"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." --Jean Luc Picard
"We see around us now an ever more apparent loss of vigor of American society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of society; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the cancerous proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the balkanization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline; the deceleration of the rate of technological innovation and a loss of belief in the idea of progress itself. Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall." --Robert Zubrin
Edward Abbey
:
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top."
"Freedom begins between the ears."
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
"The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient."
"The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe - fear and awe of the State."
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."
"Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines."
"Nothing can excel a few days in jail to give a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society."
"Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor."
"The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes 12 years of public schooling and 4 more years of college to beat it out of them."
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws."
"Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exhalts and glorifies the rebel."
"The tragedy of modern war is not so much that young men die but that they die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."
"How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it."
"If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law."
"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth." --Peter Abelard
Lord Acton:
"It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people to govern others. Every man is the best, the most responsible, judge of his own advantage."
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
"I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by." - Douglas Adams
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." --John Adams
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
:The mere title of lawyer is sufficient to deprive a man of the public confidence. . . . The most innocent and irreproachable life cannot guard a lawyer against the hatred of his fellow citizens." --John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)
Samuel Adams
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. May your chains set lightly upon you. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
(Which for some reason always reminds me of this quote.)
"What a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which may be freely given, but cannot be taken from him without his consent." -- Massachusetts circular letter, 1768
"If ever time should come when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent it's ruin."
"A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't [do his job] when he does feel like it." --James Agate
"The more people are dependent upon the government, the more controlled they are." -- U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 20 Mar 1998
"The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions." --Fred Allen
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." --Woody Allen
"Things get so fucked up sometimes because some of us folks aren't willing to sell their souls.....and we live in a world full of people that will..............." -- Zoot Allures
Brooks Atkinson
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save.", "Once Around the Sun
"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know."
"Give me chastity and continence, but not right now." --St. Augustine
"NAFTA and GATT have about as much to do with free trade as the Patriot Act has to do with liberty." --Michael Badnarik
"Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories -- those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost." --Russell Baker
"No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit." - Sir Frederick G. Banting
"After dissecting the numerous arguments of constitutionalists, I have concluded they reduce to these; that the Constitution would have worked, if only it had worked; but what kept it from working was that it failed to work; and the way to make it work, is to have it work. Couched against the fine rhetoric of the Federalist Papers, these arguments seem entirely plausible, but for one thing: The Anti-Federalists said the Constitution wouldn't work, and those gentlemen seem to have been as well versed in classical history as their Federalist counterparts. Unfortunately, they lost, so I guess their arguments don't remain as compelling after two hundred years, as those by the people who were wrong, but won. Meanwhile, the thing to do is for good guys to take over, at which point they can announce that the Constitution is working again. Then, they can summarily silence anyone who says it isn't." -- Andy Barniskis, Epistle to the Delusionoids (1995)
Dave Barry
"Do not under any circumstances ever take both a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night."
"As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government."
"Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." --Marion Barry
"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing." -- Bernard Baruch
Frédéric Bastiat
"If you cannot constrain the state to the standards in 'The Law', then you simply legalize plunder. Given the choice, I would rather deal with plunder by individuals than plunder by the state any day."
"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
"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."
"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." ---The Law. 1850.
"The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else."
"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 great struggle for independence." --Attributed to Charles Austin Beard
"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. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty -- so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator -- and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the quality alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, 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." -- Cesare Beccaria
Henry Ward Beecher
"The worse thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.", Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
"Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty."
"Complete equality isn't compatible with democracy, but it is agreeable to tolitarianism. After all the only way to ensure the equality of the slothful, the inept and the immoral is to suppress everyone else." --Iain Benson
Ambrose Bierce
"LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage."
"VOTE: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."
"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?" -- Niels Bohr
"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right." - William E Borah
"The way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence." - UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
"Government is the great Naysayer. The only things government can do are regulate and redistribute, prohibit and penalize, confiscate and command. Are these the things that liberty is made of? Somebody else's money and an endless list of Thou Shalt Nots?" -- James Bovard
"You see, it's... it's no good, Montag. We've all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal." --Ray Bradbury
"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war and less about peace, more about killing and less about living." -- Gen. Omar Bradley
"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 encrochment by men of zeal, well meaning buth without understanding." -- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Wernher von Braun
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
"I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution."
"Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." --David Broder
William F. Buckley, Jr
"I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies."
"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive."
Atheist n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others --Chaz Bufe
"There's a difference between getting money for what you do and doing it for money. If you don't do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it. If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn't be done." --Emma Bull
Edmund Burke:
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.", speech, Buckinghamshire, 1784
"People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous..."
"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." --William Burroughs
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on." --George W. Bush, shortly after his inauguration
"Government is basically a parasite, and if the host doesn't grow, then government suffers." --Jeb Bush
"Dirty" Harry Callahan:
"A man's got to know his limitations." --"Magnum Force
"Go ahead, make my day." --"Sudden Impact
"Civilization, as we know it today, owes it's existence to the engineers. These are the men who, down the long centuries, have learned to exploit the properties of matter and the sources of power for the benefit of mankind." -- L. Sprague DeCamp
"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year." --Truman Capote
Orson Scott Card:
"Anybody who thinks that parenthood is a science, that you can possibly know what is the right thing for a parent to do in every circumstance and then do it, is hopelessly deluded."
"...the politically correct are above the rules of ordinary civility, once they have identified you as an unbeliever in their religion."
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey
George Carlin
"When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?"
"I'm in favor of separation of church and state. These two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."
"Once outside the law you're all the way outside." --Raymond Chandler
"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds." --Whilliam Ellery Channing
"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's the day to day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekhov
"The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupd. --Gilbert K. Chesterson
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." --Noam Chomsky
Winston Churchill
"There is no such thing as a good tax."
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
"Most of the world's work is done by people who don't feel very well."
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
"If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law."
"If you're going through hell --Keep going."
"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 arguments, 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 42B.C.
"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea." --John Ciardi
Arthur C. Clarke, (1917-)
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Profiles of The Future
"Power... marks its victim, denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments." --Henry Clay
"I guess I've been wrong all my life, but so have billions of other people... Certainty is just an emotion. ---Hal Clement
"If a President of the United States ever lied to the American people he should resign." --Bill Clinton, 1974
"The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away." --John S. Coleman,
"If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel you are looking the wrong way." --Barry Commoner
Calvin Coolidge
"Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty."
"There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns."
"Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing."
"When once the right of the individual to liberty and equality is admitted, there is no escape from the conclusion that he alone is entitled to the rewards of his own industry. Any other conclusion would necessarily imply either privilege or servitude."
"A government which requires of the people the contribution of the bulk of their substance and rewards cannot be classed as a free government..."
"The Constitution is the sole source and guaranty of national freedom."
"Civilization and profits go hand in hand."
"That tax is theoretically best which interferes least with business."
"No matter what any one may say about making the rich and the corporations pay the taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil. It is your fellow workers who are ordered to work for the Government every time an appropriation bill is passed."
"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business."
"You can display no greater wisdom than by resisting proposals for needless legislation. It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."
"We have got so many regulatory laws already that in general I feel that we would be just as well off if we didn't have any more."
Col. Jeff Cooper
"Let us remind ourselves again that the Second Amendment of the US Constitution should be referred to as the Statute of Liberty."
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
"The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character; for he cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable of resisting temptation." --Aleister Crowley
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin
It is not enough to do your best: you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. --W. Edwards Deming
"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like." --Alan Dershowitz
"Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state." --John Dewey
Philip K. Dick
"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night." --What the Dead Men Say
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
"In every group of three or more conspirators is to be found a fool, a fanatic and an informer." --Fyodor Dostoevskiy
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." --Justice William O. Douglas
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what 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 Douglass
"Beware the fury of a patient man." --John Dryden
"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually." --Abba Eban
Thomas A. Edison
"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress."
"There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something."
"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man -- and I'll show you a failure."
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
"Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen." --Bob Edwards
Albert Einstein
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.... It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction".
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." --Out of My Later Years
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
Dwight Eisenhower
"No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them."
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed"
"It is never too late to become what you might have been." --George Elliot
"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." --Harlan Ellison
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
"Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. "
"Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times."
Richard Feynman
"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
"What I can not create I can not understand" --found on Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." --Richard Feynman's last words
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. --Ian Fleming
"Atomism nudged philosophers awy from Aristotle toward Plato's ideal forms, vsz., abstract mathematical properties and geometric arrangements of invisible particles. This disconnected science from empiricism, making science, literally, lmost sense-less. Berkeley took one step further, proposing that even primary qualities were subjective, which aroused Samuel Johnson to his famous contrapuntal refutation. But Berkeley may have been on to something. Ask Schrodinger's cat." --Michael F. Flynn
Henry Ford
"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
"One who fears limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again."
"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability."
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms ? to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." --Viktor Frankl
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."
"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
"This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
(Which always reminds me of this quote.)
"Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it."
"The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the PURSUIT of it. You have to catch up with it yourself."
"I am quite satisfied with the operational aspects, planning aspects, chain-of-command aspects, and leadership aspects of that operation. The Bureau's behavior and performance [at Waco] was not only exemplary but showed the greatest restraint and they did the best job under the most difficult circumstances." --FBI Director Louis Freeh
"The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust (our own) government." --Sen. James W. Fullbright
Richard Buckminster Fuller
"God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or imporoper."
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
"Everyone is born a genius. Society de-geniuses them."
"The more laws the more offenders." --Thomas Fuller
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." - John Kenneth Galbraith
Gandhi
"I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence."
"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt."
"Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always."
"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves." --Jerry Garcia
"Self-reliance is the antidote to institutional stupidity." --John Taylor Gatto
"If there is going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it is going to be us -- the FBI." --Paul George, Supervisory Special Agent, Michigan Bureau, FBI
"But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music."
--Kahlil Gibran
"An acid is like a woman: a good one will eat through your pants." -- Mel Gibson
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. 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." --Rudolph Giuliani
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the police state dictatorship it's going to get." --Ian Williams Goddard
Goethe
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance."
You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life. May it all turn out to your happiness.
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." --Barry Goldwater
"It is true that some lawyers are dishonest, arrogant, greedy, venal, amoral, ruthless buckets of slime. On the other hand, it is unfair to judge the entire profession by a few hundred-thousand bad apples." --James D. Gordon III
"Paranoia will get you through times of no enemies better than enemies will get you through times of no paranoia." --Pete Granger
"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." --Ulysses S. Grant
"If Love Were Oil, I'd Be About A Quart Low
"The two major political parties can be summed up this way: There are two parties, one is the Stupid Party and the other is the Evil Party. Occasionally these two parties create legislation that is both stupid and evil. This is called bi-partisianship." --Andrew Grooms
"That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude." --Alexander Haig
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." --Alexander Hamilton
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." --Benjamin Harrison
Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them. --Mike Harding, The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac
"To adopt a country without adopting its language is like keeping your first wife's picture in your second wife's bedroom -- at best it's bad manners." -- Paul Harvey
"I'm worried about Congress really messing this up. We have that tendency, I've been told." --Senator Orrin Hatch
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." --Heinrich Heine
Robert A. Heinlein
"You are free to throw away your franchise, just as the voters in Germany did, just before the rise of Adolph Hitler. You have only to refuse to register and vote, to be relegated to the status of a child, a slave, or a domestic animal. This is a fair comparison as women didn't have the vote and were regarded as all three, less than a century ago."
"Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed." -- The Puppet Masters
"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss." --Lazarus Long
"Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." --Stranger in a Strange Land
"Don't tell me violence doesn't solve anything. Look at Carthage."
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. "
"But I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.", The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms."
"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."
"Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization." --supporting character, Claude Mordan to protagonist, Hamilton Felix, in Beyond This Horizon
"...Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives." --If This Goes On
"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on." --Joseph Heller
"I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to." --Jimi Hendrix
Patrick Henry:
"Revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe: similar examples are to be found in ancient Greece and ancient Rome: instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few. We are cautioned?against faction and turbulence: I acknowledge that licentiousness is dangerous, and that it ought to be provided against: I acknowledge also the new form of Government may effectually prevent it: Yet, there is another thing it will as effectually do: it will oppress and ruin the people?I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people or by the tyranny of rulers? I imagine, Sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny."
"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."
"They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come."
"It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
"Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny." --Heraclitus
"Political correctness is just tyranny with manners." --Charlton Heston
"Let's get real. According to the CBO's report, in the current fiscal year the U.S. government is gorging on some $2,142 billion of revenues, consisting of taxes, fees, charges, fines, and other species of extractions from the people's purses. This sum works out to approximately $7,500 for every man, woman, and child resident in this country, or $30,000 for a family of four average persons. Perhaps some of those people feel they are getting benefits worth at least this much. I myself don't have that feeling." --Robert Higgs
"I'm not against half naked girls - not as often as I'd like to be." --Benny Hill
Alfred Hitchcock
"Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it's completely useless as far as I'm concerned."
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. In it, I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like."
Adolf Hitler:
"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
"It is a quite special secret pleasure, how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them."
"Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money." --Thomas Hobbes
Eric Hoffer
"The real 'haves' are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor."
"The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an axe."
"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep."
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil." --Douglas Hofstadter
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." --Sir Fred Hoyle
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard
"Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people." --F. M. Hubbard
"We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate." --Kin Hubbard
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." --Hubert Humphrey
"Good friends often are seen as miracles that somehow just happen, possibly because there are so many dissimilarities between people, or because of major obstacles which need to be accepted and adjusted to. But once friendship comes about, it always enriches our lives." --Mitche Leigh Hunt
Aldous Huxley
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
"There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarians should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not only inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers... The most important Manhattan projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call 'the problem of happiness' -- in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude."
"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." - T. H. Huxley
"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization." -- Robert Ingersoll
"Insurance is no substitute for a good alarm system and a twelve-guage shotgun." --Victor Isbecki (Cagney & Lacey)
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." --William James
"Culture which withholds freedom is more despicable than barbarism." --Jan Chryzostom Janiszewski
Thomas Jefferson
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --quoting 18th cent. criminologist Cesare Beccaria: On Crimes...1764
(letter to Francis Hopkinson,April 13,1789) "I never submitted the whole system of my opinion to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
"Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations."
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
"Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves."
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
(Letter to William Ludlow, 1824) "I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
"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 by education."
"[Let any] who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form . . . stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." --First Inaugural Address, 1801
"What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?" --to Col. William S. Smith, November 13, 1787
"Were it left for me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." (in a letter to W. S. Smith, 13 Nov. 1787)
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive."
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
"...(T)he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated."
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread."
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
"There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."
"with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens--a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of the country."
"It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour."
"You seem to think that the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of constitutional interpretation, a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one that would place us under the tyranny of an oligarchy."
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender." --in a letter written to John Taylor
"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
"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." (1790)
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered." --Lyndon Baines Johnson
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." --Henry de Jouvenel
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy." --Franz Kafka
"English is the preacher's language because it lets you talk until you think of what to say." --Garrison Keillor
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." --Helen Keller
John F. Kennedy
"When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were."
"Washington is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm."
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (1962 White House speech)
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life."
"The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people." --Frank Kent
John Maynard Keynes:
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.", The Economic Consequences of the Peace
"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.", The Economic Consequences of the Peace
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
And Tomlinson took up the tale and spoke of his good in life.
"O this I have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me,
"And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy."
The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear the path,
And Peter twirled the jangling Keys in weariness and wrath.
"Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought," he said, "and the tale is yet to run:
"By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer?what ha' ye done?"
--Rudyard Kipling
Henry Kissinger
"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation."
"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer."
"The fastest way to succeed is to look as if your playing by other people's rules, while playing by your own." --Michael Korda
"How are nations ruled and led into war? Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print." --Austrian journalist Karl Kraus
"Vampires have their stakes and werewolves have their silver bullets, but there is nothing man has yet devised that can kill a government program." --Bob Krumm
"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." --Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
"Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, 'This I am today, that I will be tomorrow.'" --Louis L'Amour
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists. Less good when they obey and acclaim him. Worse when they fear and despise him. Fail to honor people, and they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, "We did this ourselves." --Lao-Tzu
"The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise." --James Larkin
"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision." --Lynn Lavner
"At first glance, there's a lot of sex on the Internet. Or not at first glance: Nobody can find anything on the Internet at first glance." --Patrick Leahy
"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact." -- Robert E. Lee, 1863
"I try to avoid public places; they're filled with the public." --Fran Leibowitz
Jay Leno
"So they're writing a Constitution for Iraq? Let them have ours -- it's worked great for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore."
"A nature watchdog group says that we have five years to fix global warming or face catastrophic consequences. Like the possibility of another Al Gore movie."
"A politician is a man who will double cross that bridge when he comes to it." --Oscar Levant
Monica Lewinsky
"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
"When facism comes to America, itwill be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." --Sinclair Lewis
"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." --A. J. Liebling
G. Gordon Liddy
"Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime."
"Why is it that there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses?"
Abraham Lincoln
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose and you allow him to make war at pleasure.... If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.' "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood." --Representative and future Tyrant, in a letter to his long-time law partner William H. Herndon, denouncing the trickery of President Polk in provoking the Mexican War of 1848.
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong."
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
"We are led into war with the promises of peace. We are now being led toward dictatorship with the promises of democracy." --Charles Lindbergh, Jr
"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt." --Robert Lindner
John Locke
"...let his pretense be what it will, I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else."
"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins." --"Treatise on Government