FAVORITE QUOTES…

~Kurt Vonnegut – A Man Without a Country ~

“The selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.”

~Hans Hermann-Hoppe~ Democracy: The God That Failed

“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

~John Locke~

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

~H. L. Mencken~

“Power always thinks…that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”

~John Adams~

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

~Anne Lamott, writer~

“Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.”

~Charles V of France~

“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

~George Orwell~

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”

~Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE) ~

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

~Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778) ~

“We burned the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.... Ho Chi Minh had said people were like the sea in which his guerillas swam. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shoot your enemy or starve him to death?”

“Colin Powell - Secretary of State - United States of America”

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

~Aldous Huxley~

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

~Henry Kissinger - as quoted in the book “Kiss the Boys Goodbye”~

“Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

~Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899) ~

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

~George Orwell~

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

~Sun Tzu –

“Of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

~ Nazi leader, Hermann Goering - At the Nuremberg Trials, shortly before being sentenced to death. ~

“The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it.”

-Woodrow Wilson~

28^th president of the U.S., Nobel peace prize winner (1856-1924)

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental~men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre ~ the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

~H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”

~Percy Bysshe Shelley~

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

~Voltaire~

(1694-1778)

“History is a record of human stupidity writ in blood. I have often said that history is a lot scarier than Stephen King’s horror stories.”

~ Charley Reese~

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.”

~ General Douglas MacArthur ~ 1957

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

~Joseph Heller, novelist~ (1923-1999)

”Scare the hell out of the American people.”

~ Senator Arthur Vandenburg~

Telling President Harry Truman what he needed to do in order to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State that was being planned, to destroy the Russian Communist State

“Experience in politicians is not unlike experienced whores in a brothel. It’s not necessarily a desirable trait.”

~ Charley Reese~

“A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”

~ Plato~

”Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.”

~ Rudolph Rummel~

”To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

”Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

~ Thomas Paine -Common Sense, 1776~

“Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.”

~ Ayn Rand --"Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors?" ~

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of... Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

~ Thomas Paine~

From: The Age of Reason -To Paine belongs the honor of naming our country the United States of America. He was the first to use the name in print, and it was his own creation

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

~Blaise Pascal~

”I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.”

~ General David Sharp ~
Former US Marine Commandant, 1966

“As for the moral burden of guilt on the state, don’t worry. The state is a machine. It has no conscience and no soul. The state kills innocent people all the time, usually in wars.”

~ Charley Reese~

“Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

~ William Pitt ~

”Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.”

~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn~

“We should... be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.”

~ Richard Mitchell~

“Mystical references to ‘society’ and its programs to ‘help’ may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

”All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

~ John Stuart Mill – Essay: On Liberty

“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~

“In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is never to let them find out.”

~ Robert Heinlein~

”The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.”

~ Albert Jay Nock~

“There is nothing to fear from the gods. There is nothing to fear from death. Pain can be endured. Happiness can be attained.”

~ Epicurus~

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”

~ Robert Heinlein~

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

“Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.”

~ Aristotle~

“Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.”

~ Democritus~

”Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.”

~ Robert Lynd~

”The greatest productive force is human selfishness.”

~ Robert Heinlein~

”The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”

~ David Friedman~

”The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.”

~ Denis Diderot~

“Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle of liberty is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.”

~ Dante Alighieri~

”All my major works Have been written in prison. I would recommend prison not only to aspiring writers but to aspiring politicians, too.”

~ Jawaharlal Nehru~

”The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-by to the Bill of Rights.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”The intention makes the crime.”

~ Aristotle~

”Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.”

~ Ayn Rand~

“After all, it is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.”

~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne~

“No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

~ George Orwell~

”Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

“ALL I want them to do [U.S. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE-INS] is to commit themselves to make a very deliberate effort that no Border Patrol Officer will be unmindful of the fact that regardless of what their objectives or pursuits are they have to, have to, be in conformity with what’s contemplated by our constitution and laws in terms of (civil) protections. Nobody’s exempt from that.”

~ Filemon Vela ~ 10/01/00

UNITED STATES FEDERAL JUDGE, AFTER BEING STOPPED FOR THE 2^ND TIME ON THE WAY TO COURT IN SOUTH TEXAS BY THE HIGHLY MILITARIZED U.S. INS BORDER PATROL.

“The more arbitrary power government employees possess, the more they are transformed into a master class. At some point, the sheer accumulation of penalties and threats in the statute book fundamentally changes the citizen’s relation to the government. Rather than a government of laws, it becomes a government of threats, intimidation, and browbeating. If Congress and the courts want to restore the credibility of the federal government, the federal statute book and the Code of Federal Regulations must be stripped of those edicts that hang like thousands of swords of Damocles over the heads of peaceful Americans. The time is come to end the reign of the czars and to cease expecting salvation from arbitrary power.”

~ James Bovard ~
”Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power under Clinton-Gore”

“If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

~ Robert Heinlein~

“The plans differ; the planners are all alike.”

~ Frederic Bastiat~

“How perilous it is to free a people who deserve slavery.”

~ Niccolo Machiavelli~

”We should... be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.”

~ Richard Mitchell~

”The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.”

~ Charles Peguy~

”The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”

~ Thomas Paine~

”The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.”

~ Lord Hailshan~

”The increase in the world’s population represents our victory against death.”

~ Julian Simon~

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

~ Albert Einstein~

”A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.”

~ Walter Bagehot~

”The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.”

~ Mark Twain~

”Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

”Everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.”

~ Carroll Quigley~

”In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, irresolvable, and necessary.”

~ Kathleen Norris~

”For in a Republic, who is “the country”? Is it the Government that is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”

~ Mark Twain~

”When the people have no tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.”

~Lord Lytton~

”A society that puts equality...ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”

~ Milton Friedman ~

”When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”

~ Matt Groening~

”It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson~

”In a general view, there are few conquests that repay the charge of making them, and mankind are pretty well convinced that it can never be worth their while to go to war for profit’s sake. If they are made war upon, their country invaded, or their existence at stake, it is their duty to defend and preserve themselves, but in every other light, and from every other cause, war is inglorious and detestable.”

~ Thomas Paine~

”Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.”

~ Milton Friedman~

”Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville~

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

”It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

”No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.”

~ Thomas Jefferson~

”I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”

~ Thomas Jefferson~

”Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...The progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.”

~ Robert Heinlein~

“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”

~ Leonardo da Vinci~

”Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.”

~ W. Somerset Maugham~

”Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

~ H. L. Mencken~

”The tyranny of the multitude is a multiplied tyranny.”

~ Edmund Burke~

”The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.”

~ Walter Williams~

”The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

”When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals”?

~ Mark Twain~

”Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people - namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.”

~ Thomas Sowell~

“The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.”

~ Eric Hoffer~

“The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.”

~ Leonardo da Vinci~

”Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

~ William Pitt~

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

~ Joseph Stalin~

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

~ George Orwell~

”There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”

~ Thomas Edison~

”Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without knowing in the least what it wants.”

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe~

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”

~ Eric Hoffer~

”The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crises these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.”

~ Leonard Peikoff~

”The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

~H. L. Mencken~

”Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”

~ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov~

”So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”

~ Bertrand Russell~

“It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and every-where, to assume... that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.”

~ 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 ~

”Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.”

~ Eric Hoffer~

”There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic have always resorted to guns.”

~ Ayn Rand~

”The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.”

~ Bertrand Russell~

“All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.”

~ Ludwig von Mises~

“Wine makes everyone hopeful.”

~Aristotle~

FAVORITE QUOTES…

~Kurt Vonnegut – A Man Without a Country ~

~H. L. Mencken~

~Percy Bysshe Shelley~

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