The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Thursday, June 16, 2022
-
Hard times make hard men
hard men make soft times
soft times make soft men
soft men then make hard times.
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Thomas Sowell -
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.
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Alexander Trachtenberg (1944) -
When we get ready to take the United States, we will not take it under the label of communism, we will not take it under the label of socialism, these labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been speared too much. We will take the United States under labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But, take it, we will.
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Elon Musk -
If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.
Tuesday, March 08, 2022
Friedrich Hayek -
If democracies abandon the idea of freedom and happiness of the individual, they admit their civilization is not worth preserving.
Friday, February 25, 2022
Benito Mussolini -
People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin….Today’s youth are moved by other slogans…..Order, Hierarchy, Discipline.
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Aristotle -
It is a habit of tyrants never to like anyone who has a spirit of dignity and independence. The tyrant claims a monopoly of such qualities for himself; he feels that anybody who asserts a rival dignity, or acts with independence, is threatening his own superiority and the despotic power of his tyranny. He hates him accordingly as a subverter of his own authority.
It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.
Saturday, January 08, 2022
Thursday, January 06, 2022
Aldous Huxley -
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Edward Conze (1934) -
Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business.
Friday, July 30, 2021
Richard Feynman -
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Sunday, July 18, 2021
Wednesday, June 02, 2021
Mark Twain -
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Friday, May 28, 2021
Wikipedia -
Wikipedia -
Friday, April 23, 2021
Richard Hanania -
Democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population.
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 -
Monday, March 02, 2020
Freeman Dyson -
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 -
Monday, December 02, 2019
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Donald Rumsfeld -
Thursday, November 07, 2019
Frederick Douglass -
Tuesday, November 05, 2019
Benito Mussolini -
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Karl Popper -
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
George Orwell -
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Thursday, June 13, 2019
George Orwell -
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 -
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Paul Johnson -
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Moe Lane -
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 -
"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 -
Monday, December 03, 2018
Marcus Tullius Cicero -
Thursday, August 09, 2018
Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology -
Sunday, July 01, 2018
Glenn Reynolds -
Friday, May 18, 2018
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin -
Thursday, March 08, 2018
Napoleon Bonaparte -
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Thomas Sowell -
Thursday, February 01, 2018
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Monday, December 11, 2017
Friday, November 10, 2017
Glenn Reynolds -
Tuesday, November 07, 2017
Richard P. Feynman -
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Issac Newton -
Monday, August 14, 2017
Sun Tzu -
Friday, July 07, 2017
Alexander Solzhenitsyn -
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Thomas Sowell -
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Eric Hoffer -
Friday, April 22, 2016
Don Surber -
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Horace -
“They change their sky, not their souls, who cross the sea.”
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
-
Sunday, September 06, 2015
William Blake -
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Sarah Hoyt -
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Mark Twain -
Friday, June 05, 2015
Monday, May 04, 2015
-
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Martin Luther King, Jr -
Monday, February 09, 2015
William F. Buckley, Jr -
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Winston Churchill -
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Confucius, Analects XIII:III:4 -
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Booker T. Washington -
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 -
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
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Tom Kratman -
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
Thursday, October 04, 2012
T.S. Eliot -
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Henry Kissinger -
Hermann Goering -
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Monday, July 02, 2012
Frederic Bastiat -
Monday, May 28, 2012
Benjamin Disreali -
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Eric Hoffer -
Monday, March 12, 2012
Frederick Douglass -
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 -
Sunday, October 02, 2011
John Dewey -
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Abraham Lincoln -
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter -
Monday, June 20, 2011
James Delingpole -
Friday, May 13, 2011
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 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.