Teflonic
Since Sep 19, 2004

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“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” — George Orwell

“During times of universal deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” ~George Orwell

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” ~Aristotle

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H.L. Mencken

“A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” ~ Albert Einstein

“The right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended.” ~Rowan Atkinson

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” ~Mark Twain

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.” ~Voltaire

“It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.” ~Voltaire

“Never interrupt when your enemy is committing suicide.” ~Napoleon

“The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.” ~E.M. Forster

“Always give the laziest people the hardest jobs, because they’ll find the easiest way to do it.” ~Bill Gates

“Everything about socialism is sham and affectation.” ~Frederic Bastiat

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” ~William Pitt

“The emotional foundation underlying socialist politics is envy, dressed up as social justice.” ~Helmut Schoeck

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder...the state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else.” ~Frederick Bastiat

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” ~E.F. Schumacher

“One of the more interesting aspects of the Trump experience is the increased understanding that the primary purpose of the state is to constrain popular will, not to manifest it.” ~Julian Assange

“Jurors should acquit even against the judge’s instruction if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong.” ~Alexander Hamilton

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

“Natural laws have no pity.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” ~George Washington

“Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.” ~Michelle Malkin

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we must assure that the crucible turns out Americans and not some random dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” ~Daniel Webster

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” ~Thomas Jefferson

“Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.” ~Harry S. Truman

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” ~Adolf Hitler

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” ~Adolf Hitler

“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. John Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics.” ~Benito Mussolini

“No Communist, Fascist, or any other totalitarian committed to the destruction of the principles and practices of democracy should be permitted to teach in a democracy. Freedom does not imply freedom to destroy freedom.” ~Clarence R. Decker

“We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.” ~Nikita Khrushchev

“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” ~Samuel Adams

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!” ~Samuel Adams

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined... The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.” ~Patrick Henry

“If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.” ~Winston Churchill

“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.” ~Winston Churchill

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money.” ~Margaret Thatcher

“Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seem to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.” ~Margaret Thatcher

“Gun control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.” ~L. Neil Smith

“The average slave loves tyranny because it affords him a perceived seat at the table of power, perhaps for the first time in his entire life. Collectivist slaves are often people who have felt weak and inadequate since childhood. While honorable human beings fight this personal uncertainty by strengthening themselves physically and mentally, and improving upon their own character, the slave takes the easy route by joining with bureaucracy and living vicariously through its conquests. Through the state, the hollow, cowardly, and stupid, have the ability to “show the world who’s boss”, and get revenge for a life filled with meaninglessness.” ~Tyler Durden

“Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” ~Ayn Rand

“Education, along with health care, finance, and the military are the big zombie industries of the late, degenerate imperial period (as future historians will describe it). They drain resources out of the productive economy…and waste them.” ~Bill Bonner

“Government is the natural phenomenon wherein the “insiders” take wealth, power and status from the “outsiders.” They may provide a useful, even necessary, function — such as keeping the peace. Or they may not. They sometimes redistribute wealth among the outsiders. Sometimes not. They sometimes claim to be acting in the name of the greater good…and often do not. Sometimes they claim their privilege from God; sometimes, they don’t bother. But they always take wealth, power and status from those who are not among the insiders.” ~Bill Bonner

“Political tags such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“There seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important...so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and sub-literate every time he/she opens his/her mouth.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed, where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.” ~Justice Alex Kozinski

“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.” ~Ludwig von Mises

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.” ~Adrian Rogers

“The scheme works like this. Progressives supply the basic needs of poor blacks, creating for them a new plantation called the inner city. There blacks are provided with food, subsidized housing, medical care, and so on. In this regard, the new plantation functions pretty much like the old one, with a few modifications. Under slavery, this was rural paternalism; now it is urban paternalism. The slave master is replaced by the government; i.e. the Big House of slavery is now replaced by the White House.” ~Dinesh D’Souza

“In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.” ~Angelo M. Codevilla

“You are not all going to die,” he said slowly. “Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men. Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he’s not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.” ~General Patton