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.”

George Orwell -

 The truth is that to many people, calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which "we," the clever ones, are going to impose on "them," the Lower Orders.

Goebbels -

 If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Ronald Coase -

 If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

Julian Simon -

 Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you—anything at all—that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”

President Herbert Hoover -

 When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned. There is no such thing as a no-man’s land between honesty and dishonesty. Our strength lies in spiritual concepts. It lies in public sensitiveness to evil. Our greatest danger is not from invasion by foreign armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil, or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.

Bryan Caplan -

 But in a strange sense, both gun control and prohibition grow out of softness. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish violence would have little need of gun control. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish abusers for stealing, trespassing, vandalizing, and defiling would have little need of prohibition. In both cases, we haphazardly punish millions of innocents because we refuse to decisively punish thousands of clear-cut criminals.

Thomas Sowell -

 Most people who read the Communist Manifesto have no idea it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nonetheless spoke boldly in the name of the workers.

-

 The best thing about being a “conspiracy theorist” is not having myocarditis.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

 We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.

Aristotle -

 If you live under the same laws as your leaders, you are a citizen. If you live under different laws, you are a subject.

Simone de Beauvoir -

 The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.

-

 Hard times make hard men

 hard men make soft times

soft times make soft men

soft men then make hard times.

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.

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.

Elon Musk -

 If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.

Friedrich Hayek -

 If democracies abandon the idea of freedom and happiness of the individual, they admit their civilization is not worth preserving.

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.

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.

-

 Sheep spend their entire lives afraid of the wolf only to be eaten by their shepherd.

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.

Edward Conze (1934) -

 Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business.

Richard Feynman -

 I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

-

 Liberty means not having to ask for permission.

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.

Wikipedia -

 In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and is typically experienced as psychological stress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them.

Wikipedia -

 A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease.

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.

Glenn Reynolds -

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

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.

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.

Mark Steyn -

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

 Diversity is where societies go to die.

 

Aristotle -

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

Kevin Baker -

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

Frederick Douglass -

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

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.

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.

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.

Voltaire -

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin -

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

Napoleon Bonaparte -

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

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.

-

Who will be the first to stop clapping?

Peter Drucker -

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

Theodore Dalrymple -

In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.

Eric Hoffer -

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

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.

Richard P. Feynman -

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

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.

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.

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.

Thomas Sowell -

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

Eric Hoffer -

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

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.

Cymbeline -

Plenty and peace breed cowards.

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.

Horace -

"Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt."

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

-

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

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.

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.

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.

Aristotle -

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

-

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

Martin Luther King, Jr -

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

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.

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.

Glenn Reynolds -

The bureaucrats are insufficiently afraid.

Confucius, Analects XIII:III:4 -

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

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.

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.

Fred Reed -

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

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.