Sunday, April 11, 2021

Glenn Reynolds -

 When you remember that “woke” is a synonym for “crazy, stupid, and vicious” it all makes sense.

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Marcus Aurelius -

 The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in ranks of the insane.

Tuesday, February 02, 2021

Herbert Marcuse -

 Movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Mark Steyn -

 Yesterday's mental illness is today's social policy.

 Diversity is where societies go to die.

 


Thursday, December 03, 2020

Aristotle -

 Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.


Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Kevin Baker -

 If Right-wing extremists were as dangerous as they think, there wouldn't BE any Left-wing extremists.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Thomas Sowell -

 Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Edward Bernays -

No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Glenn Reynolds -

...in the end the police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, they’re there to protect criminals from the public. Communities dealt with crime long before police were invented, usually in rather harsh and low-due-process ways. The bargain was, let the police handle it instead. No police, no bargain.

Monday, March 02, 2020

Freeman Dyson -

A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation... Every model has to be compared to the real world and, if you can't do that, then don't believe the model.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Robert Heinlein -

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Saturday, February 01, 2020

Joseph Goebbels -

Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

Monday, December 02, 2019

Arthur Schopenhauer -

All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Donald Rumsfeld -

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Frederick Douglass -

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Benito Mussolini -

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Karl Popper -

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Tuesday, August 06, 2019

George Orwell -

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible —- the really disquieting —- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Voltaire -

 It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.


Thursday, June 13, 2019

George Orwell -

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.


Friday, May 31, 2019

Neil Gorsuch -

History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation."

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Paul Johnson -

The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emotions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Moe Lane -

Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Milan Kundera -

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

Sunday, March 31, 2019

Frederic Bastiat -

"We must remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force."

"When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they…oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They safeguard all of these. They are defensive; they defend equally the rights of all."

"But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men…the law is no longer negative…It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills...they lose their personality, their liberty, their property."

"As it takes from some persons and gives to other persons…the law…is an instrument of plunder."

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Jeff Snyder -

...to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless.

Monday, December 03, 2018

Marcus Tullius Cicero -

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.

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology -

The Oak Ridge experience left Rickover a legacy of keen distrust of scientists, an attitude that marked all his future undertakings. He was not opposed to science or to scientists, but scientific truth was not engineering truth, nor was the mission of the scientist the same as the task of the engineer. The scientist in his quest had to exercise strict discipline to exclude human bias, preconception, and prejudice; the engineer in his job had to take these frailties into account, for his machines and devices would be operated by and in the midst of humans with all of their shortcomings. Both approaches were essential, but for practical application of nuclear technology the principles of engineering had to govern.

Sunday, July 01, 2018

Glenn Reynolds -

After hearing nonstop from feminists about how fragile and impressionable women are, I’m beginning to think that patriarchy is a good idea.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin -

The way to crush the bourgeoisie [middle class] is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Napoleon Bonaparte -

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Thomas Sowell -

We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Thursday, February 01, 2018

-

Who will be the first to stop clapping?

Peter Drucker -

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Theodore Dalrymple -

In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Eric Hoffer -

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Glenn Reynolds -

Communism capitalizes on envy, which is why it’s largely sustained by intellectuals, in whose personalities envy tends to be a particularly powerful component.

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Richard P. Feynman -

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is ... If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Issac Newton -

As to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Sun Tzu -

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

Friday, July 07, 2017

Alexander Solzhenitsyn -

It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education, an ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Thomas Sowell -

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Eric Hoffer -

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Don Surber -

White privilege -- a term I do understand -- is a notion that it is white people's turn to serve as second-class citizens.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Cymbeline -

Plenty and peace breed cowards.

Friday, January 22, 2016

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Horace -

"Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt."

“They change their sky, not their souls, who cross the sea.”

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

-

Political correctness is based on fear, guilt, and shame. Manners are based on holding oneself to higher standards.

Sunday, September 06, 2015

William Blake -

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Sarah Hoyt -

Our media are palace eunuchs gazing avidly at the harem of power and stroking their impotent pens in time to the rape of our liberties.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Mark Twain -

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Friday, June 05, 2015

Aristotle -

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Monday, May 04, 2015

-

No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Martin Luther King, Jr -

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Monday, February 09, 2015

William F. Buckley, Jr -

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Winston Churchill -

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Glenn Reynolds -

The bureaucrats are insufficiently afraid.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Confucius, Analects XIII:III:4 -

The superior man, in speaking of what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Booker T. Washington -

There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.

Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.... as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Ayn Rand -

The three rules listed below are by no means exhaustive; they are merely the first leads to the understanding of a vast subject.

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.
2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.
3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Fred Reed -

... no white in America has ever owned a slave, and no black has ever been one.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Tom Kratman -

The Left’s 20 Rules of Racism:

1. If you believe that general intelligence exists, is heritable and at all testable for, you’re a racist.

2. If you point out that liberal philosophies and programs intended to have a good impact have had a disproportionately bad impact on the ethnicities targeted by liberals, you’re a racist.

3. If you notice that other cultures have some problems, you’re a racist.

4. If you notice your own culture has had some successes, you’re a racist.

5. If you try to identify subcultural problems, you’re a racist. If the problems existed or got worse under liberalism, see item 2, above.

6. If you’re mainstream American culture, and don’t hate that culture, you’re a racist.

7. If you’re capable of noting unpleasant facts about subcultures and discussing them without your brain fogging, you’re a racist.

8. If you won’t kowtow and grovel as soon as someone accuses you of racism for one of the reasons above or below, you’re a hopeless racist.

9. If you do not believe that mankind is a tabula rasa for liberals to make whatever they think would be good to make of man, this week, you’re a racist.

10. If you don’t take personal responsibility for all the evils of slavery, you’re a racist. This is true even if you only arrived from Poland last week.

11. If you’re white, you’re a racist.

12. If you’re white and just arrived from Poland last week and don’t accept that you’re a racist, you’re a racist.

13. If you try to interject logical thought into a discussion of culture, you’re a racist.

14. If you refuse to admit culture is a racial matter, and a liberal wants to conflate the two, you’re a racist.

15. If you believe that race and culture are indistinguishable and a liberal decides that you shouldn’t conflate the two, you’re a racist.

16. If you believe that black or Hispanic girls who are paid by liberal inspired programs from the age of 13 to have babies will have babies, you’re a racist.

17. If you believe that _any_ girls of whatever color who are paid to have babies will then have babies but then, insensitively, observe that a smaller percentage of white girls do, certainly because they haven’t been targeted for as much “help” from liberals, you’re a racist.

18. If it doesn’t bother you that the truth offends liberals, you’re a racist.

19. If your name is Tom Kratman and you write and in your writing your heroes and heroines tend to be from minorities while your villains are white liberals, you’re still a racist.

20. If you read The Bell Curve, you’re a racist. On the other hand, if you didn’t read it but wrote a scathing review on Amazon anyway you might not be a racist provided you take personal responsibility for 300 years of slavery even if you just arrived from Poland last week.

Saturday, February 02, 2013

Brian Micklethwait -

Accurate statistics are the lifeblood of government.

Thursday, October 04, 2012

T.S. Eliot -

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Henry Kissinger -

Today Americans would be outraged if U. N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.

Hermann Goering -

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Monday, July 02, 2012

Frederic Bastiat -

Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Benjamin Disreali -

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

Rudyard Kipling -

A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Eric Hoffer -

...the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present -- for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Frederick Douglass -

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Tom Kratman -

Other factors in the fall of civilizations concern separation of the elites and denial by those elites of goods and services required or desired by the larger, non-elite portion of the civilization. The separation is not merely physical, though it is usually that, too. As important, the separation becomes one of lack of accountability of the elites to the masses.

Consider who typically forms the elite: Unelected judges, politicians often gerrymandered into lifetime seats, hidden—hence safe—bureaucrats, unpoliced journalists with agendas that bear no particular correlation to advancing the truth, hereditary aristocrats, the denationalized and greedy rich, self-appointed activists, entertainers judged alone on their ability to make the unreal seem real, etc. None of these are truly accountable to those over whom they exercise power and influence .

Take it as a given throughout human history: lack of accountability leads, invariably, to irresponsibility. Irresponsibility in those who wield power, be they elites or—in the rare genuine democracy—the masses, is disaster.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Adam Smith -

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Sunday, October 02, 2011

John Dewey -

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Abraham Lincoln -

When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter -

Modern liberalism's irrationality can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The madness of modern liberalism is a massive transference of neurosis acted out in the world's political arenas, with devastating effects on the institutions of liberty.

Monday, June 20, 2011

James Delingpole -

The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo.

Friday, May 13, 2011

J. Edgar Hoover -

Justice is incidental to law and order.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Ayn Rand -

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did as follows:

Metaphysics: Objective Reality

Epistemology: Reason

Ethics: Self-interest

Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Ted Kaczynski -

On law enforcement: If a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only because forced. Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or no formal law-enforcement.

On freedom: Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

Terry Pratchett -

Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

George Orwell -

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Stephen Leacock -

“All the world criticizes them and they don’t give a damn….Moralists cry over them, criminologists dissect them, writers shoot epigrams at them, prophets foretell the end of them, and they never move. Seventeen brilliant books analyze them every month; they don’t read them .… But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to. That is their salvation

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Václav Klaus -

Presenting the climate changes we've been experiencing in the last decades as a threat to the Planet and letting the global warming alarmists use this bizarre argument as a justification for their attempts to substantially change our way of life, to weaken and restrain our freedom, to control us, to dictate what it is we should and should not be doing is unacceptable. Their success in influencing millions of quite rational people all around the world is rather surprising. How is it possible that they are so successful in it? And so rapidly? For older doctrines and ideologies, it took usually much longer to get such an influential and widely shared position in society. Is this because of the specifics of our times? Is this because we are continuously "online"? Is this because religious and other metaphysical ideologies have become less attractive and less persuasive? Is this because of the need to promptly refill the existing spiritual emptiness – connected with "the end of history" theories – with a new “noble cause," such as saving the Planet? The environmentalists succeeded in discovering a new "noble cause". They try to limit human freedom in the name of "something" that is more important and more noble than our very down-to-earth lives. For someone who spent most of his life in the "noble" era of communism this is impossible to accept.

Saturday, October 09, 2010

In their own words -

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
- Professor Maurice King

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Martinra at Daily Pundit -

Any “scientific” claim made without willingness to share every scrap of data, every technique, and every last line of code used to reach the conclusion, is not science. At best it is simply flawed, because real science requires independent repeatability of experiments. At worst, it is not even wrong but actively fraudulent.

If the Warmistas were actually scientists, they would welcome skeptical, even hostile, review of their work. They would welcome it when any real flaws were found in their methodology. Since they do not, they are not scientists. They are highly credentialed Ruling Class fraudsters, betrayers of real science and of real scientists whose mannerisms they ape but whose shoes they are not fit to shine. They deserve no more consideration from anyone with a functioning cerebrum than do the folks selling “miracle” weight loss pills on TV at 2AM. In a world unlike ours, i.e. one not dominated by insane legal and social kabuki so convoluted it would stun medieval Byzantine patriarchs at three hundred paces, they would be in jail for fraud.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Jeff Goldstein -

For the progressive agenda to ascend, the ideals of classical liberalism — those concerning individual autonomy, natural rights, Enlightenment notions of truth and the foregrounding of logic over rhetoric as a bulwark against the will to power — need to be deconstructed and then de-legitimized. Identity politics must replace individual autonomy, with the various factions within identity groups vying for what will become that group’s sanctioned narrative (with the losers in that battle cast out as inauthentic, or race-traitors, or sufferers of false consciousness, etc.); natural rights need be “separated” from the secular rights that are then decided upon by the ruling class; truth must always be “contingent,” subject to perspective and narrative frame for its relative rhetorical power, and never absolute; interpretation becomes such that the message of an individual becomes the property of an “interpretive community” whose own intentions then take precedence over the intentions of the individual — and are allowed moreover to determine the intentions of that individual.

To beat back the progressive agenda is to beat back the kernel assumptions of leftism itself — to reaffirm the very principles upon which this country was founded, and which the left has been steadily hoping to erode through an institutional takeover of language, be the offshoot of such a linguistic coup the idea of a “living Constitution” or identity politics as reinforced by such benign terms as “diversity” and “multiculturalism.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Machiavelli, The Prince -

Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Jonah Goldberg -

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore is defined as the enemy.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

P.J. O'Rourke -

Before totalitarianism had ever been tried, Adam Smith was prescient in his scorn for it:
“The man of system [...] is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.[...] He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”

Barbed wire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Note to self -

Remember to read between the lines.

Friday, March 05, 2010

Adolph Hitler -

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community…

Karl Marx -

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois (middle class) individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Dr. Zero -

The people of an orderly nation surrender the business of vengeance to the government, replacing it with the rule of law. They cannot be expected to surrender the right of defense. The right to protect yourself, and your family, from injury and death is an essential part of your dignity as a free man or woman...

The Western nations which have abandoned this essential understanding of an individual’s right to self-defense have become rotting orphanages filled with dependent children. They’re not dealing very well with the invasion of a determined ideology that has complete confidence in its own righteousness, and few reservations about using violence to assert itself. Losing the dignity of self-defense is part of the degeneration from master of the State to its client.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Murray Rothbard -

"Once a State has been established the problem of the ruling group or 'caste' is how to maintain their rule. While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a 'democratic' government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State — the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) — must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens."  
 
"Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. ...[T]his ... secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the 'intellectuals.' For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the 'opinion-molders' in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for [the] age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear." 


Sunday, January 24, 2010

C.S. Lewis -

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Jeff Goldstein -

The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.