"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
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."
"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it?s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
"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, Ego
"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
"The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future." --Stephen Ambrose (1936 - 2002)
"When a government takes over a people's economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs." --Maxwell Anderson
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." --Maya Angelou
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that `my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" -- Isaac Asimov
"Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians. We call them children." --Hannah Arendt
Brooks Atkinson, (1894-1984)
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save.", "Once Around the Sun" 1951
"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, Confessions, A.D. 401
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." --Charles Babbage>/p>
Richard Bach:
"Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."
"Get this in mind early: We never grow up."
"When you have come to the edge of all the light you have
And step into the darkness of the unknown
Believe that one of the two will happen to you
Either you'll find something solid to stand on
Or you'll be taught how to fly!""A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life."
"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, New York Times, June 18, 1968
"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
Frederic 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 (1874-1948)
"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, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 87-8 (1764)
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, The Devil's Dictionary
"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."
Etienne de la Boetie:
"Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything but simply to give him nothing. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude." --Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."
Niels Bohr (1885-1962):
"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?"
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
"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, Freedom in Chains
"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, Farenheit 451 (1966)
"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
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
"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." --1928
“Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subject to the rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.” --dissenting in the case of US v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
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." --
"There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, be they scientists or laymen, open the door to tragedy" - Jacob Bronowsky, from The Ascent of Man.
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." -- William Jennings Bryan
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, The American Heretic's Dictionary
"Indecision may or may not be my problem." --Jimmy Buffett
"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, Bone Dance
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"
"An honest politician is one who, when he's bought, stays bought." --Simon Cameron 19th Century Pennsylvania Republican political boss
"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, "Self-culture," 1838
"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 stupid. --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
"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?" --- Cicero
Arthur C. Clarke, (1917-2008)
"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, 1961 (Clarke's third law)
"With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible -- and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry from their pens. On careful analysis, it appears that these debacles fall into two classes, which I will call Failures of Nerve and Failures of Imagination." --Profiles of the Future (1962).
"Power... marks its victim, denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments." --Henry Clay, speech, US Senate, March 14, 1834
"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 problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living." --Dan Cofall
"The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away." --John S. Coleman, Address, Detroit Chamber of Commerce, 1956
"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, USMC:
"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."
"A bad engineer tries to get something to work. A good engineer tries to get something not to work -- that is, after getting it working, the good engineer tries to find its limits and make sure they are well-understood and acceptable." --Michael Covington
"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
"If you risk nothing, then you risk everything." ~ Geena Davis
President Jefferson Davis, C.S.A.:
"The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct, and He who knows the hearts of men will judge the sincerity with which we have labored to preserve the government of our fathers, in its spirit and in those rights inherent in it, which were solemnly proclaimed at the birth of the States, and which have been affirmed and reaffirmed in the Bills of Rights of the several States. When they entered into the Union of 1789, it was with the undeniable recognition of the power of the people to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of that government whenever, in their opinion, its functions were perverted and its ends defeated. By virtue of this authority, the time and occasion requiring them to exercise it having arrived, the sovereign States here represented have seceded from that Union, and it is a gross abuse of language to denominate the act rebellion or revolution. They have formed a new alliance, but in each State its government has remained as before. The rights of person and property have not been disturbed." --Inaugural Address
"The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert it's self, though it may be at another time and in another form."
"Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again."
"..the contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena." ---address to the Mississippi legislature in 1881.
W. Edwards Deming:
"It is not enough to do your best: you must know what to do, and THEN do your best."
"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
"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, As quoted in Dan Gifford, The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason, 62 Tenn. L. Rev. 759, 789 (1995).
"Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state." --John Dewey
"Love is your religion; the whole world is your temple." --Matshona Dhliwayo
Philip K. Dick:
"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night." --What the Dead Men Say, 1954
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Edward W. Dijkstra:
"From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109! The programmer is in the unique position that his is the only discipline and profession in which such a gigantic ratio, which totally baffles our imagination, has to be bridged by a single technology. He has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before."
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility."
"We could, for instance, begin with cleaning up our language by no longer calling a bug "a bug" but by calling it an error. It is much more honest because it squarely puts the blame where it belongs, viz., with the programmer who made the error. The animistic metaphor of the bug that maliciously sneaked in while the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest as it is a disguise that the error is the programmer's own creation. The nice thing of this simple change of vocabulary is that it has such a profound effect. While, before, a program with only one bug used to be "almost correct," afterwards a program with an error is just "wrong."
"The more I learn, the more I wonder." -- Dr. Lindsey Doe
"The difference between knowledge and wisdom is a big pile of mistakes in the corner" --Benny Donahue
"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, August 4, 1857.
"Beware the fury of a patient man." --John Dryden, Absolam and Achitophel, 1680
"Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance" A.R. Dykes, Scottish Branch, Institution of Structural Engineers 1946
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering" --Freeman Dyson
"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we're not vigilant." --Clint Eastwood
"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually." --Abba Eban (1915-2002)
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, 1950
"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."
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance."
"When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about." --The World as I See It.
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
The scientists? religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. --Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.
Dwight D. 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"
"If all Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government." -Dec.9, 1949
"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, Goldfinger
"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, Man's Search for Meaning
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, speech at National Press Club, Dec. 1993
"The Grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass, wherever you may be." --Robert Fulghum, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It
"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."
"You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete."
"The more laws the more offenders." --Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
"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
Kahlil Gibran:
"Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafairing soul, if either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction."
"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."
"An acid is like a woman: a good one will eat through your pants." -- Mel Gibson, Saturday Night Live
"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
Johann Wolfgang von 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.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. --Hermann Goering, Nuremberg
"The most violent element in society is ignorance." ~ Emma Goldman
"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, The Washington Post
"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
"Never get between electricity and where it wants to go." -Red Green
"If Love Were Oil, I'd Be About A Quart Low." --Lewis Grizzard
"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, The Federalist Papers
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." --Benjamin Harrison, Address to Congress, 1888
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
"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," --Stephen Hawking
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." --Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823
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, 1961
"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, copyright 1942, Street Publications.
"...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, 1940 (revised as Revolt in 2100, 1953)
"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on." --Joseph Heller
"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." --Ernest Hemingway
Jimi Hendrix:
"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."
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
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."
"People unfit for freedom--who cannot do much with it--are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self."
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil." --Douglas Hofstadter
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." --Ed Howdershelt
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." --Sir Fred Hoyle, London Observer, 1979
"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, lay sermons, 1870
"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)
Asked in a 1965 interview how long he expected the Rolling Stones to last, Jagger replied, "I think we're pretty well set up for at least another year."
"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 (1848)
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)
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
"Religions are all alike -- founded upon fables and mythologies."
"That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute New Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
"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 greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
"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, explaining the causes of the First World War.
"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, as quoted on his statue on O'Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland.
"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
Timothy Leary:
"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top."
"I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration."
"If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."
"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."
"Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time."
"My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."
"Science is all metaphor."
"The universe is an intelligence test."
"There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third."
"Think for yourself and question authority."
"We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go."
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."
"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
Robert E. Lee:
"We could have pursued no other course without dishonor. And sad as the results have been, if it had all to be done again, we should be compelled to act in precisely the same manner."
"Our country demands all our strength, all our energies. To resist the powerful combination now forming against us will require every man at his place. If victorious, we will have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for."
"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 (on CNN's Larry King Live discussing her miraculous Jenny Craig weight-loss): "I've learned not to put things in my mouth that are bad for me"
"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, English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)
"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."
"My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope(as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, it's sudden execution is impossible. What then? Free them, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people on. What then? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? MY own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not...A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded."
"I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office..." --9/15/1858 campaign speech
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." --3/14/1861 First Inaugural Speech
"I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District [of Columbia]..." --3/24/1862 letter to Horace Greely, New York Tribune editor
"I will say, then, that I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
"I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." --upon his replacement of General Burnside with General Hooker for command of the Army of the Potomac
"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, Must You Conform? 1956
"Your thoughts are not contained in your head -- they are part of the Quantum Field. When playing through your nervous system the thoughts generate a vibatory field similar to that of a tuning fork. Thought vibrations interact and entangle with harmonically resonant structures in the Field. "We activate and bring into our lives the things that we think about the most.
Psychologists reveal that over 70% of our thoughts are negative and redundant.
Do the math!"
-- Dr. Bruce Lipton
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," 1690
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."
"A woman's dress should be like a barbed wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view." --Sophia Loren
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." --H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Emil Ludwig -->"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender." --Emil Ludwig
"Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly." --George MacDonald
"It is a common failing of man not to take account of tempests during fair weather." --Machiavelli
James Madison:
"If Man is not Fit to Govern Himself, How can He be Fit to Govern Someone Else?"
"Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." (1787)
"When Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign foe."
"If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within."
"Religion and government will both exist �in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
"Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
"War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
"In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
"The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.
"No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
"War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.
"In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.
"In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.
"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
--from Political Observations, April 20, 1795 in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison"Charity is no part of the legislative �duty of the government."
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
"I mail myself a copy of the Constitution every morning just on the hope that [the government] will open it and see what it says" -- Bill Maher
"I don't want to change the world. I only want to burp it." --Lenna Mahoney
Groucho Marx:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
"If women dressed for men, the stores wouldn't sell much -- just an occasional sun visor."
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of bandages and adhesive tape."
"They must find it difficult... Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority." --Gerald Massey
"Like I said, love wouldn't be so blind if the braille weren't so damned great!" --Armistead Maupin
"It is not the particular man in power that I oppose, but the power itself, which is unjust." --Wendy McElroy
People are clueless. That, in itself, is forgivable. What's NOT forgivable is people being happy about the fact that they're clueless, and lacking any particular desire to change. --Dave McGuire
"What some may call 'simplistic', I think of as "cutting through the crap". --Kent McManigal
"Before I started working here I drank, smoked, and used foul language for no reason at all. But thanks to this job, I now have a reason." --Fitz McKinzie
"If you're not making anybody mad you're not getting anything done." -- Col. Paul McNicol, USMC
"Don't be humble. You're not that great." --Golda Meir
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956):
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
"Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods."
"Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of."
"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."
"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage."
"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing."
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
"All Government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent."
"It is a fine thing to face machine guns for immortality and a medal, but isn't it a fine thing, too, to face calumny, injustice and loneliness for the truth which makes men free"
"The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."
"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply.
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie.
I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
--Mencken's Creed"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights."
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him."
"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition."
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right."
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise, not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion. -- from the Introduction, In Defense of Women (1922 ed.)
"The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle -- a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism."
"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal." -- Dr. Karl Menninger, The Human Mind, 1930
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority." --Stanley Milgram
John Stuart Mill:
"If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind."
"Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government." --Dissertations, 1859
"And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would have never tolerated any of this crap. For God's sake, they were blowing peoples' heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn't even coffee." --Dennis Miller
"Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed." --Henry Miller
Ludwig von Mises:
"An 'anti-something' movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program that they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be." --in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
"Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interest. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and the division of labor are universal. They immediately benefit every generation, and not only later descendants. For what the individual must sacrifice for the sake of society he is amply compensated by greater advantages. His sacrifice is only apparent and temporary; he foregoes a smaller gain in order to reap a greater one later."
"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity." --Christopher Morley, 1890-1957
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around. What do you see. Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it." --Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix
"Cognitive dissonance is only dissonant if you recognize it" --John Mosby, Mountain Guerrilla
"The man who walks alone is soon trailed by the F.B.I." --Wright Morris, A Bill of Rites . . ., 1967
"Education is cheap; ignorance is expensive! Fortunately,the cure for ignorance is education." --Jim Morrison
"The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention." --Richard Moss
"When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it is attached to the rest of the world." --John Muir
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.'" --W.H. Murray, of the Scottish Himalayan Expedition
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." --Edward R Murrow
"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 spells individualism, Fascism spells government." --Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism
"There is only one thing that remains to us, that cannot be taken away: To act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life." --Jawaharlal Nehru
Ted Nelson:
"I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming---or buying software---on the basis of 'lists of features' is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess."
"Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry."
"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." --Johann von Neumann
"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz."� --Doug Newman
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me?and by that time there was nobody left to speak up." --Martin Niem�ller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
"The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god. --Friedrich Nietzsche
Richard M. Nixon:
"Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy."
"Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people."
"When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal." --interview with David Frost, May 19, 1977
"TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains." --Peggy Noonan
P. J. O'Rourke:
"Term limits aren't enough. We need jail."
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
"The political process consists entirely of politicians talking out of their butts."
"If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?"
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
"This country was founded by religious nuts with guns."
"The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders."
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs."
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop." --Parliament of Whores, 1991
"Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral." --Robert Orben
George Orwell:
"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
"He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him."
The 20th Century proved, if you were paying any attention, that taxation is the great enemy of civilization. How do you think Hitler paid for that army? With voluntary contributions? How did Stalin pay for the Gulag Archipelago? With baked goods sales?" --James Ostrowski
Thomas Paine:
"The government is best which governs least."
"It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support."
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.."
"It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off."
"He who dares not offend cannot be �honest."
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church"
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
"Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.", Rights of Man
"You're giving [the government] too much credit for having an active defense. They don't have an active defense. What they have is a lot of reports that have been written. Just one consulting firm increased their staff writing (cybersecurity) reports from four people to 200 in the last five years. As one chief of staff told me, the best thing to do with those reports is to pile them in front of our buildings so the terrorists can't use a car bomb to get us." --Alan Paller, Infoworld, 9/11/2006
"Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." --Lucy Parsons
Isabel Paterson:
"Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish."
"The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.", The God of the Machine
"Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security." --Norman Vincent Peale
"You can fight without ever winning, but you can never win without a fight." --Neil Peart, drummer for Rush
"This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him." --William Lyon Phelps
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber." --Plato
"Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only." --Titus Maccius Plautus
"All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest." -- Beatrix Potter
"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." --Ezra Pound
"..what I recommend...is coldly severing your love from your income. One part of your life is to make only as much money as you need with as little stress as possible, and a separate part, the important part, is to do just exactly what you love with zero pressure to make money. And if you're lucky, you'll eventually make money anyway." --Ran Prieur
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." --Thomas Pynchon
Ayn Rand:
"We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight *against* anything, unless we fight *for* something--and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being." --Philosophy: Who Needs It
"I will neither live for the sake of another man, nor expect another to live for mine."
"To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality."
"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws." --Atlas Shrugged
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual."
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
"I like my mixed metaphors shaken, not stirred, thank you." --Eric S. Raymond
Ronald Reagan:
"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I?m here to help."
"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't take the civil service exam."
"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first. 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."
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
"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."
"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
"Status quo, you know, that is Latin for 'the mess we're in.'"
"I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon."
"Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them."
"They say hard work never hurt anybody, but I figure why take the chance."
"What makes him think a middle-aged actor, who's played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?" (on Clint Eastwood's bid to become mayor of Carmel, CA)
"...I know it's hard when you're up to your armpits in alligators to remember you came here to drain the swamp.", Feb 10, 1982
"...there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.", Jan 21, 1981
"Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere.", Fortune, Sept 15, 1986
"Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence." --Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1970
"Facts are stupid things." (attempting to quote John Adams, who said "Facts are stubborn things.")
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."
"Freedom is not something to be secured in any one moment in time. We must struggle to preserve it every day. And freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
""How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? -- First Inaugural Address
"If you want to remain free, you must always be wary of government, because governments, not private terrorists, are and always have been the greatest threats to liberty and the greatest mass murderers in history." --Charley Reese
"The fact that hitler was a politcal genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other can." -- Wilhelm Reich
"Don't you ever stand for that sort of thing. Someone ever tries to kill you, you try and kill 'em right back." --Captain Malcom Reynolds, Firefly
Spider Robinson:
"I must have missed something: if a guy has truly absolute power, then what could you possibly corrupt him with? Acton got it backward: what engenders corruption is paranoia, the perception of inadequate power. Absolute power renders you absolutely immune to corruption."
"God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there's some consolation."
"Nobody in the CIA is smart enough to read science fiction." --The Callahan Touch
"I think there is an aversion to intimacy that has let us down the cupcake path. I mean, whatever happened to the days when everyone was sharing a cake" --Mo Rocca on why he is anti-cupcake
Will Rogers:
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we are paying for."
"There is no income tax in Russia. But there's no income."
"I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons."
"One of the evils of democracy is, you have to put up with the man you elect whether you want him or not." -- Autobiography, 1949
"Never miss a good opportunity to shut up."
"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer."
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
"Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth."
"Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials."
"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!"
Murray Rothbard:
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." --Murray Rothbard
"The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of person and property, but dangers to its own contentment: for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, conspiracy to overthrow the government. Murder is pursued haphazardly unless the victim be a policeman, or Gott soll hï¿œten, an assassinated Chief of State; failure to pay a private debt is, if anything, almost encouraged, but income tax evasion is punished with utmost severity; counterfeiting the State's money is pursued far more relentlessly than forging private checks, etc. All this evidence demonstrates that the State is far more interested in preserving its own power than in defending the rights of private citizens."
"If questions of a different kind can be asked, then nature will respond in a new language."--Beverly Rubik, biophysicist
"When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." --Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does NOT mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'guilty'."
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." --speech in New York on October 12, 1915.
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today."
"To engage in the ritual of 'democracy' conveys the message that we CONCEDE that whether we are to be free or not depends upon whether our MASTERS will, by legislation, allow us such freedom. See the contradiction? If I own me, by definition I don't NEED anyone else's permission." --Larken Rose
"A survey once found that gifted children (truly gifted* as opposed to public school definitions) watch an average of less than 5 hours of television a week during their preschool years. Compare that with a national average of twenty-five hours a week (beginning around the second birthday), and you can begin to appreciate what a drain on the brain the idiot-box truly is." --John Rosemond
"We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the "rights of society"? Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat "society" as if it were an actually existing entity. "Society" is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding "rights" of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that "society" is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work." --Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
Salman Rushdie:
"Don't bow your heads. Don't know your place. Defy the gods, and you'll soon find out that most of them have feet of clay."
"Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
"Most people would rather die than think. In fact, they do."
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
"Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible." ~~The Impact of Science on Society (1952)
Carl Sagan:
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumb down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." in "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995
"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." --The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster."
Mort Sahl
"I'm for capital punishment. You've got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?" --Mort Sahl"If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason." -- From the recording Mort Sahl at the hungry i
"The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness." --Annie Savoy, Bull Durham
"... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." --Bruce Schneier
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." --Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Albert Schweitzer:
"Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it, a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals."
"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by another human being. We should all be thankful for the people who rekindle the inner spirit."
I get up each morning, gather my wits. Pick up the paper, read the obits. If I'm not there I know I'm not dead. So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed. Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent? My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went. But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin, And think of the places my get-up has been. -- Pete Seeger
"I was sitting on a curb one day feeling all dejected, and a little bird came along and said 'cheer up, it could be worse', so I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse." --Dan Shafer
"If one takes the trouble to examine the matter from the perspective of the machinations that dominate all political behavior, the answer becomes apparent. Though Republicans and Democrats have their personal and minor policy differences, they are in agreement on one basic point: their 'bipartisan' support for the preservation and aggrandizement of the power of the state. They understand, as do members of the mainstream media, that their principal obligation is to serve the well-being of the political power structure that long ago laid uncontested claim to the ownership of modern society. --Butler Shaffer
"It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody?s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy." --Albert Shanker
George Bernard Shaw:
"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day." -Pygmalion, Act 2
"Liberty means responsibility; that is why most men dread it."
"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
"Dance is the only art of which we ourselves is the stuff of which it is made." -- Ted Shawn
"The minds first step to self-awareness must be through the body." ~ George Sheehan
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
--Percy Bysshe Shelly
"If the primates that we came from had known that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea." --Capt. John Sheridan, Babylon 5
"A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge."---Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
Profanity is the inevitable linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker. --Bruce Sherrod
"I refuse to be hyphenated." --Shevek
Michael Shirley:
"One of the things that we've been doing rather well for the last three quarters of a century is to produce people who are not only ignorant, but so totally self absorbed as to be unable to really see the world as it is. They grew up being lied to until they discovered how to lie to themselves. And they like their lies better than they like being able to open their eyes and look the big free world in the face. It's not surprizing that most of em are liberals or some other flavor of collectivist,........."
"And in the end, that's what tyranny is-- power without responsibility. These guys all want to tell us what to do, but they never seem to want to be accountable for the results."
"If people are being entertained by a lurid scandal or two, they're not paying attention while they're being enslaved."
"...when the answer is government, frequently the question is stupid."
Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character. --Margaret Chase Smith
"An ounce of wit is worth a pound of argument." --Sydney Smith
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."
--Joseph Sobran
It is essential that the true fighter for justice, if he is to survive for even a short time, should remain a private individual, and not go into public life. --Socrates
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away. When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? . . . ." ....And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! .... If . . . if . . . We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." -- The Gulag Archipelago
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
Thomas Sowell:
"Reality is not optional."
"To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle."
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is: he confuses it with feeling."
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
"The ultimate consequence of protecting men from the results of their own folly is to fill the world with fools." --Herbert Spencer
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." --Henry Spencer
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -- Herbert Spencer
Lysander Spooner:
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --1867
"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."
"Thus the whole Revolution turned upon, asserted, and, in theory, established, the right of each and every man, at his discretion, to release himself from the support of the government under which he had lived. And this principle was asserted, not as a right peculiar to themselves, or to that time, or as applicable only to the government then existing; but as a universal right of all men, at all times, and under all circumstances." --1867
"We anarchists have a secret weapon. Children are natural anarchists. It takes many years of constant oppression to squeeze it out of them." -- Bill St. Clair
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils". --John Stark (The New Hampshire state motto truncates this quote.)
Adlai Stevenson:
"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."
"Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse." -- speech, Albequerque, NM, 1952
"It is often easier to fight for priciples than to live up to them." --speech, NYC, August 27, 1952
To expect the state to protect you is to be a bystander in your own fate. --Mark Steyn
"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." --Bjarne Stroustrup
"Ask the next question. Keep on asking questions and don't stop, and sooner or later you'll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough." --Theodore Sturgeon
"Son, it doesn't say 'to keep us safe'. It says 'to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men'." --Vin Suprynowicz, The Black Arrow
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." --Jonathan Swift
"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes." --Charles R. Swindoll
"The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws." --Cornelius Tacitus
"People don't like to be meddled with." --River Tam, Serenity
"I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." --Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)
Henry David Thoreau:
"If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." --Walden, 1854
"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."
"Any fool can make a rule - and every fool will mind it."
"Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its own way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.", Civil Disobedience
"I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.", Civil Disobedience
"I heartily accept the motto--'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,--'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
"Rock and roll never sleeps. It just passes out." --George Thorogood
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." --Howard Thurman
Alexis de Tocqueville:
"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." -- Alvin Toffler
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." --Pete Townshend, Won't Get Fooled Again
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." --Harry S. Truman
Mark Twain:
"Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.", A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889
"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."
"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
"The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German." --Mark Twain's Speeches, Disappearance of Literature
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.", A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
"I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction."
"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress."
"Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say." --Barbara Ueland, If You Want to Write.
"Last night as I lay in bed looking at the stars I thought, 'Where the hell is the ceiling?'" --Chris Unger
"Humanity many times has had sad experience of superpowerful police forces.... As soon as [the police] slip out from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitrary, merciless, a law unto themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth, jingling their weapons in megalomaniac euphoria. People thereupon become not masters, but servants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditionsly as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly overzealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption. The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminials escape them. Better a hundred unchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force." -- Jack Vance, The Star King, 1964 (later included in The Demon Princes)
Voltaire:
"Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd." --to Frederick the Great, 1767
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence-- it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and fearful master." --George Washington
"Life is tough. Life is tougher if you're stupid." --John Wayne
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." --Daniel Webster
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." --Noah Webster
"Armies under the control of ... a sovereign State cannot bring freedom to anyone." --Simone Weil, Ecrits historiques...
"Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels."
"Of all anti-homeostatic factors in society, the [sociopathic] control by business of the means of communication is the most effective and most important. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money,"
"Who is to assure us that ruthless power will not find its way back into the hands of those most avid for it?" --Norbert Weiner: Author of Cybernetics MIT 1947 -Chapter 6: "Information Language and Society".
Edith Wharton:
"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting"
"The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods"
"You can't fix it. You can't make it go away. I don't know what you're going to do about it, but I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm going to walk away from it. Maybe a small part of it will die if I'm not around feeding it any more." --Lew Welch
"There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race." --Alfred North Whitehead
Oscar Wilde, (1854-1900):
"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.", The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
"Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much."
"Democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."
"For now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love."
"Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of foreign-born and native-born."
"Let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again."
--Wendell Wilkie, One World
Walter E. Williams:
"What's just has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you -- and why?"
"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'."
Robert Anton Wilson:
"Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes - neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe."
"Marx bragged of 'turning Hegel upside down,' thinking he had thereby created Social Science. Unfortunately, metaphysics turned upside down does not become science but merely upside-down metaphysics. Hence the failure of Marxism."
"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it." --Woodrow Wilson
Claire Wolfe:
"America is at that awkward stage -- it's too late to work within the system, and too early to shoot the bastards."
"A judge is nothing but a combination of a lawyer and a politician. What on Earth is likely to be honorable about that?"
"When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer, superstition ain't the way" --Stevie Wonder
All good work is done in defiance of management. --Bob Woodward
Frank Zappa:
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set."Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute."
"A drug is neither moral nor immoral - it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole."
"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible"
"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."
"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced"
"I believe that people have a right to decide their own destiny; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only as long as) individual citizens give it a "temporary license to exist" - in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy you own the government - it doesn't own you. Along with this comes a responsibility to ensure that individual actions, in the pursuit of a personal destiny, do not threaten the well-being of others while the "pursuit" is in progress."
"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
The Jury:
"If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence ... and the courts must abide by that decision." -- US v Moylan, 4th Circuit Court of appeals, 1969, 417 F.2d at 1006
"The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts." Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Supreme Court , Horning v. Dist of Columbia, 138 (1920)
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts." --Samuel Chase, U.S.Supreme Court Justice, (1796)
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided." --Harlan F. Stone, 12th Chief Justice
"The pages of history shine on instance of the jury's exercise of its perogative to disregard instructions of the judge ..." -- U.S. v Daughterty, 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139 (1972)
Guns:
"Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state government, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people" --Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788
"The right of self-defense is the first law of nature. In most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited; liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." --Justice George Tucker, Virginia Supreme Court,1803
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." --Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
"A free people ought to be armed...When firearms go, all goes-we need them every hour...Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance. They are the American people's liberty's teeth and keystone under independence." --George Washington
"Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anyone has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so that he can do something to you that you wouldn't let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians." --From the novel Hope by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman.
"Drink heavily, and buy more guns." --Jim Bovard, at Freedom Summit 2005, responding to a question about what we should do now about government abuses of rights.
"I believe there's something in the Bible about 'Thou shalt not call anyone insane who owns and is competent with more firearms than you own sharp sticks.'" --Andrew Plotkin
"If you shoot me with .25 ACP, and I find out about it, I'll kick your ass." --Dan Martinez
"If guns cause crime, all mine are defective." --Ted Nugent
"Guns don't kill people. The Government does." --Dale Gribble
"If you believe the term "militia" means the National Guard then you must believe that freedom of speech is reserved for the Government Printing Office." --Seen in a sig file
"The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation." --Joyce Lee Malcolm, Professor of History, Bentley College
"... a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen..." --Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App.181)
"Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power." --Yoshimi Ishikawa, in the L.A. Times, Oct 15, 1992.
If somebody starts shooting a gun at me, don't expect me to defend myself with a condiment. --Steve Daniels on pepper spray
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." --Han Solo, Star Wars
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. --Hubert H. Humphrey, 1960
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State." --Heinrich Himmler
"Being able to put two rounds into the same hole from 25 meters! That's gun control." --Minnesota Governor-Elect Jesse Ventura
"Called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, 'What wine goes best with an M-16?' The guy who answered did his best to be helpful: "That depends. What are you smoking?" --Michael Maciolek
"You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one." --Rush Limbaugh, 1993
"Sure I've got a permit. It's called the Second Amendment." --Ted Nugent on Gun Control
"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic." --Ted Nugent
"If you choose not to defend your life with force, you have that absolute right, and the rest of us will attend your funeral. Whether you reap an eternal reward for your non-violent choice is entirely between you and your God. You do not have the right to make the rest of the world pay for your choice." --Kathryn Graham
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." --George Washington
Windoze, m$, billgates, & computers in general...:
"No program shall leave its sanity at the mercy of its input." --P. J. Plauger
"Once a new technology starts rolling, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road." --Stewart Brand
"The rest of the world views the USA the way Silicon Valley views Microsoft. Except with tanks." --Brad Templeton
"If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait! He does!" --Greg Sutter
"Microsoft is like Coke. It's a secret formula, all the money is from distribution, and their goal is to get Coke everywhere. Open source is like selling water. There are water companies like Perrier and Poland Spring, but you're competing with something that's free." --Carl Howe
"I curse Microsoft at least once a day. I only curse Apple every other day. As I see it, that's a 100 percent improvement." --Sam Kass
"Supporting Windows is like buying a puppy. 'The dog only cost $100, but we spent another $500 cleaning the carpet.'" --Marc Dodge
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." --Nathaniel Borenstein
"PowerPoint is a distraction. People use it when they don't know what to say." --Cristian Arcega
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place." --Douglas Adams
"Windoze is the Mac interface done by people with Crayolas instead of Rapidographs." -barnhill@kahub.cc.ukans.edu
"This just in: Bill Gates is an unscrupulous businessman and a big, fat liar. Attention newspaper publishers: This is not a scoop." --Brooke Shelby Biggs, Packet
"No matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it." --Alan Cooper
"Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it." --Seymour Cray
"...if it's a hobby for me, and a job for you, why are you doing such a shoddy job of it?" --Linus Torvalds on Microsoft and software development
"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie." --Dennis Miller
"Windows '98 is so similar to Windows '95 because Apple hasn't invented anything worth copying since 1995." - Jakob Nielsen
"It seems the only aspect of Microsoft NT which scales well is the price." --Need To Know
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." --Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. - Mitch Ratliffe in Technology Review
"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." --Joseph Campbell
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." -- Mitch Ratcliffe
Misc.
"A state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the federal Constitution." --Murdock vs. Pensylvania, 319 US 105 at 113
"If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals -- not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall." -- United States Supreme Court decision, Ullmann v. United States 350 U.S. 422, 428 (1955)
"...The individual may stand upon his Constitutional Rights as a Citizen. He is entitled to carry on his private business in his own way. His power to contract is unlimited. He owes no duty to the State or to his neighbors to divulge his business, or to open his doors to investigation, so far as it may tend to incriminate him. He owes no such duty to the State, since he receives nothing therefrom, beyond the protection of his life, liberty, and property. His Rights are such as the law of the land long antecedent to the organization of the state, and can only be taken from him by due process of law, and in accordance with the Constitution. Among his Rights are the refusal to incriminate himself, and the immunity of himself and his property from arrest or seizure except under warrant of law. He owes nothing to the public so long as he does not trespass upon their rights." --Hale vs. Hinkel, 201 US 43, 74-75
"For as long as I can remember, I've been bored out of my skull by the game of American-rules football. What's the point, really? All of the rivalries, merchandising and hyperbole -- what does it amount to in the end? All it is to me is a bunch of guys running back and forth across a field so other guys can watch and yell at them, as though those on the field are actually listening. To me, football is a waste of a perfectly good pistol range, conveniently marked off at 10-yard intervals." --Mike Blessing (The part about the field being best used as a pistol range can be originally attributed to Jeffrey Jordan of the Liberty Round Table, AKA "Hunter.")
Useful words No. 94. "mamihlapinatapai"- the uncomfortable feeling experienced when two people are each hoping that the other will volunteer to do something that both want done, but neither is willing to do.He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. He will be yours, faithful and true to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. - Anonymous
I hear your backyard mechanic music... but you need to become a Harley Davidson engineer
"At Harley-Davidson... if we need something stronger, we make it bigger. If that makes it ugly, we chrome it..." -- H^) harryRay's Rule of Precision: Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. err, wait, not the last one :-).
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete stangers to kill again." -- Marin Paper TV listing for The Wizard of Oz
"Occam's Razor is in bad shape mostly from folks trying to employ it as an ax." -- johnsebastian
"Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them." - Miranda vs. Arizona, 384 US 436 p. 491
"If it's against state law, it's generally considered a breach of Etiquette." - Miss Manners
"It's only premarital sex if you're going to get married." - Anonymous
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchmen?" --Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
"It is a principle of the law that people are presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions. Those who apply this principle to government actions are paranoid conspiracy theorists." -- Anonymous
