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.

John Dewey -

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

Abraham Lincoln -

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

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.

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.

J. Edgar Hoover -

Justice is incidental to law and order.

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.

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.

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.

George Orwell -

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Machiavelli, The Prince -

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

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson -

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

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.

Note to self -

Remember to read between the lines.