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
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.
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."
"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.
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