@Kiradavis -

 A cult is not defined by what happens when you join. A cult is defined by what happens when you try to leave.

@InfantryDort -

 This is how empires fall. Not from invasion alone, but from conceptual rot. From mistaking a long season of safety for a permanent condition. From believing lethality is immoral instead of foundational.

Every civilization that forgot how violence works eventually relearned it the hard way. The conquerors did not arrive because they were monsters; they arrived because their victims could no longer imagine them.

The tragedy is not that power still exists. The tragedy is that so many have forgotten it does.

Idk who needs to hear this but civilization is a garden grown atop a graveyard. Ignore the soil, and someone else will plant something far less gentle.

Jonathan Swift -

 When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Andre Malraux -

 At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.

Thomas Sowell -

 What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture—and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Ayn Rand -

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism-by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Ibn al-Munayyr -

 The good war, which attains its complete objective, is the one involving deception, not confrontation, for confrontation involves danger, while deception achieves victory without risk.

Saul Alinsky -

 They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot.  When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.

Nietzsche -

 They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

Margaret Thatcher -

 We have harboured those who hated us, tolerated those who threatened us and indulged those who weakened us.

Rowan Atkinson -

To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion, that is a right. Indeed, a duty, in my view.

The concept that certain ideas can be protected by law from criticism or ridicule is deeply damaging to intellectual discourse.

If you cannot criticise or ridicule an idea, then you cannot properly evaluate it. And if you cannot properly evaluate an idea, then you are not truly free to think about it.

That is why laws that protect religious beliefs from insult or ridicule are not just misguided, they are positively oppressive

Mark Steyn -

 Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.

Thomas Jefferson -

 A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

Donald Rumsfeld -

 Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, 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 tends to be the difficult ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

Totalitarianism demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

Christopher Hitchens -

 Islamophobia… A word created by Fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.

G.K. Chesterton -

 The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Plato -

 One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Ayn Rand -

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - 

When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -

When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you -

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - 

 You may know that your society is doomed.

Leon Uris "The Haj" -

 This is the way it is with Arabs,” Ibrahim said.

“First comes my brother and I against our father; then my father and I and my brother against our cousins; then our cousins and we against the stranger.

That is the way it has always been with us. Me against my brother; my brother and me against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.”