Friday, January 20, 2006
Notable Observations By Others
Before beginning observations by others, I'm posting the following great quote as a sort of preamble to them all. It is a great testament to conservative and libertarian values regarding, government, economics, and morals:
“I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that every right
Implies a responsibility, every opportunity, an obligation; every possession a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that
government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the
world owes no man a living but it owes every man an opportunity to
make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that
economy is a prime request of a sound financial structure, whether in
government, business or personal affairs.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be
as good as his bond; that character-not wealth or power or position-
is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of
mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross
(waste matter) of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human
soul set free.
I believe in an all-wise-and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and
that the individuals highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and
widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone
can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.”
-- John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quotation inscribed at Rockefeller Center
"...The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West..."
-- Alan Charles Kors, from the essay "After Socialism"
"At the height of the Cold War, it was common for American 'liberals' to defend Communists as being just 'liberals in a hurry.' I agree with that. and I paricularly agree with its logical corollary: That 'liberals' are just slowed-down communists."
-- Dr. John Ray, on his web site, Dissecting Leftism
"Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark.
A large group of professionals built the Titanic."
-- Unknown
“Immoral acts by individuals do not become moral when practiced by a million people calling themselves ‘society’.”
-- Unknown source, but I’m quite certain it was either Ayn Rand or a follower of hers.
“Society: A mystical entity that is no one in particular and everyone but yourself.”
-- Unknown source, but I’m quite certain it was either Ayn Rand or a follower of hers.
"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
-- Frediric Bastiat, Essays, 144
"A man who would consider himself a bandit if, pistol in hand, he prevented me from carrying out a transaction that was in conformity with my interests has no scruples in working and voting for a law that replaces his private force with the public force and subjects me, at my own expense, to the same unjust restriction."
-- Frederic Bastiat, Harmonies, 463
“Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both…The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
-- Frederick Douglass (quoted by Edward Cline)
You have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything.
-- Aaron Tippin
(French bureau-autocrat's cluelessness and arrogance in one quote)
"I have always been aware that what is good for the nation is not always popular with the public."
-- Jean-Pierre Raffarin, after resigning as prime minister (quoting Charles de Gaulle).
“…it’s clear that the death penalty really does deter crime. The recidivism rate among executed murderers is a perfect zero percent.”
-- Mark W. Smith, from his book, “The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing conspiracy.”
“For a tree’s branches to reach to heaven, its roots must reach to hell.”
-- Medieval alchemical dictum, as quoted by Stephen Arroyo in his book, “Astrology Karma & Transformation…”
“The individual may strive after perfection but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.”
-- C.G. Jung, as quoted by Stephen Arroyo in his book, “Astrology Karma & Transformation…”
“Weakness defines a power relationship not a moral attribute.”
-- Robert Kaplan
“…in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy, you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on.”
-- Adam Michnik, a leading figure in the Solidarity movement of Poland, as quoted by Clifford May in an online essay
“When PETA [People for the ethical treatment of animals – a radical animal rights group] is able to prevent animals from eating other animals, I will stop eating animals.”
-- Jim K. responding to foxnews.com regarding commentary on “political correctness.”
“…For the proletariat this will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks: a regime, where regimented workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to the beat of a drum [Mikhail Bakunin is prophetically describing the communist state that Marx sought to create]...
...There will be slavery within this state, and abroad there will be war without truce, at least until the “inferior” races, Latin and Slav, tired of bourgeois civilization, no longer resign themselves to the subjection of a State, which will be even more despotic than the former State, although it calls itself a People’s State.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin (Anarchist), written in 1872, as cited in Marx & Friends In Their Own Words
“…Whiners, if given power, readily become tyrants. Marx was seen by his contemporaries as a potential tyrant. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), the Italian revolutionary, and a rival of Marx’s in the International Workingmen’s Association in the mid- 1860’s, once described Marx as ‘a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind . . . extraordinarily sly, shifty and taciturn. Marx is very jealous of his authority as leader of the Party; against his political rivals and opponents he is vindictive and implacable; he does not rest until he has beaten them down; his overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for power. Despite the communist egalitarianism which he preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party; admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition’"
-- Gary North, as cited in Marx & Friends In Their Own Words
“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes,
and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of
Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the
approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the
last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse
relationship between pirates and global temperature.”
-- Bobby Henderson; Passed on to me in an e-mail from a friend
“…That some 5% of the world's population creates 25% of the world's wealth…” (emphasis mine)
-- Tim Worstall, in an essay from Tech Central Station
In a recent interview, General Norman Schwartzkopf was asked if he thought there was room for forgiveness toward the people who have harbored and abetted the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America. His answer; “I believe that forgiving them is God's function. Our job is to arrange the meeting.
“Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
-- 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
"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
"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
“History is evoked more and more these days, even as fewer of us read it…”
“…So the next time someone quotes philosopher George Santayana for the umpteenth time that ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’ just assume that what follows will probably be wrong. Having a Rolodex of cocktail party quotes to beef up an argument is not the same as the hared work of learning about the past.”
-- Victor David Hanson, cited in The Tanuki Ramble blogsite
“Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.”
-- Ayn Rand (John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged)
“…all Muslims are not terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.”
-- Neal Boortz
“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”
-- Robert Heinlein
“…The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
-- Robert Heinlein
“Responsibility cannot be shared.”
-- Robert Heinlein
"...virtue cannot be genuine without the freedom not to be virtuous. If that freedom does not exist, then the result is not virtue; it is just coercion. This is why Muslim criticisms of Western immorality ring hollow, because they would replace Western libertinism not with genuine virtue, but with enforced conformity and fear."
-- Robert Spencer, in an interview with Front Page Magazine, paraphrasing a concept articulated by Dinesh D'Souza
"...If Che's world vision had prevailed, it's safe to say that Apple founder Steve Jobs would have never brought us the iPod. After all, it's tough to innovate when you're stuck behind a donkey farming turnips for the proletariat..."
-- Ryan Clancy, freelance writer
“Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.”
-- G.K. Chesterton
“...to different individuals and groups the common good is bound to mean different things.”
-- Joseph Schumpeter
“...Leftists want to make us 'better' while at the same time denying that there is any such thing as 'better!!...”
-- Dr. John Ray
"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
-- Michaelangelo
"...Name me a society that has degenerated into famine and misery and fear because it has adopted the teachings of Spinoza and Jefferson and Einstein. Dare you say that these and other men had no ethics because they self-consciously rejected a personal or intervening deity?..."
-- Christopher Hitchens, quoted at frontpagemag.com
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientist s in history are great precisely because the broke with the consensus."
-- Michael Crichton, as quoted "Nealz Nuze at Boortz.com
"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon."
-- Friedrich Engels – from his controversy with the Anarchists, as quoted on the blog site, Dissecting Leftism
“...The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.
Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are...”
-- Andrew Klavan
"...I can't imagine what it must be like to hold an ideology where Wal-Mart outrages me more than the slaughter of 600 people..."
A writer's comments at the blogsite, "Libertas" commenting on the left's acceptance and adoration for Che Guevara and his actions as leader of firing squads at the beginning of Cuba's "revolution."
“Madonna believes in man-made global warming. Ok, now I'm convinced.”
-- Neal Boortz
“We love government because it enables us to accomplish things that if done privately would lead to arrest and imprisonment. For example, if I saw a person in need, and took your money to help him, I'd be arrested and convicted of theft. If I get Congress to do the same thing, I'm seen as compassionate.”
-- Economist Walter Williams
“Speakers of both the left and right who dare defy the intellectual Taliban of academia and support Israel or speak in support of American values are routinely harassed, drowned out and intimidated socially, academically and even physically. This is a universal characteristic of totalitarians of any stripe, they are more comfortable with other totalitarians, no matter how diametrically opposed their ideas, than they are with those who can see and point out the absurdity of their slavery to empty ideas and pathetic rationalizations.”
-- Yaacov Ben Moshe, from his blogsite; Breath of the Beast
“Damn that [President George] Bush! He's made people who hate our guts not like us.”
-- Ann Coulter
"An individual can become so secure within his own being that he becomes insecure within his false sense of security."
-- Steve Lynch
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from me. - Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
“If we don't change direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.”
-- Chinese Proverb
“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
-- Robert Heinlein
(In reference to the phony "anti-torture" lobby when they direct their scorn at the U.S. -- in incidents that can hardly be called torture); It's not torturing they criticize, it's America. If they opposed torture they'd be lobbying for an American victory in Iraq to insure torturers don't swarm the country.
-- the Libertas web site
(Regarding “Climate Change”) “Climate change” isn’t like predicting Italian coalition politics. There are only two options so, whichever one predicts, one has a 50 percent change of being right. The planet will always be either warming or cooling.”
-- Mark Steyn
“Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.”
-- Frank Zappa (1940- 1993)
Regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories and, specifically, the popular conspiracy theory film, “Loose Change” :
...if the United States government had no trouble killing so many people in the attacks themselves, there was nothing to stop them from bumping off one college student who thought he'd cracked the case...”
-- from the Wikipedia entry regarding the conspiracy film, “Loose Change” with a reference to the web site observations of “Maddox” on the site, “The Best Page in The Universe.”
"Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial
complex."
-- Frank Zappa
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. - Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
When you put off paying war's price, you pay compound interest in blood.
-- Ralph Peters, Writer for the New York Post
"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and gospel of envy."
-- Sir Winston Churchill
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur Clarke
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. - George Orwell (1903- 1950).
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."
-- George Orwell
“The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice Versa.”
-- Robert Heinlein
“... The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be?...”
-- Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq conflict and those who oppose it
We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us."
-- Bin Laden
"…the European Union is the creation of bureaucrats, by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats…"
-- Theodore Dalrymple
"…Having overwhelming military force on your side, and letting your enemies know you have the guts to use it, is being genuinely antiwar, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement brought on World War II and Ronald Reagan's military buildup ended the cold War…"
-- Thomas Sowell
"...policies to redress economic inequality hardly affect true inequality at all. Policymakers and economists rarely denounce the scandal of inequality in work effort, creativity, talent, or enthusiasm. We almost never hear about the outrage that is America’s inequality in leisure time, love, faith, or fun—even though these are things that most of us value more than money. To believe that we can redress inequality in our society by moving cash around is to have a materialistic, mechanistic, and totally unrealistic understanding of the resources that we truly care about..."
-- Arthur C. Brooks in a City Journal essay
“…We forget that once war breaks out, things usually get far worse before they get better. We should remember that 1943, after we had entered World War II, was a far bloodier year than 1938, when the world left Hitler alone. Similarly, 2005 may have brought more open violence in Iraq than was visible during Saddam’s less publicized killings of 2002. So it is when extremists are confronted rather than appeased…”
-- Victor David Hanson on the Iraq conflict
“Anyone who isn’t a liberal when young doesn’t have a heart. And anyone who isn’t a conservative when older, doesn’t have a brain.”
-- Winston Churchill
“It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.”
-- Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in an interview at Front Page Magazine
“…in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.”
-- Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in an interview at Front Page Magazine
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
-- Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in an interview at Front Page Magazine
"How can we make the world a safer place for dictators and one-party police states?"
-- Paraphrasing the values and daily statements made by the United Nations and Left-wing political observers everywhere
“Modern man particularly - or so it seems to me - is particularly bad at recognizing that much of his unhappiness or discontent stems from this inevitable source. Rather, he blames the structure of society and thinks that a perfection that will resolve all contradictions and eliminate all frustrations can be achieved, if only we abolished private property or followed the example of the 7th century followers of Mohammed. The attempt to force people to do so gives meaning to their existence, and of course a lot of sadistic pleasure into the bargain.”
-- Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in an interview at Front Page Magazine
“…Really, do we need more of these experiments to prove the critical importance of freedom to human security? Doctors, you know, stop an experiment when it proves deadly to the control group.”
-- Dr. __________Rummels on the communist social “experiment”
“I left the appalling tragedy of Russia with a lasting hatred and distrust of communism and of intellectuals, gifted with intelligence, but without simple common sense.”
-- Malcolm Muggeridge, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, reporting on the great famine in Russia under Stalin
“If you talk to God, you are praying, if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
-- Thomas Szasz
"A communist is someone who reads Marx. An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx."
-- Ronald Reagan
"...The odd thing, of course, is that real progress in the world is almost never achieved by self-proclaimed "Progressives." They generally make things worse rather than better. (See all the mad utopian schemers from Bin Laden to Stalin and Ahmadi-Nejad.) As a group, they are strikingly ill-equipped to even understand the world in any depth. Rather, it's farmers, business people, engineers, teachers, laborers, scientists, soldiers, cops, doctors, writers, inventors, all of whom create real progress --- or who keep the world from sliding back into barbarism..."
-- James Lewis, writing in The American Thinker
"...Communist Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population, it was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet.
And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving"?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence."
-- From the blog site, "Snake Hunters"
All the radicals in the world together have not created as much economic progress as the inventor of Diet Coke or the Post-It Note. I'm sorry, but it's plainly true. So the "Progressive" ego trip is really only an ego trip.
“When the Swiss are for nonintervention in war, they are called “neutral.” When Americans are for nonintervention, they are called ‘isolationists’ [and, I would add that when the U.S. is not “isolationists,” they’re called “warmongers”].
-- Thomas Szasz
"...Kirk identified six elements that make the conservative mind: belief in a transcendent order that "rules society as well as conscience"; attachment to "the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence" as against the routinizing and leveling forces of modern society; the assumption that "civilized society requires orders and classes"; the conviction that "freedom and property are closely linked"; faith in custom and convention and consequently a "distrust of the 'sophisters, calculators, and economists' who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs"; and a wariness of innovation coupled with a recognition that "prudent innovation is the means of social preservation." The leading role in this mix that Kirk attaches to religion marks him as a social conservative; his insistence that religion provides the indispensable ground for individual liberty marks him as a modern conservative...."
"...Famously, at least in libertarian circles, Hayek, an Austrian-born economist who became a British citizen and then immigrated to the U.S. in 1950, wrote a postscript to "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960), explaining why he was not a conservative. For him, "true conservatism"--which he confused with European reaction--was characterized by "opposition to drastic change" and a complacent embrace of established authority. Because his overriding goal was to preserve liberty, Hayek considered himself a liberal, but he recognized that in the face of the challenges presented mid-century by socialism, he would often find himself in alliance with conservatives. As a staunch member of the party of liberty, Hayek was keen to identify the political arrangements that would allow for "free growth" and "spontaneous change," which, he argued, brought economic prosperity and created the conditions for individual development. This meant preserving the tradition of classical liberalism, and defending limited, constitutional government against encroachments by the welfare state and paternalistic legislation..."
-- Peter Berkowitz, describing "The Conservative Mind" in an essay in The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
"Human beings are born equal but cultures are not,...They are human made and for the most part man-made. There is nothing sacred about cultures and nothing blasphemous about reforming them."
-- Irshad Manji, a Canadian-Muslim feminist
"The isolationists on the Right are afraid the world is bad for America, while the isolationists on the Left think America is bad for the world..."
-- Norman Podhoretz
"Ever since Rousseau, the left has regarded the family as an obstacle to the revolutionary transformation of human nature they seek..."
-- Thomas Lifson, at The American Thinker
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't
-- Margaret Thatcher
"In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be."
-- Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978)
"From cradle to grave was their promise; and little by little, the graves started outnumbering the cradles." (In regard to European socialism)
-- Guy Millière
"He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul's support"
-- George Bernard Shaw
"I am an optimist. But I am an optimist who takes his raincoat."
-- Harold Wilson
"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good."
-- Andy Warhol
"Our founders Marx and Engels believed that the government was endowed with unalienable rights to regulate life, ration liberty, and dispense happiness – and that to secure these rights, government must decide what's best for the governed, redistribute their property, and indoctrinate their children."
-- The writers at, The People's Cube
"...Once you understand the Multicultural Pyramid of Oppression, you can begin to understand how to turn to your advantage certain circumstances that are beyond your control; such as where you were born, the type of genitalia you were born with, into what race you were born, and the religion of your parents. You see, the fewer things you have in common with The Oppressor, the more you can cast yourself as The Victim. And, as The Victim, you are virtuous, so there are certain things you can get away with that others can't; like actually oppressing people..."
-- Mark Steyn
"The difference between people who 'do it' and those who don't is that those that do just do it!"
-- Donald Zydorczyk
"People are sick of the same old bullshit, they want a new kind of bullshit."
-- Donald Zydorczyk
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." [I'd add that doing something inefficiently that shouldn't be done at all is useless and blatantly stupid, but tell that to a bureaucrat or any other lover of the state].
-- Peter Drucker
"A person is smart,...people are... and stupid"
-- Paraphrased from a line in the movie, "Men in Black" when Will Smith's character asks, "Why the big secret. People are smart. They can handle [information regarding aliens]."
"In the beginning there was nothing, and it exploded..."
-- Unknown
It can be justly asserted that any country which erects monuments to leaders still living is probably not a free society. (paraphrased)
-- Donald Zydorczyk
[The following is an example of "unsophisticated" contemporary American culture]:
"The Truck is packed. The house is sold. The trees don't care. These woods were never mine, they just lent themselves awhile. No one can truly own the woods any more than you can own another's thoughts. Today my dream is to know the mind of a tree."
"To that end I hereby decree that I will be buried in a pine box with an acorn in my mouth. An oak will grow from my head, pressing its roots like flowers within my ribs, piercing my skull and slithering deep into the earth. I want my boughs to shelter children a hundred years from now. I want to be a tree where pilgrims trek for knowledge. I want lovers to caress each other in the soft ground beneath my shade. I want to withstand snow and wind, rain and drought, fire and hail. I want to thrive in the woods and die in the woods, return to the woods and become born in the woods."
"I want to stay home."
"I am ready to leave."
-- Chris Offutt
"...The sad truth is that as long as you hate America and are in favor of national health care you can pretty much kill all the people you want without losing favor with the left. Let’s remember that this is an industry where step-one in a career resurrection involves hugging the dictator Hugo Chavez..."
-- From the Libertas blog site
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."
-- Will Rogers
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
– Mark Twain
“...people in America and around the world aren't dying from malnutrition because places like [Burger King] have made food fresh, cheap, and simple to prepare. Seriously, where ever you find a fast food restaurant, you'll find fat kids, but not starving ones. But in this easy age of value-free moralism, experts are more inclined to demonize Ronald McDonald than Robert Mugabe.”
-- Greg Guttfield
"It is one of the ironies of modern liberalism that diversity should so often come to mean uniformity, and tolerance so often to mean intolerance: that is to say, think and act like me, or else."
-- Theodore Dalrymple
“...Another colleague of mine, with great moral indignation and personal angst, once complained to me about how we are being “attacked” by Pepsi commercials. “By trying to tell us that we are not cool if we don’t drink Pepsi,” he agonized, “the capitalist machinery practices the politics of exclusion. By trying to pretend it offers us choice, it actually negates choice.”
My mom’s father was executed by the Soviet secret police. He did not have the luxury of being oppressed by Pepsi commercials...”
-- Jamie Glazov
"The erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence .... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such montebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
-- H.L. Mencken
"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain."
-- Thomas Sowell
"...We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn't do rather than turn to our best and brightest private citizens to show us what we could.
Alas, no successful civilization in history - Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on - ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers."
-- Victor Davis Hanson at FrontPageMag.Com
"History rarely repeats itself but historians often do."
-- James Pethokoukis quoting a professor he had at Northwestern University
"It depends on the question."
-- Film dirctor David Zucker's response to the cliché and meaningless statement, "War is not the answer."
“What makes me laugh – ruefully, I assure you – is when our office seekers trot around the country promising “accountability” for Wall Street. Lehman [Bros.] just went bankrupt – in a market economy, things don’t get more “accountable” than that….
-- Jeanne Cummings in The Politico
"The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans. If classical liberalism [free-market capitalism] spells individualism, Fascism spells government."
-- Benito Mussolini
Majority rule is three wolves and one sheep deciding on dinner.
-- unknown
"The first step towards freedom is calling things by their real name. With the phrase "Punitive Liberalism," we at least have a truthful name for the toxic doctrine that would have us believe success is a form of failure."
-- Roger Kimball
"...And that's assuming we could just 'end' wars – and you can't . You can lose, quit or win wars...but you cannot end them simply by walking away. Wars have two sides and the enemy, as the saying goes, 'gets a vote.'..."
-- James Jay Carafano
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking [telling] others to live as one wishes to live." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken."
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
-- Yogi Bera
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
-- Margaret Thatcher
“You are one of those who did not return from hell empty handed.
--Unknown
"They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform..."
-- Fred Thompson, speaking before the 2008 Republican Convention
“...Apparently Democrats are catching on to this idea of stability. According to a June 23rd memo distributed to House Democrat Caucus members, "stability and peace of mind" are to be included its daily talking points. So there are now four buzz words for [current president] Obama's healthcare plan: cost, choice, quality -- and stability.”
“OK ... so let me play with this idea of a "stable" lifestyle for a moment. How would one define a stable lifestyle? Let's see ... you are guaranteed a place to live. That's stability, right? So, you have a place to live, what more could you want? How about a guarantee of three meals a day! Getting more stable all the time. Now let's throw in a guaranteed job, and just to top things off we'll include health care! Sound good? Well .. this wonderful "stable" lifestyle is available to you right now! Just commit a crime heinous enough to get you sent to prison.”
-- Neal Boortz
"...But his [presidential candidate, Obama] tax plans and their likely economic consequence are very much a plan for catastrophe. Doubling the tax in invested capital, and ratcheting up the top tax bracket to an effective 60%, will plunge the nation into a real depression. Not a recession or a downturn or a correction or a slowdown. A depression..."
"...When [Presidential Candidate] Obama says he will only tax the rich, it's like saying he won't shut down the entire ship , just the engine room."
-- Former Clinton Advisor, Dick Morris commenting on Barack Obama's (punish "the rich") tax plans
"I don't know any true patriot who questions the right of Americans to dissent on any issue, whether we agree with them or not."
"The Left's patriotism-deficit has less to do with dissent than a very real and ingrained hostility toward America."
"Its recitation of our national saga runs from slavery to Wounded Knee, to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, to segregation to My Lai and Abu Ghraib -- excluding everything else. Liberals love America; they just can't find anything positive to say about it, other than Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks."
Don Feder, in an essay at FrontPageMag.Com
"Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value,..."
Dean Steacy; an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, when asked what value he gives to free speech in his investigations.
"...David Horowitz ran up against this aspect of the leftist psyche after his father died. Horowitz begged his communist father's old friends to tell him what his father had been like as a person. But none of those old men could. They could recite his father's dreams (of the coming communist utopia ) but none could recite the facts about his father. Despite having known Horowitz's father for nearly 60 years, those old men couldn't tell his son whether his father had cheered for the Yankees or the dodgers, whether he liked ketchup on his french fries, whether he liked to dance or not...."
-- A comment left by "Carolyn" at the Libertas web site (an excellent example of the cold inhuman nature of socialist thinking as it always dwells in mere political abstractions).
"Diplomacy without force is like music without instruments."
-- Metternich
"To me 'justice' is when someone gets what they deserve. To the left 'justice' is when someone gets what they want."
-- Neal Boortz
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom
-- Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not, but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
-- Epicurus (341 B.C. – 270 B.C.)
“...Hatred is the central element of our struggle!...Hatred that is intransigent...Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine. We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism, rivers of blood must flow!”
-- Che Guevara
..."to promote, educate and advance conservative principles of fiscal responsibility, small limited government, free enterprise, the rule of law, private property rights, and the preservation and protection of individual liberty."
-- "The Lincoln Club," a small conservative values organization describing their values
"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 quoted in the blog, "Dissecting Leftism"
"Few things are more absurd than a "rebellious" American rock band playing the anthem of a political power that outlawed rock music and persecuted the musicians who were the true romantic rebels."
-- From a The People's Cube regarding an American rock band that regularly plays the old Russian national anthem before their concerts to express their hatrd for capitalism.
"How could anyone possibly disagree with me when I so obviously know what's best for everyone."
-- In so many words...a typical leftist appraisal of things
"...What comes to mind when Che is mentioned (other than bigotry, incompetent leadership and mass murder) is the time I saw a death penalty protester on the news wearing a Che t-shirt. I doubt he was even aware of the irony..."
--A person commenting at the the Libertas blog site
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
-- Thomas Sowell
["...]since when was it written into law that your earnings must "contribute to society as a whole"? Can you imagine what would happen to our economic system if every financial transaction was judged - or perhaps regulated - on whether or not it contributed to society as a whole? You do realize that this "society as a whole" noise is collectivist nonsense, don't you? I engage in an economic tranction - or "function" as Obama calls it, to get something that I want, not to contribute to society. The person on the other side of the transaction is getting something he wants as well. It's a trade ... a trade negotiated and transacted between two free individuals. Society plays no role here. Society isn't putting up any of the money, society isn't taking any of the risk. So long as I'm not harming someone else ... just leave me the hell alone. When I want to contribute to society as a whole I'll send some money to the Red Cross.[...]
-- Neal Boortz
"The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything – or nothing."
-- Lady Nancy Astor
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx (a Marx who actually did understand politics).
"
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
-- H.L. Mencken
-- Everett Dean Martin
The Soviet Union used to show the 1940 John Ford "Grapes of Wrath" movie to demonstrate how miserable life is under capitalism. But this backfired, as audiences watched the scene where the poor Okies pile into a beat up jalopy in their futile quest for a better life in California The audience's reaction was, "Holy crap! Poor people in America have cars!"
-- A comment by "boffotmc" at the Libertas web site
# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ January 20, 2006 
