagan"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
-- Ronald Reagan"The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."
-- Ronald Reagan"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."
-- Ronald Reagan"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
-- Ronald Reagan"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
-- Ronald Reagan"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
-- Ronald Reagan"I oppose registration for the draft... because I believe the security of freedom can best be achieved by security through freedom."
-- Ronald Reagan"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
-- Ronald Reagan"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-- Ronald Reagan, remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"
-- Ronald Reagan -October 27, 1964"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price."
-- Ronald Reagan, 1981 inaugural address"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
-- Ronald Reagan"No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
-- Ronald Reagan"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so."
-- Ronald Reagan"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me. even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
-- Ronald Reagan"Free enterprise has done more to reduce poverty thann all the government programs dreamed up by Democrats."
-- Ronald Reagan"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."
-- Ronald Reagan"You can't be for big government, big taxes and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy."
-- Ronald Reagan"Our government is so corrupt that citizens no longer become incensed when they learn the CIA is running drugs into the U.S."
-- Terry Reed, Compromised"The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress."
-- Ernest Renan"Waiting periods are only a step. Registration is only a step. The prohibition of firearms is the goal."
-- Janet Reno, December 10th, 1993 [Associated Press]"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."
-- Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982)"Guns cause crime the same way that pens cause bad spelling"
-- from the .sig of desertdog8812@webtv.net (C.J. Roberts)"Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide."
-- Tom Robbins"I came to Ottawa with the firm belief that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers and soldiers."
-- Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice, on Maclean's "Taking Aim on Guns", April 25, 1994, page 12"... protection of life is NOT a legitimate use for a firearm in this country sir! ... Not! That is expressly ruled out!"
-- Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice, VCR taping at the Triwood community centre in Calgary, Dec. 1994"You know, gentlemen, that I do not owe any personal income tax. But nevertheless, I send a small check, now and then, to the Internal Revenue Service out of the kindness of my heart."
-- David Rockefeller, before a Congressional committee"Competition is a sin."
-- John D. Rockefeller"I want to own nothing and control everything"
-- John D Rockefeller I"The combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return."
-- John D. Rockefeller I"The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything."
-- Nelson Rockefeller"The presidency - by which I mean the executive state - is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while its steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, the business, the charity, and the community."
-- Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
-- Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931"Republicans want a man that can lend dignity to the office. Democrats want a mand that will lend some money."
-- Will Rogers"We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress."
-- Will Rogers"When I was a kid I was told anyone could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."
-- Will Rogers, 1920's"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the acts."
-- Will Rogers"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."
-- George L. Roman"I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: - 'No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.'"
-- Eleanor Roosevelt"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject, but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1930
"When you play, play hard; when you work, don't play at all."
-- Theodore Roosevelt"Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day affairs of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal."
-- Theodore Roosevelt"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else."
-- Theodore Roosevelt"The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight."
-- Theodore Roosevelt"I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law, I will meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it"
-- Senator Elihu Root of NY, 1913"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws"
-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild"Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by
force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him."
-- Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages, will bear its burden without complaint."
-- Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863-Jun-25, in a letter to fellow members of the establishment"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."
-- Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1777-1836)"The best time to buy is when blood is running in the streets."
-- Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russel"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. [...] Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. [...] Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."
-- Bertrand Russel"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
--Bertrand Russel, "Skeptical_Essays", 1928-S-
"Free trade means open markets, which means power goes to the powerful and not to the people"
-- Michael Sacco, 25, a student from Toronto, protesting the free trade conference in Quebec, wearing a Canadian flag like a cape. The amusing thing here is the strict absurdity of the student's statement: whoever the power "goes to" is who is powerful. (student quotation from "Police, protesters clash at Quebec summit", 2001-Apr-20, from AP, by Tom Cohen"[...] it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier."
-- William Safire, on the phrase and concept of "New World Order", in the New York Times, February 1991"The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?"
-- Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-- Richard Salant, former President of CBS News"Life is like a mirror. If you frown at it, it frowns back. If you smile at it, it returns the greeting."
-- Herbert Samuels"Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them."
-- George Santayana"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."
-- George Santayana"It's no longer an issue of contention that privatization is a solution. You can always rely on government to make the right decision, but only after it has exhausted every other conceivable alternative."
-- E. S. Savas, a management professor at Baruch College in New York who advised Giuliani during the campaign."We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money."
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995"If you're a liberal, anything you say is protected. If you're a conservative, anything you say is hateful."
-- Laura Schlessinger"Decriminalization would take the profit out of drugs and greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the drug-related violence that is currently plaguing our streets."
-- Kurt L. Schmoke, Baltimore Mayor"Crooks are going to get guns regardless of what regulations we have."
-- Kurt Schmoke, Mayor of Baltimore, 1999-Mar-13"The most interesting thing about Clinton is he's a real hero in Hollywood. They love this guy. It has nothing to do with his politics. His politics, in a way he's betrayed liberals at every turn: welfare reform, the death penalty, balancing the budget, which they don't care much about. What they love him for is his values. He's a child of the '60s, the first President to come out of the culture of the '60s. That's why a lot of people in Hollywood love him and that's why most conservatives hate him. But in Hollywood he's a hero."
-- Bill Schneider, political analyst on CNN's Inside Politics, 2000-Aug-3"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
-- Stephen Schneider, environmental activist, in _Discover_, Oct. '89"Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use."
-- C. Schultz"The broad principle that there is an individual right to bear arms is shared by many Americans, including myself. I'm of the view that you can't take a broad approach to other rights, such as First Amendment rights, and then interpret the Second Amendment so narrowly that it could fit in a thimble."
-- Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY, 2002-May-8"Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny."
-- Carl Schurz"One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free..."
-- Dr. N.A. Scott"We must sacrifice our civil liberties."
-- Brent Scowcroft, in the immediate aftermath of the 2001-Sep-11 terrorist campaign"Trampled upon the Second Amendment [...] Offended the Fourth Amendment [...] Ignored the Fifth Amendment"
-- Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, 1982, findings regarding the ATF"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of money and freedom of banking ... are the principles that must guide our steps."
-- Hans F. Sennholz"The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it."
-- Horatio Seymour"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
-- William Shakespere"First you make choices, then your choices make you."
-- Robin Sharma"Sometime in your life you will be on a journey. It will be the longest journey you have ever taken. It is the journey to find yourself."
-- Katherine Sharp"Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English"
-- George Bernard Shaw"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (writer, philosopher, and Fabian socialist)"You see things; and you say 'Why?'; But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"
-- George Bernard Shaw"A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul"
-- George Bernard Shaw"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, philosopher, and Fabian socialist"Socialism has a bad name in America, and no amount of wishful thinking on the part of the left is going to change that.... the words Economic Democracy are an adequate and effective replacement."
-- Derek Shearer, in Economic Democracy: The Challange of the 1980's (1980)"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
-- William Shedd"...natural rights provided the moral philosophic underpinning for the US Declaration of Independence [...] During the 19th and early 20th centuries, natural rights fell into disfavor with legal philosophers [...] Natural rights theory was largely replaced with legal positivism. Positivism holds that legal authority stems solely from what the state has laid down as law [...] However, the flaw in positivist philosophy is that the law is no better than the source of its authority. [...] In the aftermath of World War II, a revival of natural rights theory emerged. It was due in part to the revulsion against Nazism, which revealed the horrors that could emanate from a positivist system [...]"
-- Attorney Jerome J. Shestack, former ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights. Quoted in "There's Nothing Alien About Natural Rights." Wall Street Journal, September 6, 1991"I'm convinced that we have to have Federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest... Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time...The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered, and the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns, and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal."
-- Nelson T. Shields III, former chair of Handgun Control, Incorporated, in The New Yorker, 1976-Jun-26 (immediately before Sarah Brady, and immediately after Edward O. Wells, who in 1974 upon his ostensible retirement from the CIA (a preeminent Rockefeller tentacle), founded HCI under the name "National Council to Control Handguns"), revealing HCI's Final Solution"The CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States.... The government employed these men and women for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the USSR in the midst of a nuclear war.... Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS veterans; some had been officers of the bloody Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi party's security service."
-- Christopher Simpson, Blowback, 1988."Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations"This proposal will never prevent criminals from possessing firearms and we never said it would."
-- Daryl Smeaton, Attorney General's department, Director of Law Enforcement Co-ordination, on the new Australian gun bans, in The Weekend Australian, 20-21 September 1997, page 6"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
-- Adam Smith"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
-- Adam Smith"There's a strange contradiction lurking in all this revisionism: the United States is arguably farther along the road to Marx's communist Utopia. After all, the major means of production are collectively owned, thanks to the stock market and mutual funds. The country certainly boasts of an informed proletariat. And, as Mr. Cheek noted, `With our social security system and Medicare, we are far more socialized in practice than China, which has neither."'
-- Craig S. Smith, in "Workers of the World, Invest!", in the New York Times, 2001-Aug-19"Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses."
-- L. Neil Smith, Third Among Equals"When the liberty of the Press shall be restrained...the liberties of the People will be at an end."
-- Merriweather Smith Representative of Virginia, quoted by US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, in a 1995-Apr-19 concurring opinion in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334, from Notes of Debates by Henry Laurens, 1779-Jul-3, at 139"How, in fact, can we tell what is going on if foreign policy discussions are handled in the manner of meetings of the Masons, Montana Militia, or Skull & Bones?"
-- Sam Smith of the Progressive Review, on the Council on Foreign Relations, in How You Became the Enemy: America's Military Looks Inward"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, You're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."
-- Joseph Sobran, Former Editor of the National Review"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
-- Socrates"...To defend oneself, one must be ready to die, and there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn"Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?"'
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today."
-- Thomas Sowell"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone els's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves."
-- Thomas Sowell"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
-- Thomas Sowell"It is amazing the people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it."
-- Thomas Sowell"I think this man [Obama] really does believe he can change the world, and people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians."
-- Thomas Sowell"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-- Thomas Sowell"One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
-- Thomas Sowell"I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you've earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
-- Thomas Sowell"With all the political hysteria being whipped up this year about school shootings, more children are killed each year by bee stings -- and far more are killed by airbags mandated by the government."
-- Thomas Sowell, NewsMax, 1999-Sep-30"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
-- Thomas Sowell"I think this man [Obama] really does believe he can change the world, and people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians."
-- Thomas Sowell"The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration."
-- Thomas Sowell"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."
-- Thomas Sowell"Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps."
-- Thomas Sowell, of the Manchester Union-Leader, 1999-Mar-16, "Clinton has undermined military""If we are the new American slaves, then who is our master? The New Master, like some monster escaped from the laboratories of a noble experiment called the American dream, is the sum total of an amoral coupling between government and business. It looms as a monolith hybrid that is neither government nor business and is composed of individual strands of power that include the president, Congress, the courts, a multitude of governing bureaus and agencies, and an immense cluster of multinational corporations, some as wealthy as great nations."
-- Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty!"The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."
-- Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)"There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact."
-- Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain -- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
-- Lysander Spooner, 1870, in No Treason #6"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents---men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest---stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved."
-- Lysander Spooner, 1870, in No Treason #6"MTV may talk about lighting fires and killing children, but Janet Reno actually does something about it."
-- Spy Magazine"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."
-- Joseph Stalin"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
-- Josef Stalin, in a 1934-Jul-23 interview"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
-- Joseph Stalin, from "Reply to the discussion on the Political Reports of the Central Committee", Dec. 7, 1927. Stalin, Works, Vol. 10, p. 378"Tighter gun control laws were not framed with the specific expectation that gun related deaths would decline."
-- Anne Standford, press secretary for Police Minister Bill McGrath, in The Geelong Advertiser, 11/9/97"The reality is that wealth can be translated into information power, and that the apathy of the people is allowing private wealth to control public information. We are very, very close to private tyranny."
-- Robert David Steele, President of Open Source Solutions, from God, Man, & Information: Comments to Interval In-House, 1998-Mar-9"If it's not worth doing at all, it's not worth doing well."
-- Ralph Steiner"The president has kept all of the promises he intended to keep."
-- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on "Larry King Live.""I offered my opponents a deal: "if they stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling the truth about them". --Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952..
"Greatness is never appreciated in youth, called pride in midlife, dismissed in old age, and reconsidered in death. Because we cannot tolerate greatness in our midst, we do all we can do destroy it."
-- J. Michael Straczinski, creator and arc writer of Babylon 5"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. .... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon."
-- Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in _Forbes_"All guns are capable of being used in crime. All guns pose a threat to public safety."
-- The Supreme Court of Canada, 2000-Jun-15"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time."
-- Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland"Unfortunately, this is a free society, and we're gonna have people with trucks, and people with bombs."
-- Greta van Susteren, on CNN with a panel of terrorism experts, ca. 2001-Jan-31-T-
"The Romans brought devestation, but they called it peace."
-- Tacitus, on the Roman sacking of Carthage in Tunisia"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
-- Tacitus"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."
--Tagore"The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the proto-ministries of trade, finance and development for a united world. [...] Globalization has also contributed to the spread of terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation. But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international cooperation."
-- Strobe Talbott, in TIME, 1992"Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice to the act."
-- The Talmud"Good Conservatives always pay their bills. And on time. Not like the Socialists who run up other people's bills."
-- Margaret Thatcher"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"
-- Margaret Thatcher"Our children need strong families raising them with sturdy virtues, not to be smothered in the cold arms of the state."
-- Margaret Thatcher"Socialists cry 'Power to the people,' and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State."
-- Margaret Thatcher"What the honorable [Parliament] member is saying is that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. You do not create wealth and opportunity that way."
-- Margaret Thatcher"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism', they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
-- Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Presidential candidate"...a clique of the richest, economically and politically most powerful and influential men in the Western world, who meet secretly to plan events that later appear just to happen."
-- The Times of London, 1977, describing Bilderberg"To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated."
-- Trefor Thomas"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."
-- Thoreau"Government is not suggestion nor persuasion, it is force...and force is violence. ...When you advocate any government action, you first must believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand."
-- Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859"Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville"I took an oath. And the thing that I find totally abhorrent and disgusting is these higher-level people took that same oath and they violate the basic principles and tenets of the Constitution and the laws and simple ethics and morality."
-- Lou Tomasello, ATF agent, to Mike Wallace, on 60 Minutes, 1993-Jan"If you don't do it excellently, don't do it at all. Because if it's not excellent, it won't be profitable or fun, and if you're not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?"
-- Robert Townsend"Mister Speaker. We are here now in Chapter 11. Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any bankrupt entity in world history, the U.S. government."
-- James Traficant, Jr. (Ohio) addressing the House on Wednesday, March 17, 1993 (United States Congressional Record, Volume #33, page H1303)"...there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, `and this will always be the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology... Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals."
-- H. Trevor-Roper (ed), The Goebbels Diaries, p. XX, cited in Regan, Geoffrey. 1987. Great Military Disasters. New York: M. Evans and Company."When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth then all Americans are in peril."
-- Harry Truman"The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced."
-- Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
-- attributed to Gideon J. Tucker, NY State Court judge, 1866 (Tucker was also Secretary of State of New York, 1858-59)"When tyranny hits the fan and the 'Firearms Control Section Gestapo' stops by to confiscate your firearms, do the right thing...give'em the ammunition first."
-- the Tucson (Arizona) Rifle Club newsletter, 1999-Sep"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back."
-- Turkish proverb"The reason there's a penalty for laughing in court is that otherwise the jury would never be able to hear the evidence."
-- Mark Twain"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
-- Mark Twain"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."
-- Mark Twain"Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state."
-- Mark Twain"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
-- Mark Twain"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that the only distinctly native American criminal class is Congress."
-- Mark Twain"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."
-- Mark Twain"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
-- Mark Twain"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
-- Mark Twain"Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement."
-- Mark Twain"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
-- Mark Twain"Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children."
-- Mark Twain"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session."
-- Mark Twain (1866)"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
-- Mark Twain"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."
-- Scots Historian Professor Alexander Tyler, circa 1787-U-
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state; Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution..."
-- Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10, 1948) Approved by the United Nations with the nations of the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, & South Africa abstaining."Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free."
-- unknown"Sentiment without action is ruination of the soul"
-- unknown, from http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/quote"A life lived by chance is a life of unconscious reaction. A life lived by choice is a life of conscious action."
-- unknown"The definition of insanity is, 'Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.'"
-- unknown"Being terminated is nature's way of telling you that you were in the wrong job in the first place."
-- unknown"The poorest man is not the one without a cent, but the one without a dream."
-- unknown"Talk is cheap-except when Congress does it."
-- Unknown"The NSA can have my private key when they pry it from my cold, dead neurons."
-- unknown"MS-DOS is like Communism: It doesn't work and you wouldn't want to use it even if it did."
-- unknown"If we have to kill 12 people to save 1 human life it will have been worth it."
-- unknown"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I'm innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they've taken the first amendment and I can't say anything at all."
-- unknown"As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion"
-- the three-judge panel that issued a preliminary injuction blocking as unconstitutional the Communications Decency Act"If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same [...] They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section [...] they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death."
-- The US Code, Title 18, §241, "Conspiracy against rights""If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence ... and the courts must abide by that decision."
-- US v Moylan, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1969, 417 F.2d at 1006"It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship, as defined in paragraph (15) of section 782 of this title, the direction and control of which is to be vested in, or exercised by or under the domination or control of, any foreign government, foreign organization, or foreign individual: Provided, however, That this subsection shall not apply to the proposal of a constitutional amendment."
-- US Code, Title 50 (War and National Defense), Chapter 23 (Internal Security), Subchapter I (Control of Subversive Activities), §783 (Offenses), former subsection a, stricken in 1993 by Public Law 103-199, Sec. 803(2) (also stricken were restrictions on access to classified information by members of Communist organizations)"It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
-- US Supreme Court, 339 US 382,447"We will never fully solve our nation's horrific problem of gun violence unless we ban the manufacture and sale of handguns and semi-automatic assault weapons."
-- USA Today, 1993-Dec-29-V-
"A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade."
-- Thorstein Veblen, economist"Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business."
-- Jesse Ventura"The smell of the Weimar Republic is in the air."
-- Gore Vidal, from a 1996 speech at the National Press Club"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other."
-- Voltaire"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
-- Voltaire"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
-- Voltaire"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
-- Voltaire"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."
-- Voltaire"In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
--Voltaire(1764)"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."
-- Kurt Vonnegut-W-
"We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders. People are the great resource, and so long as we keep our economy free, more people means more growth, the more the merrier. Study after study shows that even the most recent immigrants give more than they take."
-- Wall Street Journal"The world's businessmen understand that the US legal system is a running joke, and trade tales that start, have-you-heard-this-one-yet?"
-- Wall Street Journal editorial, August 14, 1991"People who laugh actually live longer than those who don't laugh. Few persons realize that health actually varies according to the amount of laughter."
-- James J. Walsh"We shall have world government whether or not you like it--by conquest or consent."
-- James Warburg, son of CFR founder Paul Warburg and advisor to FDR, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1950-Feb-17"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
-- H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927"Everything I did in life that was worthwhile I caught hell for."
-- Earl Warren, former U.S. Supreme Court Chief"The presidents come and go but the Rockefellers are forever."
-- Washington cliché"Justice Department studies show that armed citizens are much less likely to suffer losses or personal injury from thieves"
-- The Washington Post, 1992-Jan-7"We are inclined to think that every firearm in the hands of anyone who is not a law enforcement officer constitutes an incitement to violence. Let's come to our senses before the whole country starts shooting itself up on all its Main Streets in a delirious kind of High Noon."
-- Washington Post, 1965-Aug-19"There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy."
-- George Washington"A free people ought [...] to be armed [...]"
-- George Washington, speech of January 7, 1790, printed in the Boston Independent Chronicle, January 14, 1790"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-- George Washington, presidential farewell address"It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible."
-- George Washington"Sir, I read these sentiments with surprise and astonishment. Believe me, Colonel Nicola, no occurrence in the course of this war has given me greater pain than this revelation of such sentiments among the officers of my army, which I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity. I am at a complete loss to see what in my conduct could have given encouragement to such a proposal, a proposal that proposes I participate in the greatest mischief that could befall our country. Nicola, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable. I advise you and your collaborators to put these thoughts from your mind."
-- George Washington, on the offer from his officers that he be declared King of America"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what section or clause is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battle in any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?"
-- Daniel Webster"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
-- Daniel Webster"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger."
-- Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."
-- Noah Webster"Contrarians drink to remember."
-- Dave Weinbaum"The political world of the Open Conspiracy must weaken, efface, incorporate and supersede existing governments. The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms; it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York. The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will be a world religion."
-- H.G. Wells, Fabian Socialist, in The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928)"The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?"
-- H.G. Wells, The New World Order, 1939"[...] when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people [...] will hate the new world order [...] and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people."
-- H. G. Wells, in The New World Order (1939)"[...] when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people [...] will hate the new world order [...] and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people."
-- H. G. Wells, in The New World Order (1939)"And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!"
-- From the fourth leaflet of the White Rose Resistance in Germany, 1942. Five students and a professor who wrote and distributed the leaflets were executed in 1943."There is a self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge."
-- Alfred North Whitehead"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."
-- Walt Whitman (1819-92), U.S. poet. Notes Left Over, "Freedom" (1881)."The church is a hospital for sinners, not a country club for saints."
-- Hayes Wicker"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
-- Oscar Wilde"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands."
-- Oscar Wilde"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
-- Robert Wilensky, Digital Library Project, Prof. of Computer Science, University of California"Football exemplifies the worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings."
-- George Will"Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago....[The government should] deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrassing Amendment."
-- George Will, 1991"Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends."
-- George F. Will, Newsweek"The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers."
-- George F. Will, on campaign finance reform, in Newsweek 1999-Oct-11"Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it."
-- Walter Williams, economist and syndicated columnist"What's just has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you -- and why?"
-- Walter Williams, All It Takes Is Guts"There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, 'Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.'"
-- Walter Williams, economist and syndicated columnist"Motivated by the pursuit of private gain, individuals promote the public welfare."
-- Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics, George Mason University"No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong."
-- Walter Williams"If you guys vote for Al Gore, you're out of your minds. [... It's] just the lying and the mendacity of the last eight years of the regime that Al Gore was part and parcel of. I mean, there is only so much lying the American people will take before they go, 'Uh, this doesn't seem like a good idea.' You have to look at what he does and what he stands for. I just think he's a knucklehead."
-- Bruce Willis, to George Whipple, in a segment on NY1 News, 2000-Jul-19"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
-- Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom (1913)"Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of Liberty is a history of resistance. The history of Liberty is a history of limitations of Governmental power, not the increase of it."
-- Woodrow Wilson"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-- President Woodrow Wilson"The Federal Reserve System pays the U.S. Treasury $20.60 per thousand notes -- a little over 2 cents each -- without regard to the face value of the note. Federal Reserve Notes, incidentally, are the only type of currency now produced for circulation. They are printed exclusively by the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the $20.60 per thousand price reflects the Bureau's full cost of production. Federal Reserve Notes are printed in $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations only; notes of $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000 denominations were last printed in 1945."
-- Donald J. Winn, Assistant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System"America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
-- Claire Wolfe, 1995-Nov"If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed."
-- Thomas Wolfe"He was one of the few leaders whose high ideals, moral integrity and personal modesty inspired people right around the globe."
-- James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, lauding Tanzania's now deceased former President Julius Nyerere. "[...] dictator of a one-party state and principal architect of one of the poorest, most dysfunctional economies in the world [...] Nyerere was a flawed leader, a tireless advocate of unworkable socialist doctrines." (from Investors Business Daily)"A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright"The president responded to plaintiffs' questions by giving false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process."
-- Judge Susan Webber Wright"Unconscionability has generally been recognized to include an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party."
-- Judge Wright (use of US paper money and private credit, checking, and savings services, is a voluntary act (without which one is inconvenienced to a degree most Americans cannot imagine), and constitutes agreement to the contract that renders the user liable for income taxes)-X-
"I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue."
-- Xenocrates"It takes a wise man to recognize a wise man."
-- Xenophanes"Only by great risks can great results be achieved.
-- Xerxes"The search for religion is the starting point of thought."
-- Xu Zhimo"The nature of man is evil; his goodness is the result of his activity"
-- Xunsi-Y-
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible."
-- A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp."Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire."
-- William Yeats"Do or do not. There is no try."
-- Yoda, 'The Empire Strikes Back'-Z-
"The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions."
-- Frank Zappa"Fair use is notoriously impossible to get ahold of until you actually go to the judge to find out what the judge says, and even then you probably aren't very happy. There is simply no way to know what fair use is and isn't."
-- Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, in USA Today 2000-Aug-10, "Music-copying laws often shield consumers"
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