``It is my right to be uncommon...if I can; I seek opportunity...not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stole calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud, and unafraid; to think and act for myself; enjoy the benefits of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, This I have done, and this is what it means to be an American.''
-Dean Alfrange

``Greatness is never appreciated in youth, called pride in midlife, dismissed in old age, and reconsidered in death. Because we cannot tolerate greatness in our midst, we do all we can do destroy it.''
-J. Michael Straczinski, creator and arc writer of Babylon 5, from production #309, episode #53, ``Point of No Return,'' spoken by Lady Morella, the prophetess widow of Centauri Emperor Touranne

``The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic.''
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

``All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.''
-Joseph Conrad

``...it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.''
-Milton Friedman, Professor (Emeritus) of Economics at the University of Chicago and Hoover Institution Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, and Nobel laureate

``Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.''
-John F. Kennedy, 1962

``The Clinton administration didn't cause these fires, but their policies have left the Forest Service under-funded and under-prepared for this crisis. I don't think it's a conspiracy, but it's a philosophy they have that leads to explosive fires that destroy everything.''
-Marc Racicot, governor of Montana, in an interview appearing in the New York Times 2000-Aug-12, decrying the mismanagement that led to the summer's catastrophic wildfires

``We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed''
-Thomas Jefferson

``I can do any Goddamned thing I want. I'm President of the United States. I take care of my friends and I fuck with my enemies. That's the way it is. Anybody who doesn't like it can take a hike.''
-Bill Clinton, in a White House staff meeting, as reported by Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson in his column on 1999-Apr-8, regarding sicking the IRS on Ken Starr

``America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.''
-Claire Wolfe, 1995-Nov

``But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain -- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.''
-Lysander Spooner, 1870, in No Treason #6

``As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.''
-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

``Those who by valorous ways become princes, like these men [`Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like'], acquire a principality with difficulty, but they keep it with ease. The difficulties they have in acquiring it rise in part from the new rules and methods which they are forced to introduce to establish their government and its security. And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.''
-Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

``The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.''
-Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (Simon & Schuster, 1968), p.72

``The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad.''
-Thomas Dolby (English pop music maestro)

``The poorest man is not the one without a cent, but the one without a dream.''
-unknown

``The value of an idea lies in the using of it.''
-Thomas Edison

``A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.''
-William Shedd

``All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.''
-Victor Hugo

``Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.''
-Thomas Edison

``An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.''
-Oscar Wilde

``Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.''
-Joseph Stalin

``One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea''
-Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
(Bagehot was an English journalist and economist, and first formulated a distinct theory of central banking. He was an early editor of The Economist. He was a member of the establishment, and he explains quite accurately how the establishment experiences new ideas.)

``Do not go where the path may lead, go instead to where there is no path and leave a trail.''
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

''No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.''
-Turkish proverb

``If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.''
-Charles F. Kettering

``We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.''
-Robert Wilensky, Digital Library Project, Prof. of Computer Science, University of California

``The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.''
-Alan Ashley-Pitt

``When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.''
-René Descartes

``The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.''
-Ernest Renan

``Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.''
-Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the Republican Convention; 1964

``Everything I did in life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.''
-former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren

``Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.''
-Howard Aiken, designer of the Mark I relay computer

``Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.''
-Latin for ``Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.''

``The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.''
-G.K. Chesterton

``People only see what they are prepared to see.''
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

''The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.''
-Oscar Wilde

``If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it.''
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man ("Conclusion")

``The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.''
-Frank Zappa

``It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous...The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.''
-HL Mencken

      ``Bill Clinton is not the problem. The dismally stupid American people are the problem. It's they I fear.
      Let us take comfort in the fact that majority opinion in this country has seldom pioneered greatness. It has nearly always been the minority who cherish freedom. What we are witnessing is a predictable cycle--a law of political science as every bit as unalterable as the law of gravity--as so eloquently explained by Prof. Tyler two centuries ago: that democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government, not due to any one corrupt leader, but to the rule of the masses who become dependent on government. Is it any wonder that the Founding Fathers tried to prevent democracy? Yes. We are nose diving into socialism, not because of Bill Clinton, but because of many of the people surrouding you in rush hour traffic.
      It's the masses we must march against, and I can think of no better way than to vote Libertarian and abandon the Republicrats. In addition challenge every Clinton defender you know to name the three branches of the federal government and explain the function of each. When they can't (which in my experience is nearly all of them), simply dismiss them as unqualified to form a serious opinion.''
-poster ``JJ'', 1999-Feb-11, from the georgiapolitics Message Board

``If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.''
-Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

``If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.''
-W. Somerset Maugham

``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 inevitably ruined.''
-Patrick Henry, from ``Against the Federal Constitution'', 1788-Jun-5

``In growing up, the normal individual has learned to check the expression of aggressive impulses. But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.''
-Stanley Milgram, Yale social psychologist, in Obedience To Authority

``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

``They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.''
-Ben Franklin

``The safe way is the right way.''
-sign hanging in an inmate common area of Attica maximum security penitentiary, as remembered by myself (the AMPP editor) from a History Channel program

``The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.''
-John Hay, 1872

``The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.''
-H.L. Mencken

``Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war''
-George Orwell, 1984

      ``Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed, and a picture presented which by its crude coloring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy is beyond question.
      A moment's reflection would tell any reasonable person that such obvious bias cannot possibly represent the truth. But the moment's reflection is not allowed; lies are circulated with great rapidity. The unthinking mass accept them and by their excitement sway the rest.
      The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in wartime in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned.''
-Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, 1928

``It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.''
-Ayn Rand

``the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.''
-J. Edgar Hoover, 1956, speaking of communism

``It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any "conspiracy theory of history;" for a search for "conspiracies" means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane "social forces," or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ("We Are All Murderers," proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on "conspiracy theories" means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the "general welfare" reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda.''
-Murray N. Rothbard, in The Anatomy of the State

``The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.''
-Remy de Gourmont

``Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of Liberty is a history of resistance. The history of Liberty is a history of limitations of Governmental power, not the increase of it.''
-Woodrow Wilson

``I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.''
Thomas Jefferson

``Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.''
-Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, in a 1928 decision

``To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.''
-Thomas Paine, 1792

``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.''
-President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

``There ought to be limits to freedom. We're aware of the site, and this guy is just a garbage man.''
-George W. Bush, commenting on the website www.gwbush.com

``If this were a dictatorship, things would be a lot simpler. As long as I was the dictator. Heh heh heh.''
-George W. Bush, 2000-Dec-18, in Washington DC, on the occasion of a public appearance with Democratic Congressional leaders

``the purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people''
-Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993

``The presidency - by which I mean the executive state - is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while its steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, the business, the charity, and the community.''
-Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute

``When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.''
-Dresden James

``We have sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.''
-George Orwell

``In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.''
-George Orwell

``Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.''
-Noam Chomsky

``To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.''
-William Blase

``Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.''
-Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)

``If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.''
-Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons

``Most people stumble over the truth, now and then, but they usually manage to pick themselves up and go on, anyway.''
-Winston Churchill

``The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents---men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest---stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved.''
-Lysander Spooner, 1870, in No Treason #6

``The best time to buy is when blood is running in the streets.''
-Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild

``War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistable forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense [...] the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war [...] The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history - war [...]''
-Randolph Bourne (1886-1918), essayist, in The State (unfinished essay)

``The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they're not.''
-Hillary Clinton, 1992 60 Minutes interview

``It is important that you do not say that you [are] calling because the campaign asked you to, but because you are outraged with what was said about her.''
-campaign aide to Hillary Clinton, in a ca. 2000-Jul-19 bulk email asking the candidate's supporters to protest allegations that Clinton had once used the phrase ``fucking Jew bastard'' in anger

``If you guys vote for Al Gore, you're out of your minds. [... It's] just the lying and the mendacity of the last eight years of the regime that Al Gore was part and parcel of. I mean, there is only so much lying the American people will take before they go, 'Uh, this doesn't seem like a good idea.' You have to look at what he does and what he stands for. I just think he's a knucklehead.''

-actor Bruce Willis, to George Whipple, in a segment on NY1 News, 2000-Jul-19

 

``The President's essential character flaw isn't dishonesty so much as a-honesty. It isn't that Clinton means to say things that are not true, or that he cannot make true, but that everything is true for him when he says it, because he says it. Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite. He is the existential President, living with absolute sincerity in the passing moment.''
-Michael Kelly, "The President's Past," New York Times Magazine, 1994-Jul-31

``I am in support of the NRA position on gun control.''
-Bill Clinton, 1982, in a letter to the NRA

``The most interesting thing about Clinton is he's a real hero in Hollywood. They love this guy. It has nothing to do with his politics. His politics, in a way he's betrayed liberals at every turn: welfare reform, the death penalty, balancing the budget, which they don't care much about. What they love him for is his values. He's a child of the '60s, the first President to come out of the culture of the '60s. That's why a lot of people in Hollywood love him and that's why most conservatives hate him. But in Hollywood he's a hero.''
-Bill Schneider, political analyst on CNN's Inside Politics, 2000-Aug-3

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

``It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.''
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (writer, philosopher, and Fabian socialist)

``If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.''
-Anatole France

``To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth . . . to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can only answer with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.''
-Michel Foucault, renowned French Marxist and deconstructionist intellectual, enunciating the disdain of the establishment for humanity

``The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages, will bear its burden without complaint.''
-Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863-Jun-25, in a letter to fellow members of the establishment

``If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?''
-Carl Sagan

``It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.''
-Henry Ford, a man admired by Adolf Hitler

``...all of us here at the policy-making level have had experience with directives... from the White House.... The substance of them is that we shall use our grant-making power so as to alter our life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.''
-H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., President, Ford Foundation, to Norman Dodd, Congressional Reese Commission, 1954

``What luck for the rulers that men do not think.''
-Adolf Hitler

``You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.''
-Charles Manson, leader of a murderous cult of entirely unskeptical followers

``Americans are now certifiably insane. They are crazy. They are suffering a mass psychosis. They have lost their own ability to discern right from wrong.''
-Joseph Farah. editor of WorldNetDaily, 1999-Apr-12

``We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.''
-Daniel Boorstin

``Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.''
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955) (Einstein also advocated world government, the disarmament of nations, and dialectical pacifism, and was a generally nasty man)

``Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.''
-Nietzsche

``The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.''
-Louis D. Brandeis

''The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.''
-Bertrand Russel

``Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.''
-Reinhold Niebuhr, Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary (NYC), as quoted by George Stephanopoulos

``Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.''
-George Santayana

``Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.''
-C.S. Lewis

``One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free...''
-Dr. N.A. Scott

``None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.''
-Johann Von Goethe

``Evil requires the sanction of the victim.''
-Ayn Rand

``It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.''
-Voltaire

``Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?''
-Patrick Henry

``The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.''
-Dresden James

``Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no Law, no Court can save it...Where do you stand Citizen?''
-Judge Learned Hand (1961)

``The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.''
-John Gilmore

``The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.''
-James Madison

``There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows..''
-Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, to a class of CIA recruits in Langley, 1988-Nov

``Unfortunately, this is a free society, and we're gonna have people with trucks, and people with bombs.''
-Greta van Susteren, on CNN with a panel of terrorism experts, ca. 2001-Jan-31

``People shouldn't expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the 'fringe' media.'' -Ted Koppel

``When the liberty of the Press shall be restrained . . . the liberties of the People will be at an end.''
-representative Merriweather Smith of Virginia, quoted by US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, in a 1995-Apr-19 concurring opinion in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334, from Notes of Debates by Henry Laurens, 1779-Jul-3, at 139

``If you can't say Fuck, you can't say, Fuck the government.''
-Lenny Bruce

``At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.''
-Marshall Lumsden (a bit of hyperbole, but the message is clear)

``What we have is two important values in conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both.''
-Richard Gephardt

``To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion''
-the three-judge panel that issued a preliminary injuction blocking as unconstitutional the Communications Decency Act

``If you're a liberal, anything you say is protected. If you're a conservative, anything you say is hateful.''
-Laura Schlessinger

``Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting. But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. Literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional rights.''
-Noam Chomsky, in a 1993-Dec-6 interview with David Barsamian

``And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the right of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.''
-Aristotle, "Politics"

``America has many more guns than England, and a lower violent crime rate. Switzerland has many more guns than Germany, and a lower violent crime rate. England had much less crime in 1900, when the nation had no gun laws, than it does in 2000, when England has some of the most repressive gun laws in Europe. Gun prohibition leads to boldness by criminals, and passivity by the innocent - and therefore to many more violent crimes committed against the innocent.''
-David B. Kopel, in an interview with Carlo Stagnaro for Zola Times 2000-Oct-23

``One man with a gun can control 100 without one. [...] Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.''
-V.I. Lenin, from Collected Works, Vol. 35, 4th ed., p. 286. Congressional Record, April 28, 1970, p. H3601

``If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.''
-Joseph Stalin, from ``Reply to the discussion on the Political Reports of the Central Committee'', Dec. 7, 1927. Stalin, Works, Vol. 10, p. 378

``A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.''
-Thomas Jefferson's advice to Peter Carr, his nephew and ward, in a letter written in Paris in 1785-Aug-19, cited in the Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, p.318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967)

``The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.''
-Col. Jeff Cooper, from The Art of the Rifle

``The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defence. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside.... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; . . . the weak will become prey.''
-Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in "Thoughts on Defensive War", in The Pennsylvania Magazine, July 1775

``Justice Department studies show that armed citizens are much less likely to suffer losses or personal injury from thieves''
-The Washington Post, 1992-Jan-7

``Since Florida has enacted their concealed carry law, the Florida murder rate has dropped by 29%. Nationwide, the murder rate rose 11% over the same period...''
-ABC News, 1995-Mar-12, reporting on 1994 FBI crime statistics

``But focusing solely on guns is not the right question, according to Joe Morse, president of Seacoast Firearms in Hampton. Morse pointed out that New Hampshire has the second lowest homicide rate in the country, while Granite Staters own the most guns per family of any state in the nation.''
-the Portsmouth Herald, 1999-Apr-22 (shortly after Columbine), "Gun laws debated", by Steve Jusseaume

``Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. In particular, we find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 treatment states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states.''
-Jens Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000-Aug-2, Homicide and Suicide Rates Associated With Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act

``A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country...''
-James Madison

``Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.''
-Noah Webster

``I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.''
-George Mason

``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed''
-The Constitution of the United States, sovereign standing law

``A covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For (as I have shown before) no man can transfer or lay down his right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment, the avoiding whereof is the only end of laying down any right; and therefore the promise of not resisting force, in no covenant transferreth any right, nor is obliging. For though a man may covenant thus, unless I do so, or so, kill me; he cannot covenant thus, unless I do so, or so, I will not resist you when you come to kill me. For man by nature chooseth the lesser evil, which is danger of death in resisting, rather than the greater, which is certain and present death in not resisting. And this is granted to be true by all men, in that they lead criminals to execution, and prison, with armed men, notwithstanding that such criminals have consented to the law by which they are condemned.''
-Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), English political philosopher, from Leviathan (1651), Chapter XIV, ``Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts''

``But I don't want to defend myself.''
-reportedly uttered by a Brady Law supporter

``False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicide, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.''
-Ceasare Beccaria, 18th century criminologist, in On Crimes and Punishments

``To disarm the people--that was the best and most effective way to enslave them.''
-George Mason, founding father who led opposition to adoption of the US Constitution before the addition of the Bill of Rights

``A free people ought [...] to be armed [...]''
-George Washington, speech of January 7, 1790, printed in the Boston Independent Chronicle, January 14, 1790

``According to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, only 36 percent of U.S. households had guns in 1999 - down from 51 percent just six years earlier.''
-editorial in the New York Post, 2001-Mar-13

``Free men have arms; slaves do not.''
-William Blackstone (1723-1780), English jurist and professor of common law at Oxford

``The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.''
-Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), quoted by James Burgh (1714-1775), in "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses," (London, 1774-1775)

``There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.''
-George Washington

``Armed women deter rapists over 400 times each day.''
-bumper sticker

``Armed women equals polite men.''
-Charles Curley

``The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which... historically has proven to be always possible.''
-United States Senator Hubert Humphrey

``Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.''
-Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the Los Angeles Times, 1992-Oct-15, commenting on the response of the Japanese public to government corruption

``If every person has the right to defend - even by force - his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly.''
-Frederic Bastiat, The Law, Paris, 1850

``When tyranny hits the fan and the 'Firearms Control Section Gestapo' stops by to confiscate your firearms, do the right thing...give'em the ammunition first.''
-the Tucson (Arizona) Rifle Club newsletter, 1999-Sep

``the people I put in jail have more honor than the top administration in this organization.''
-Bob Hoffman, ATF agent, to Mike Wallace, on 60 Minutes, 1993-Jan

``I took an oath. And the thing that I find totally abhorrent and disgusting is these higher-level people took that same oath and they violate the basic principles and tenets of the Constitution and the laws and simple ethics and morality.''
-Lou Tomasello, ATF agent, to Mike Wallace, on 60 Minutes, 1993-Jan

``a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today.''
-Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) in 1983, describing the ATF

``Trampled upon the Second Amendment [...] Offended the Fourth Amendment [...] Ignored the Fifth Amendment''
-Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, 1982, findings regarding the ATF

``To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated.''
-Trefor Thomas

``Criminals don't register their guns.''
-Murray Grismer, spokesman of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers, and a 13-year veteran of the police force in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

``At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory controls on the private ownership of firearms are irrelevant to the problem of armed crime: yet that is precisely what the evidence shows. Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a particular type of weapon. The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is minute, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. Controls have had serious effect on legitimate users of firearms, but there is no case, either in the history of this country (Britain) or in the experience of other countries in which controls can be shown to have restricted the flow of weapons to criminals, or in any way reduce crime.''
-Chief Inspector Colins Greenwood, West Yorkshire Constabulary, Police Review, Britain after six months of study of firearms control systems at Cambridge University

``Crooks are going to get guns regardless of what regulations we have.''
-Kurt Schmoke, Mayor of Baltimore, 1999-Mar-13

``This proposal will never prevent criminals from possessing firearms and we never said it would.''
-Daryl Smeaton, Attorney General's department, Director of Law Enforcement Co-ordination, on the new Australian gun bans, in The Weekend Australian, 20-21 September 1997, page 6

``This business about gun control is a joke really. I come from Switzerland where everyone is taught how to treat weapons sensibly and with care. In Switzerland everyone keeps a gun in their own home and we don't have any problems with them.''
-Mrs Emma Jay, 70, Northern New South Wales, Australia, Friend of Port Arthur mass shooting victim Jim Pollard, as reported in The Age 19/7/96 page A7

``Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins.''
-Mafia informant Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, on gun control, in an interview by Howard Blum that appears in the September 1999 issue of Vanity Fair magazine

``Since 1934, only one legally owned machine gun has been used in a crime of murder, and a law enforcement officer committed that crime.''
-The History Channel, Modern Marvels, Weapons at War: The Machine Gun

``A proper claim of the privilege against self-incrimination provides a full defense to prosecutions either for failure to register under 5841 or for possession of an unregistered firearm under 5851.''
-Justice Harlan, Supreme Court of the United States, in Haynes v. United States, 390 U.S. 85 (1968), recognizing a special and expansive immunity for felons from the National Firearms Act regulation of machine guns (and other assorted firearms and firearms-related devices), and by extension from any firearm registration regime

``No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.''
-Ann Landers, former director of Handgun Control, Inc.

``When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the 'anti-gun' thesis. ... It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested. ... [But] the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U.S. ... Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery. ... The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse.'' -Prof. Gary Kleck, Florida State University School of Criminology, from a speech given to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, as reported by Don B. Kates, Jr. in "Shot Down", National Review, March 6, 1995, pages 49-54

``Accidental gun deaths among children are fortunately much rarer than most people believe. Consider New York, with more than 2.6 million children under the age of 10. From 1993 to 1997, the Centers for Disease Control report that there were only six accidental gun deaths in that age range - an annual rate of 1.2 deaths. Yet, with over 3.3 million adult New Yorkers owning at least one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must be extremely careful or such gun accidents would be much more frequent.
[...]
Guns clearly deter criminals: Americans use guns defensively around 2 million times each year - five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997. And 98 percent of the time, simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.
[...]
Recent research that I have done, examining juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides for all the states in the United States from 1977 to 1996, found that safe-storage laws had no impact on either type of death. However, what did happen was that law-abiding citizens were less able to defend themselves against crime. The 15 states that adopted these laws during this period faced over 300 more murders and 3,860 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased dramatically.''
-John R. Lott, senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws

``Liberalizing concealed carry laws won't lead to a return to the Wild West - though it wouldn't be bad if it did. ... in 19th Century cattle towns, homicide was confined to transient males who shot each other in saloon disturbances. The per capita robbery rate was 7% of modern New York City's. The burglary rate was 1%. Rape was unknown.''
-David Kopel, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 1994-Feb-28, in ``Have Gun, Will Eat Out''

``Antigun advocates have always faced an uphill battle in this country. Americans have, to begin with, a constitutional right to gun ownership. Today, half of American households exercise this right, owning a total of about 250 million guns; and over 99 percent of those households do so in a responsible manner. To fight for major restrictions on an item that plays such a valued part in the lives of so many people looks like a nearly impossible task. So if you're really committed to the effort, and you want to win, what do you do? Simple: You lie.''
-Dave Kopel

``[...] we agree with the National Rifle Association that assault weapons right now play a small role in overall violent crime.''
-A Handgun Control, Inc. representative, in Congressional testimony

``It is true that despite an increase in gun ownership in Australia over the past 15 years, there has been a decline in the murder and suicide rates.''
-Melanie Granger, for the Hon. Daryl Williams, Attorney General of Australia and Minister for Justice, from a Letter to Ross Wilmoth dated 27/8/97

``Tighter gun control laws were not framed with the specific expectation that gun related deaths would decline.''
-Anne Standford, press secretary for Police Minister Bill McGrath, in The Geelong Advertiser, 11/9/97

``This has got nothing to do with common sense, this is about politics.''
-Hon Bill McGrath MLA, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Deputy National Party Leader, at the Annual General Meeting of the Ballarat Arms and Militaria Collectors Society Inc., August 1996 (as recorded on videotape)

``I don't think there's any reason on Earth why people should have access to automatic and semiautomatic weapons unless they're in the military or in the police.''
-Australian Prime Minister John Howard, in the Los Angeles Times, ``Australia's Answer to Carnage: a Strict Law'', 1997-Aug-27

``I came to Ottawa with the firm belief that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers and soldiers.''
-Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice, on Maclean's "Taking Aim on Guns", April 25, 1994, page 12

``All guns are capable of being used in crime. All guns pose a threat to public safety.''
-The Supreme Court of Canada, 2000-Jun-15

``Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago....[The government should] deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrassing Amendment.''
-George Will, 1991

``There is no reason for anyone in this country, for anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use, a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the constitution.''
-NBC News president, Michael Gartner, USA Today, 1992-Jan-16/p>

``We will never fully solve our nation's horrific problem of gun violence unless we ban the manufacture and sale of handguns and semi-automatic assault weapons.''
-USA Today, 1993-Dec-29

``Why should America adopt a policy of near-zero tolerance for private gun ownership? [...] [W]ho can still argue compellingly that Americans can be trusted to handle guns safely? We think the time has come for Americans to tell the truth about guns. They are not for us, we cannot handle them.''
-Los Angeles Times, 1993-Dec-28

``The mistake Republicans have made over the years is treating Democrats like adults.''
-Ann Coulter, 2001-Feb-14, at the 28th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Crystal City, Virginia

``The only way to discourage the gun culture is to remove the guns from the hands and shoulders of people who are not in the law enforcement business.''
-The New York Times, 1975-Sep-24

``We are inclined to think that every firearm in the hands of anyone who is not a law enforcement officer constitutes an incitement to violence. Let's come to our senses before the whole country starts shooting itself up on all its Main Streets in a delirious kind of High Noon.''
-Washington Post, 1965-Aug-19

``Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA -- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.''
-Heinrich Himmler

``All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government.''
-SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933

``Juden haben waffen! Juden haben waffen!''
-``Jews have arms'', the astonished outcry of a retreating German soldier in 1942, cited by Israel Gutman in Resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, ``A publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum''

``The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. [...] They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.''
-Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, 1923

``The communist party must control the guns.''
-Mao Tse Dung

``There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the [German] people were not brainwashed about gun ownership and had been well armed. ... Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis.''
-Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor

``Handguns should be the province of the military or law enforcement or a special segment of people''
-Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran

``As an avid sportsman and as Governor of the State of Louisiana, I have been extremely interested in the recent politically-motivated lawsuits against your industry, especially the ill-advised suit by the mayor of New Orleans. I know I speak for the majority of Louisiana citizens and businessmen when I say that lawsuits such as these are very, very wrong. It is wrong to blame the responsible manufacturer of a legitimate and non-defective product for the criminal use of that product. It is wrong to ignore your industry's success in support of firearms education and accident prevention and to dismiss the role of your industry in providing quality products for hunting, target shooting, self-protection and law enforcement.''
-Louisiana Governor M. J. "Mike" Foster, in a letter to the National Shooting Sports Foundation urging them to hold The 2001 Shot Show in New Orleans

``the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed''
-The Constitution of the United States

``If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same [...] They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section [...] they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.''
-The US Code, Title 18, §241, "Conspiracy against rights"

``On March 5, 1991 Bonnie Elmasri called a firearms instructor, worried that her husband - who was subject to a restraining order to stay away from her - had been threatening her and her children. When she asked the instructor about getting a handgun, the instructor explained that Wisconsin has a 48-hour waiting period. Ms. Elmasri and her two children were murdered by her husband twenty-four hours later.''
-Jeff Dissell, from "More Women and Children Killed By The Brady Bill"

``A gun is like a seatbelt; when you need it you need it now!''
-bumper sticker

``A right delayed is a right denied.''
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

``... protection of life is NOT a legitimate use for a firearm in this country sir! ... Not! That is expressly ruled out!''
-Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice, VCR taping at the Triwood community centre in Calgary, Dec. 1994

``The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising.''
-Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan, August 29, 1558.

``I'm convinced that we have to have Federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest... Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time... The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered, and the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns, and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal.''
-Nelson T. Shields III, former chair of Handgun Control, Incorporated, in The New Yorker, 1976-Jun-26 (immediately before Sarah Brady, and immediately after Edward O. Wells, who in 1974 upon his ostensible retirement from the CIA (a preeminent Rockefeller tentacle), founded HCI under the name "National Council to Control Handguns"), revealing HCI's Final Solution

``Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.''
-Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446.

``A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.''
-Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1952)

``With all the political hysteria being whipped up this year about school shootings, more children are killed each year by bee stings -- and far more are killed by airbags mandated by the government.''
-Thomas Sowell, NewsMax, 1999-Sep-30

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
-William Burroughs

``Guns cause crime the same way that pens cause bad spelling''
-from the .sig of [email protected] (C.J. Roberts)

``I don't care if you want to hunt. I don't care if you think it's your right. I say: `Sorry, it's 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison.'''
-Television talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell

``Most gun-grabbers want to disarm you because they believe you must share their sickness, which they are sure would drive them to murder or suicide were they armed with a gun.''
-Daniel Pouzzner

``A bereaved mother whose son was shot and killed nearly two years ago -- and who spoke out against gun violence and memorialized shooting victims at the "Million Mom March" rally in Washington, D.C., last Mother's Day -- was herself convicted of shooting a man she wrongly believed was her son's killer.''
-Jon Dougherty of WorldNetDaily, the opening paragraph of a 2001-Feb-5 article

``So what is the first thing he would do to decrease violent behavior? Quick answer. `We've got to dismantle the NRA.' And what to do with Charlton Heston? `Shoot him - with a .44-caliber bulldog," he says with a laugh.''
-Howard Feinstein, New York Post writer, reporting the views of (racist, rich, peddler of psychopath training films, black, and establishment Liberal) Spike Lee, in "Spike Takes On 'Sam' & The NRA" (New York Post, 1999-May-22 - Feinstein interviewed Lee at the Cannes Film Festival in France; the type of handgun Lee identifies was used in the Son of Sam slayings)

``Spike Lee is obviously more stupid than anyone can be by accident.''
-Dick Armey

``Remember the words of Chairman Mao: `It's always darkest before it's totally black.'.''
-John McCain, 1999-Sep-17, on Jay Leno's show, discussing his presidential election prospects

``It is, of course, true that if we continue to lose our freedoms, concentration camps on U.S. soil would eventually become a reality.''
-Thomas R. Eddlem, in the John Birch Society's New American, 1997-Feb-17, ``PATRIOT BEWARE!''

``Gap Orders `Everybody In Showers'''
-The Onion, 1999-Sep-8

``Government is not suggestion nor persuasion, it is force...and force is violence. ...When you advocate any government action, you first must believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand.''
-Laws of the Jungle, by Allen Thornton

``Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.''
-George Washington, presidential farewell address

``Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.''
-Barry Goldwater

``We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.''
-Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

``It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship, as defined in paragraph (15) of section 782 of this title, the direction and control of which is to be vested in, or exercised by or under the domination or control of, any foreign government, foreign organization, or foreign individual: Provided, however, That this subsection shall not apply to the proposal of a constitutional amendment.''
-US Code, Title 50 (War and National Defense), Chapter 23 (Internal Security), Subchapter I (Control of Subversive Activities), §783 (Offenses), former subsection a, stricken in 1993 by Public Law 103-199, Sec. 803(2) (also stricken were restrictions on access to classified information by members of Communist organizations)

``The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.''
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1913

``The presidents come and go but the Rockefellers are forever.''
-Washington cliché

``Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.''
-P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

``Power has a certain attraction.''
``Is it an aphrodisiac?''
``Yes, it is.''
[...]
``The secret bombings in Cambodia - do you regret this today?''
``No.''
[...]
``On the main lines of our policy, I wouldn't change anything.''
-Henry Kissinger, in an interview with Leslie Stahl on the CBS news program 60 Minutes, first aired 1999-Mar-7

``I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.''
-Henry Kissinger, appearing on CNBC, 2000-Dec-13

``he has built the doomsday machine, in order to make trains run on time.''
-Daniel Pouzzner, personal correspondence 2000-Feb-9, on Henry Kissinger

``And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.''
-Lord Acton

``Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power, and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents.''
-Daniel Pouzzner

``I mean, I do think, bluntly, when you are inside the bubble of power, when you sniff every day the heady scent of power, whether it's the White House or a governor's mansion or a big corporation or a media giant, it's much easier to be blinded to the flaws of the principal, because to say something about those flaws means you are no longer going to be in the room with the car with the private jet. Once you leave that, it's astonishing how -- how much clearer the atmosphere is, and somehow the flaws are seen much more clearly.''
-Jeff Greenfield, syndicated columnist and CNN senior analyst, on the Larry King Show (CNN), 1999-Mar-8

``I want to go back to Jeff Greenfield's point when you're working inside. It's not that Cabinet members are so delighted to be there that they're willing -- they blind themselves to it. I think rather it is that people who work inside these administrations, as he well remembers, work so hard, they pour their life and soul into this 14, 16 hours a day that they want to believe. They want to believe the best, and they just don't want to believe that the worst is being tossed at somebody. In -- in Watergate, the cover-up worked better inside the Nixon White House and worked longer inside the Nixon White House than anywhere else.
-David Gergen, editor-at-large, ``U.S. News & World Report,'' on the Larry King Show (CNN), 1999-Mar-8

``The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight.''
-John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 10 days before his assassination. Several days before this speech, Kennedy ordered an initial issue of Treasury Department metal certificates. Three days after the speech, he proposed to Nikita Khrushchev that the United States and Soviet Union embark on a joint program to land men on the moon - Khrushchev received this proposal favorably. Also shortly before his assassination, Kennedy vowed to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency, which he blamed for the Bay of Pigs disaster.

``The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything.''
-Nelson Rockefeller

``I want to own nothing and control everything''
-J D Rockefeller I

``The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control.... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.''
-Larry P. McDonald, US Congressman, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets

``The real menace of our republic is the invisible government which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over our city, state and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses, generally referred to as 'international bankers.'''
-John F. Hylan, 1911, then mayor of New York

``Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.''
-Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom (1913)

``I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.''
-President Woodrow Wilson

``The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.''
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

``America is run by members of the federal reserve board, by a few powerful senators and congressmen who chair important committees and by the sitting president and his close advisers. The Supreme Court Justices also have some say, especially if any of the power brokers get out of hand and start wielding too much influence. [...]
      Chaos is what the powerful in America fear the most. Belief in the system is what they want the most.''
-Bill O'Reilly, in his 2000-Dec-6 column for WorldNetDaily

``The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the [public] is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.''
-Edward Bernays writing in Propaganda, l928, from ``Food & Water Journal''

``I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. [...] Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. [...] Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.''
-Bertrand Russel

``All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself.''
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I

``...there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, `and this will always be the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology... Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals.''
-H. Trevor-Roper (ed), The Goebbels Diaries, p. XX, cited in Regan, Geoffrey. 1987. Great Military Disasters. New York: M. Evans and Company.

``For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.'' -Karl Marx

``The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.''
-Karl Marx

``The reality is that wealth can be translated into information power, and that the apathy of the people is allowing private wealth to control public information. We are very, very close to private tyranny.''
-Robert David Steele, President of Open Source Solutions, from God, Man, & Information: Comments to Interval In-House, 1998-Mar-9

``A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.''
-President James Madison, "Notes on Virginia"

``If we are the new American slaves, then who is our master? The New Master, like some monster escaped from the laboratories of a noble experiment called the American dream, is the sum total of an amoral coupling between government and business. It looms as a monolith hybrid that is neither government nor business and is composed of individual strands of power that include the president, Congress, the courts, a multitude of governing bureaus and agencies, and an immense cluster of multinational corporations, some as wealthy as great nations.''
-Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty!

``According to its form a strong revolutionary organization may also be described as a conspirative organization - and we must have the utmost conspiracy for an organization of that kind. Secrecy is such a necessary condition - that all other conditions (number, and selection of members, functions, etc.) must all be subordinated to it.''
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ``Lenin,'' Chto Dyelat (``What Is to Be Done?'')

``How, in fact, can we tell what is going on if foreign policy discussions are handled in the manner of meetings of the Masons, Montana Militia, or Skull & Bones?''
-Sam Smith of the Progressive Review, on the Council on Foreign Relations, in How You Became the Enemy: America's Military Looks Inward

``...a clique of the richest, economically and politically most powerful and influential men in the Western world, who meet secretly to plan events that later appear just to happen.''
-The Times of London, 1977, describing Bilderberg

``The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.''
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister, 1876

``Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men (plus a few women). This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order. [...] A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment -- the ruling class -- is not supposed to be discussed.''
-Arthur S. Miller, George Washington University Professor of Law (deceased)

``[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.''
-Ronald Reagan, remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986

``Clinton sits on the White House seat
While many work to ensure his defeat
But only few know,
He's on the third row
Of the American Power Elite.''
-anonymous

``Hey, I'm a pretty lousy President.''
-faux Bill Clinton, in The Simpsons (Fox Television), 2000-Feb-6

``The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.''
-Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice

``The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.''
-Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, in a novel he published in 1844 called Coningsby, the New Generation

``Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.''
-Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

``Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.''
-attributed to President Andrew Jackson, who in 1836 forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter

``Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of money and freedom of banking ... are the principles that must guide our steps.''
-Hans F. Sennholz

``The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers.''
-Congressman Louis T. McFadden

``I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply.''
-Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1777-1836)

``All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.''
-John Adams

``The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.''
-William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, ca.1694

``The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.''
-John Kenneth Galbraith

``Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws''
-Mayer Amschel Rothschild

``Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.''
-James A. Garfield

``The power to determine the quantity of money...is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power ... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.''
-Milton Friedman

``I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.''
-Abraham Lincoln, shortly before his assassination

``... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.''
-Prof. Carroll Quigley, author of Tragedy and Hope (1966)

"I am now quite sure that Tragedy and Hope was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom"
-Carroll Quigley, in a letter to a friend

``Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the `modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth (Eugene Boehler, Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft, Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)''
-J. Orlin Grabbe, from The Collapse of the New World Order

``Well, the stock market is by licensed brokers [...]''
-Andrew Ketterer, attorney general of Maine, on Public Radio's "Here and Now", 2000-Jun-19, explaining why he will initiate civil forfeiture proceedings against participants in a pyramid scheme sweeping New England, but not against the stock market.

`~Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.''
-Thomas Sowell

``A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade...there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.''
-Nathaniel Branden's essay, Common Fallacies About Capitalism

``If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free;
if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.''
-Edmund Burke

``I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that ... the severity of each of the contractions -- 1920-21; 1929-33, and 1937-38 -- is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.''
-Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, p.45

``...From now on depressions will be scientifically created.''
-Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., 1913, on the Federal Reserve Act

``To expose a 4.2 trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.''
-Buckminister Fuller

``...the increase in the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks from 143 million dollars in 1913 to 45 billion dollars in 1949 went directly to the private stockholders of the [Federal Reserve] banks.''
-Eustace Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy

``I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.''
-P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist. Parliament of Whores, "The Winners Go to Washington, D.C." (1991).

``The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth - in Morocco - to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.''
-from a full-page advertisement by the government of Morocco, in the New York Times, April 1994

``There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an institutional Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies ... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.''
-Dr. Carroll Quigley

``As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley.''
-Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, on his Georgetown mentor, in his nomination acceptance speech, 1992-Jul-16

``Communism is not [and never was] a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people.''
-Anthony J. Hilder

``There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.''
-Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

``Although Communism, like other `isms,' had origined with Marx's association with the House of Rothschild, it enlisted the reverent support of John D. Rockefeller because he saw Communism for what it is, the ultimate monopoly, not only controlling the government, the monetary system and all property, but also a monopoly which, like the corporations it emulates, is self-perpetuating and eternal. It was the logical progression from his Standard Oil monopoly.''
-Eustace Mullins, chapter 10 (``The Rockefeller Syndicate''), of Murder by Injection

``These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.''
-Frederick C. Howe, in Confessions of a Monopolist (1906)

``All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery - fortunately, as all now feel - but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people: namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life.''
-excerpt from the decision of the Court in Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 83 (1911)

``The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless...From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be going down hill. It will not be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``...To defend oneself, one must be ready to die, and there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.''
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

``We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.''
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995

``Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.''
-Thomas Sowell, of the Manchester Union-Leader, 1999-Mar-16, ``Clinton has undermined military''

``The smell of the Weimar Republic is in the air.''
-Gore Vidal, from a 1996 speech at the National Press Club

``It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.''
-US Supreme Court, 339 US 382,447

``I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.''
-James Madison, 1788

``Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``After the 1994 election, there was a lot of talk about getting rid of the Department of Education, which had a budget of $24.4 billion at the time. Roughly five years later, the department is still kicking, and a budget of $35.6 billion has just been approved. ... In 1993, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole was asked about judicial activists while on a radio call-in show. 'If you give us a majority and we don't produce, then you ought to throw us out,' he responded. Well, it's been five years. Isn't it time to start producing?''
-Free Congress Foundation's John Nowacki

``If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the events affecting our nation's well-being should be good for America. If we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally make a mistake in our favor. We . . . are not dealing with coincidence or stupidity, but with planning and brilliance.''
-Gary Allen, from his book None Dare Call It Conspiracy

``In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.''
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

``[...] it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.''
-William Safire, on the phrase and concept of "New World Order", in the New York Times, February 1991

``A man always has two reasons for doing anything -- a good reason and the real reason.''
-attributed to J. P. Morgan

``Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.''
-Frederick Douglas, Civil Rights Activist, 1857

``I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger.''
-Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837

``No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.''
-Abraham Lincoln

``If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis ... In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.''
-Richard N. Gardner, in Foreign Affairs, April 1974

``If we hold fast to the concept and practice of unlimited sovereignty of nations it only means that each country reserves the right for itself of pursuing its objectives through warlike means. Under the circumstances, every nation must be prepared for that possibility; this means it must try with all its might to be superior to anyone else. ...
      This alone is on my mind in supporting the idea of "World Government", without any regard to what other people may have in mind when working for the same objective. I advocate world government because I am convinced that there is no other possible way of eliminating the most terrible danger in which man has ever found himself [sic]. The objective of avoiding total destruction must have priority over any other objective.''
-Albert Einstein, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, FEB 1948 an open letter in reply to criticism from his "Russian colleagues" included in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein; Carl Seelig, editor page 150

``Australians have never given their consent to the dangerous experiment of turning their country into the utopian dream of the multinational state. This dream, as yet unsuccessful in any corner of the globe, is being ruthlessly imposed on Australians in lieu of their informed consent. As some of the results of multiculturalism begin to emerge, the experiment, already unpopular, grows daily less popular but the social engineers continue to insist that multiculturalism works in much the same way that they slavishly admire the emperor's clothes.''
-E J Kempster

``Australian Leadership elites in politics, the bureaucracy, academia, big business, the churches and the media have effectively cut themselves adrift from the interests of majority of Australians. Many have betrayed the trust of the people they are supposed to represent.
      As part of this process the elites, while they may mouth concern for the country, have given up thinking in terms of the national interest to pursue an internationalist agenda. This agenda is eroding the foundations of our nation and marginalising the majority, which has less and less say in its destiny.
      The bulk of the media, charged with a watchdog role in the public interest, have become active agents in this process. Academics, artists and others who are supposed to be independent-minded have become propagandists and intellectually corrupt hirelings.''
-Graeme Campbell and Mark Uhlmann

``I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.''
-General MacArthur

``We are going to do something terrible to you - you will no longer have an enemy.''
-Georgi Arbatov, once adviser to President Gorbachev, quoted in the International Herald Tribune, 1990-Mar-16, p.4

``We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.''
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

``World War I had far reaching implications for America that still haven't seen the light of day. This was the beginning of the fall of the American republic, the rise of the American democracy, the loss of American innocence and the death of the American dream through a still undeclared federal bankruptcy. Most Americans have been asleep to the truth ever since.''
-Johnny Liberty

``Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.''
-Aristotle

``I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election ... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States.''
-Sen. George W. Malone, 1957

``Mister Speaker. We are here now in Chapter 11. Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any bankrupt entity in world history, the U.S. government.''
-James Traficant, Jr. (Ohio) addressing the House on Wednesday, March 17, 1993 (United States Congressional Record, Volume #33, page H1303)

      ``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 garments, 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''
-Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 BC

``He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.''
-Samuel Adams [letter to James Warren, November 4, 1775]

``Sir, I read these sentiments with surprise and astonishment. Believe me, Colonel Nicola, no occurrence in the course of this war has given me greater pain than this revelation of such sentiments among the officers of my army, which I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity. I am at a complete loss to see what in my conduct could have given encouragement to such a proposal, a proposal that proposes I participate in the greatest mischief that could befall our country. Nicola, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable. I advise you and your collaborators to put these thoughts from your mind.''
-George Washington, on the offer from his officers that he be declared King of America

``Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.''
-Frederic Bastiat

``The demise of substantive due process, apparent in the 1950s, is a fact today insofar as the validity of economic legislation is concerned, although in a few isolated cases, involving the obligation of contracts, and perhaps expanding in the regulatory takings area, the Court has demonstrated that some life is left in the old doctrines.''
-Killian and Costello, Introduction to ``The Constitution of the USA - Analysis and Interpretation,'' 1996 GPO printing, the US Senate and the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress

``Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.''
-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859

``Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.''
-unknown

``Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.''
-Milton Friedman

``Free trade means open markets, which means power goes to the powerful and not to the people''
-Michael Sacco, 25, a student from Toronto, protesting the free trade conference in Quebec, wearing a Canadian flag like a cape. The amusing thing here is the strict absurdity of the student's statement: whoever the power ``goes to'' is who is powerful. (student quotation from ``Police, protesters clash at Quebec summit'', 2001-Apr-20, from AP, by Tom Cohen

``Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?'''
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

``The new version of rights are not any kind of rights that our founders fought for and created a government over, and the idea that law should be an instruction manual telling us exactly how high our railings should be and how many square feet the nursery school is, is not anything that existed in our country when I was growing up. It's a brand new invention, and it doesn't work.''
-Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, on C-SPAN's Booknotes 1995-Feb-12

``A lot of people who go into law school have a strong sense of right and wrong and a belief in moral truths. Those values are destroyed in law school, where students are taught that there is no right and wrong and where such idealistic, big-picture concepts get usurped. They actually come to disdain right-versus-wrong thinking as unprofessional and naive.''
-Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, No Contest, p.334 (1996)

``What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?''
-James Madison

``It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.''
-James Madison, Federalist Paper #62

``...[W]hat shall be the supreme law of the land... only laws that are made in pursuance of the constitution have that rank. . .All laws repugnant to the Constitution are void of law.''
-Marbury v. Madison, 5 US 137 at Sec. 180, (1803)

``The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it... No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law, and no courts are bound to enforce it.''
-16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256

``When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.''
-Justice William O. Douglas

``Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.''
-James Madison

``Business Week says that each year in the US there are more than 100,000 new laws, rules and regulations enacted.''
-Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?

``In the US the sanctimonious maxim that 'Ignorance of the law is no excuse' puts every citizen at risk. That may have been a sound rule in simpler times, when the catalog of punishable offenses was limited to traditional offenses like murder, robbery, rape and larceny, but it becomes a sinister joke when applied to the five-foot shelf of the US criminal code and the even more voluminous statutes of individual states.``
-Charles Meachling, Jr., US State Dept., Cambridge Law professor

``I will never understand this peculiar American custom of intensely pagan worshipping of the man-made laws, 99% of which are an obvious inhuman abomination sprung into life by the most criminal and psychopathic part of the population irresistibly attracted to power over other human beings.''
-Boris Kuperschmidt

``The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.''
-Henry Kissinger

``The world's businessmen understand that the US legal system is a running joke, and trade tales that start, have-you-heard-this-one-yet?''
-Wall Street Journal editorial, August 14, 1991

``Fair use is notoriously impossible to get ahold of until you actually go to the judge to find out what the judge says, and even then you probably aren't very happy. There is simply no way to know what fair use is and isn't.''
-Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, in USA Today 2000-Aug-10, ``Music-copying laws often shield consumers''

``Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions.''
-Judge Earl Johnson Jr.

``The reason there's a penalty for laughing in court is that otherwise the jury would never be able to hear the evidence.''
-Samuel Clemens

``There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.''
-Jean Giraudoux

``Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.''
-Edmund Burke

``The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.''
-Samuel Adams, 1772

``It has long been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression,... that the germ of dissolution of our Federal Government is in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary--an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed.''
-Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Hammond, 1821. ME 15:331 (more Jefferson here)

``The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.''
-Walt Whitman (1819-92), U.S. poet. Notes Left Over, "Freedom" (1881).

``...natural rights provided the moral philosophic underpinning for the US Declaration of Independence [...] During the 19th and early 20th centuries, natural rights fell into disfavor with legal philosophers [...] Natural rights theory was largely replaced with legal positivism. Positivism holds that legal authority stems solely from what the state has laid down as law [...] However, the flaw in positivist philosophy is that the law is no better than the source of its authority. [...] In the aftermath of World War II, a revival of natural rights theory emerged. It was due in part to the revulsion against Nazism, which revealed the horrors that could emanate from a positivist system [...]''
-Attorney Jerome J. Shestack, former ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights. Quoted in ``There's Nothing Alien About Natural Rights.'' Wall Street Journal, September 6, 1991

``Imagine if a scientist claimed he had made up a law of physics or chemistry. He'd be carted away to a lunatic asylum. As we'd expect, much of political law is complete fantasy.''
-Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?

``The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.''
-C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1943)

``American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.''
-Noam Chomsky

``The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.''
-George F. Will, on campaign finance reform, in Newsweek 1999-Oct-11

``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 Heinlein

``People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. The question, `Where are you from?' doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting. They live somewhere near a Gap store, and what else do you need to know?''
-Garrison Keillor

``Gap Orders `Everybody In Showers'''
-The Onion, 1999-Sep-8 (this is the second occurance of this quote herein:-)

"The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority."
-Will Durant

``The political world of the Open Conspiracy must weaken, efface, incorporate and supersede existing governments. The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms; it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York. The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will be a world religion.''
-H.G.Wells, Fabian Socialist, in The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928)

``Religion is the opium of the masses.''
-Karl Marx

``The church is a hospital for sinners, not a country club for saints.''
-Hayes Wicker

``Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.''
-Tom Robbins

``Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.''
-Robert Ingersoll

``Religion is all bunk.''
-Thomas Edison

``84 percent of Americans believe God answers their prayers. More than half believe in miracles.''
-Fox News, 2000-Apr-22

``Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.''
-Jesse Ventura

``The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.''
-from article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, 1796, unanimously approved by the United States Senate, presumed to have been authored by treaty negotiator Joel Barlow (a friend of Thomas Jefferson)

"The Party, as such, stands for Positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession."
("Die Partei als solche vertritt den Standpunkt eines positiven Christentums, ohne sich konfessionell an ein bestimmtes Bekenntnis zu binden.)
-from the 1927 NSDAP Programm, point 24

``If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.''
-George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

``Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.''
-Blaise Pascal

``You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.''
-Anne Lamot

``It is only the atheist who adopts success as the criterion of right.''
-Robert Lewis Dabney, American theologian

``You cannot doubt the obligation you owe to God to obey him, and the perfect right he has to require just such a measure of obedience as he may see fit.''
-Robert Lewis Dabney, in a letter to his sister

``...there is a new religion in the world. The god of this new religion is government, and the ritual the worshippers perform is legislation.''
-Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?

``How many evils have flowed from religion!''
-Lucretius (~98-55BCE), Roman poet who categorically denied the reality of the supernatural

``I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.''
-Galileo Galilei

``To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable''
-Epictetus (55-135CE), exiled Roman slave and Stoic, from Discourses, I,2

``[...] We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come. [...] Destiny which some introduce as sovereign over all things, [the Epicuran ideal] laughs to scorn, affirming rather that some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For [the Epicuran ideal] sees that necessity destroys responsibility and that chance or fortune is inconstant; whereas our own actions are free, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach. [...]''
-Epicurus (341-270BCE), Greek philosopher, theoretical particle physicist, objectivist, proponent of the theory of material particulate soul, and feminist, from ``Letter to Menoeceus''

``Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.''
-William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, [Nov. 18, 1783]

``You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.''
-Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

``The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable...''
-H.L. Mencken

``It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.''
-Voltaire

``Fear is the foundation of most governments.''
-John Adams

``From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?''
-Thomas Paine

``Our government is so corrupt that citizens no longer become incensed when they learn the CIA is running drugs into the U.S.''
-Terry Reed, Compromised

``The street price of heroin and cocaine is less than one-fourth of what it was in 1981. The purity of heroin available on the street has increased more than fourfold since 1981. Incarceration for drug arrests has risen tenfold since 1981. The number of drug-overdose deaths has increased more than fivefold since 1981. The proportion of high school seniors reporting that drugs are readily available has doubled since 1981. This is not victory. This is failure.''
-Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA), at the GOP ``Shadow Convention'' in Philadelphia, the week of 2000-Jul-30

``Bureaucracy is the preferred weapon of those who distrust the voice of the people... public employment is a cancer gorging itself on the decreasing number of productive workers.''
-Edward Harper (journalist, novelist), Unintended Consequences (Rutledge, 1999)

``Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.''
-Henry Kissinger

``In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.''
-Confucius

``Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.''
-Montesquieu

``The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.''
-Tacitus

``The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced.''
-Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching

``Power over a man's subsistence is power over his will.''
-Alexander Hamilton

``A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
      The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to [selfishness; from selfishness to] complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage.''
-Scottish historian Alexander Tyler on the fall of the Athenian republic. The bracketed portion on ``selfishness'' appears in only some citations, and the term here means pathological acquisitiveness and a preference for short term advantage at the expense of long term disadvantage

``The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.''
-Frederic Bastiat

``If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.''
-The Old Farmer's Almanac

``Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.''
-Friedrich A. Hayek

``In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.''
-Voltaire

``Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.''
-H.L. Mencken

``Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.''
-George F. Will, Newsweek

``No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.''
-John Jay, Address to the People of Britain, 1774

``Unconscionability has generally been recognized to include an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party.''
-Judge Wright (use of US paper money and private credit, checking, and savings services, is a voluntary act (without which one is inconvenienced to a degree most Americans cannot imagine), and constitutes agreement to the contract that renders the user liable for income taxes)

``If taxes are laid upon us without our having a legal representation where they are laid, we are reduced from the character of free subjects to the state of tributary slaves.''
-Sam Adams

``In other words, governments do not collect taxes to provide services, they provide services as an excuse to collect taxes.''
-Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice?

``The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.''
-Albert Einstein

``You know, gentlemen, that I do not owe any personal income tax. But nevertheless, I send a small check, now and then, to the Internal Revenue Service out of the kindness of my heart.''
-David Rockefeller, before a Congressional committee

``The regional Federal Reserve Banks are not government agencies.... but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations.''
-Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (9th Cir. 1982)

``Congress had no authority to grant a private consortium of banks the monopoly privilege to create the nation's currency.''
-Boston T. Party

``If Congress has the right to issue paper money, it was given to them to be used by... [the government] and not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.''
-President Andrew Jackson, Vetoed Bank Bill of 1836

``Under the surface, the Rothschilds long had a powerful influence in dictating American financial laws. The law records show that they were powers in the old Bank of the United States.''
-Gustavus Myers, History of The Great American Fortunes

``Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.''
-Ralph M. Hawtrey, Secretary of the British Treasury

``There is not really any such thing as federal money. Every dollar spent at the state or federal level got there by the sweat of someone's labor. Even the funny money created out of thin air carries with it a future taxpayer obligation to pay.''
-Senator David Duke R-Colorado, from Media Bypass, March 1996

``The Federal Reserve System pays the U.S. Treasury $20.60 per thousand notes -- a little over 2 cents each -- without regard to the face value of the note. Federal Reserve Notes, incidentally, are the only type of currency now produced for circulation. They are printed exclusively by the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the $20.60 per thousand price reflects the Bureau's full cost of production. Federal Reserve Notes are printed in $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations only; notes of $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000 denominations were last printed in 1945.''
-Donald J. Winn, Assistant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

``We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system.... It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.''
-Robert H. Hamphill, Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank

``By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens...''
-John Maynard Keynes

``We believe--or we act as if we believed--that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, of their posterity, in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.''
-Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:357

``It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.''
-Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1820. FE 10:175

``In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.''
-Alan Greenspan, 1967

``I am firmly of the opinion [...] that there never was a paper pound, a paper dollar, or a paper promise of any kind, that ever yet obtained a general currency [as money] but by force or fraud, generally by both. That the army has been grossly cheated; that the creditors have been infamously defrauded [some closed their shops to prevent being paid off with worthless paper money]; that the widows and fatherless have been oppressively wronged and beggared; that the gray hairs of the aged and the innocent, for want of their just dues, have gone down with sorrow to their graves, in consequence of our disgraceful depreciated paper currency.''
-Josiah Quincy, written to George Washington, quoted in Albert S. Bolles, The Financial History of the United States, vol. I (New York: D. Appleton, 1896, 4th ed.), p. 132.

``The importance of an honest, stable, gold money supply is to ensure that relative scarcity, demand and production efficiency of goods and services are accurately represented through their actual market prices. Prices are information.''
-Boston T. Party

``It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.''
-Adam Smith

``Motivated by the pursuit of private gain, individuals promote the public welfare.''
-Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics, George Mason University

``I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.''
-Adam Smith

``No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.''
-Walter Williams

``... The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes, one consisting of those who, in reality, pay taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are then recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or in fewer words, divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.

-John C. Calhoun - 1833

 

``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, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801

``Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.''
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

``From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.''
-Karl Marx

``What's just has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you -- and why?''
-Walter Williams, All It Takes Is Guts

``You can't pay people for doing nothing without forcing others to do something for nothing.''
-J. Kesner Kahn

``A liberal is a man who will give away everything he doesn't own.''
-Frank Dane

``Beware of him who promises something for nothing.''
-Bernard Baruch, international banker, key backer of Woodrow Wilson's candidacy, head of the War Industries Board, war profiteer, and coiner of the term ``Cold War''

``The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.''
-Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

``My family can't live in good intentions!''
-Ned Flanders

``Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez-faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging.''
-George S. Counts, author of Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?, from the final 1934 volume of a 17 volume Carnegie Foundation funded study exploring the use of public schools for the purpose of socialist indoctrination

``Let us begin to measure one another in terms of contributing to each other's success.''
-John W. Magaw, Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 1994-Aug (explanation: Magaw has spelled out a collectivist credo. He recommends that each ATF agent be evaluated not on the basis of his effectiveness in pursuing his mission, but on the basis of how he facilitates the pursuits of others. This is a manifestly horrendous idea.)

``Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses.''
-L. Neil Smith, Third Among Equals

``By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education.... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments.''
-Russell Baker, ``School vs. Education''

``Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture.''
-Judge Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah

``Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.''
-Josef Stalin, in a 1934-Jul-23 interview

``Who owns the youth owns the future!''
-Adolf Hitler

``A troubling number of teachers at all levels regard the bulk of American history and heritage as racist, sexist, and classist, and believe their purpose is to bring about social change...''
-Helen Cordes, Utne Reader, July-August '91, p.52 excerpted from TIME magazine

``Football exemplifies the worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings.''
-George Will

``The combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.''
-John D. Rockefeller I

``We had become one mind. And it wasn't Manson's mind. We had become another, something that goes beyond the individual, I don't know what to call it.''
-Charles Manson follower Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme ("Red")

``The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species.''
-Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1923

``Everything that can be invented has been invented''
-Charles H. Duell, US Commissioner of Patents, 1899

``The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.''
-A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.

``Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?''
-H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927

``We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.''
-Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

``There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.''
-Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

``640K ought to be enough for anybody.''
-Bill Gates, in 1981

``kill cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market''
-from an internal Microsoft planning document

``The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners.''
-Ernst Jan Plugge, Dutch network security consultant

``Only six computers will ever be sold in the commercial market''
-Howard Aiken, designer of the milestone Mark I relay computer

``I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.''
-Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

``There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.''
-Jeremy S. Anderson

``Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.''
-Karl Marx, Capital (1867) Volume 1, Chapter 15, ``Machinery and Modern Industry,'' enumerating a critical Marxist dementia. The inventive mind is the preeminent source of wealth, of course.

``There is a self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.''
-Alfred North Whitehead

``The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the proto-ministries of trade, finance and development for a united world. [...] Globalization has also contributed to the spread of terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation. But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international cooperation.''
-Strobe Talbott, in TIME, 1992

``To realize the full possibilities of this economy, we must reach beyond our own borders, to shape the revolution that is tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations and individuals, and economies and cultures: globalization. It's the central reality of our time.''
-Bill Clinton, State of the Union address, 2000-Jan-27

``The thing I keep running into with libertarians is that they are purposely blind to the following: if you start with a weak state and a laissez-faire economy, eventually megacorporations will coalesce and become a defacto state, usually fascist and obviously not held accountable by the democratic process. And the megacorps will mold and embolden the state so that it has the authority and agenda to serve them. I don't have to wonder about the viability of this theory, since I have discovered that the US is more or less living proof.''
-Daniel Pouzzner, from personal email

``In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.''
-Ronald Reagan, 1981 inaugural address

``I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.''
-Thomas Jefferson

      ``A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. . . .
       Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.''
-William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937, from Facts and Fascism, George Seldes, p. 122, and Trading with the Enemy, Charles Higham, p. 167

``And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!''
-From the fourth leaflet of the White Rose Resistance in Germany, 1942. Five students and a professor who wrote and distributed the leaflets were executed in 1943.

``The CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States.... The government employed these men and women for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the USSR in the midst of a nuclear war.... Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS veterans; some had been officers of the bloody Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi party's security service.''
-Christopher Simpson, Blowback, 1988.

``It goes against our nature to believe the worst, to assume we are being deceived, or to be always on guard against such deception. And every power seeker from Sun Tsu to Gorbachev knows this implicitly.''
-from ``The Greening'' (1990) by Larry Abraham, co-author of None Dare Call it Conspiracy

``Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.''
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

``Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.''
-Theodore Roosevelt

``We the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.''
-Abraham Lincoln

``I'll rule this country by executive order if Congress won't adopt my agenda.''
-Bill Clinton, 1998-Jul-4

``Act right now so that you will look good on color television in the year 1999.''
-Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels, April 1945

``We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...that we forget about reality.''
-President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, ``NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful''' by Debbie Howlett

``You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say.''
-Bill Clinton, May 29, 1993, The White House

``I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I have changed government policy solely because of a contribution.''
-President Clinton, March 10, 1997

``The president has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.''
-Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on ``Larry King Live.''

``How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!''
-Samuel Adams (1722-1803), letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776

``When anybody brings about as much positive change in such a short period of time as President Bill Clinton has brought, it's bound to discombobulate some people. It's bound to shake them up.''
-Vice President Albert Gore, 1999-Jan-20 rally in Buffalo NY

``I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House.''
-Al Gore, October 1996

``Write down the name of that motherfucker. When I'm back in office, he's a dead man.''
-Bill Clinton, to a campaign worker, as reported by Samuel Wilson, a former political worker in Clinton's second campaign for governor, in an interview with Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson, regarding a local townsperson encountered on the campaign trail who called Clinton a ``two-bit politician''

``When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.''
-Bill Clinton, quoted by George Stephanopoulos in his book All Too Human, regarding his Somalia deployment misadventure

``I'd like to kill all of these sons of bitches and just be done with it.''
-Bill Clinton, in a White House staff meeting during the impeachment process, as reported by Doug Thompson in his Capitol Hill Blue column of 1999-Apr-8

``Presumably, Clinton concluded that it was better that the passengers (especially the ones in steerage) go down rather than the ship's captain.''
-from the editors' introduction to The Clinton Legacy, edited by Colin Campbell of Georgetown University and Bert Rockman of the University of Pittsburgh, both public policy professors

``The president responded to plaintiffs' questions by giving false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.''
-Judge Susan Webber Wright

``It has occurred to me really that every one of us has this little scale inside, you know. On one side, there's the light forces and the other side there's the dark forces.... If the scale tips dark even for a little bit, things turn badly for people and those with whom they come in contact. And it can happen for communities and for a whole country.''
-Bill Clinton

``violence is wrong''
-Bill Clinton, 1999-Apr-21, the day after the Littleton, Colorado high school massacre, and the NATO bombing of the high rise party and broadcasting headquarters of the Milosevic family in Belgrade

``Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold.''
-Michael Kelly

``From now on, every state in the country will be required by law to tell a community when a dangerous sexual predator enters its midst.''
-Bill Clinton, 1996-May-17 (included for irony)

``Bill Clinton's greatest ``gift'' is his ability to strip all dignity from our most precious institution, to reduce everything, including himself, to a cheap joke.''
-Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden

``The president acted immorally, he acted recklessly, he acted disgracefully. He willfully misled the American people, the members of his Cabinet, his staff and the judicial system.''
-Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA

``Clinton engaged in a pattern of criminal behavior and obsessive public lying, the tendency of which was to disparage, undermine, and even subvert the judicial system of the United States, the American ideology of the rule of law, and the role and office of the President.''
-Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in "An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton" (Harvard University Press, 1999)

``If the President of the United States robs a liquor store, since that is not one of his official duties, [he] would be able to stay in office, under that [`official duties'] theory?''
``Absolutely.''
-Lanny Davis' response to Steve Gill of WLAC in Nashville, 1999-Jan-29

``CLINTON HAS POWERFUL BUDDY IN U.S.S.R. - NEW HEAD OF KGB''
-headline from Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1991

``The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.''
-Nicholas Von Hoffman, liberal columnist at the Washington Post

``[...] For example, Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the Treasury and chief architect of the Bretton Woods agreement and the World Bank and first director of the International Monetary Fund, was not, as he claimed, one of the red-baiter's victims but a Soviet agent regularly reporting to the KGB.''
-Ronald Radosh, Senior Research Associate, Center for Communitarian Policy Studies, George Washington University, in the LA Times 1998-Nov-9

``I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself.... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.''
-Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU

``Communism equals murder. Everywhere. Always.''
-Jeff Jacoby, columnist at the Boston Globe, 1995-Dec-7

``Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.''
-Karl Marx, from The Communist Manifesto

``The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.''
-Plutarch

``I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.''
-Sir Winston Churchill

``Prosperity For All''
-Gore stump speech stage backdrop banner, first week of 2000-Nov

``The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.''
-George Bernard Shaw, writer, philosopher, and Fabian socialist

``The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism', they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.''
-Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Presidential candidate

``Socialism has a bad name in America, and no amount of wishful thinking on the part of the left is going to change that.... the words Economic Democracy are an adequate and effective replacement.''
-Derek Shearer, in Economic Democracy: The Challange of the 1980's (1980)

``You see, the left isn't forgiving or civil. Instead they are violently, feverently committed to their unholy war to tear down American democracy and replace it with their version -- an Americanized version -- of communism.''
-David Horowitz, 2000-Jan-31

``The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. This is not a charge. My opinion of that revolution is not at issue. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power.... No one could have been more dismayed than I at what I had hit, for though I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.''
-Whittaker Chambers (born Vivian Jay Chambers in 1901, Soviet agent turned right wing Christian activist, and exposer of Soviet agent, trusted aide to FDR, and UN co-architect, Alger Hiss), 1952

``For Hegel, history was a slaughter bench; for Chambers, it had become an emergency room. He has not been adequately served by a biographer unwilling or unable to understand the nightmare of Cold War epistemology, the place where politics and pathology become indistinguishable. ''
-Ann Douglas, in her review of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus

``[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.''
-Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40

``Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English''
-George Bernard Shaw

```She joined the Communist Party during the Depression, attracted by its support for social welfare programs like food subsidies, unemployment aid, and social security.' Today, of course, that's why people join the Democratic Party.''
-from National Review, quoting the 2000-Jan-24 New York Times obituary of environmentalist Hazel Wolf

``Hillary bothers me a lot. I realized the other day that her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.''
-Dick Armey, of Hillary Clinton

``The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?''
-H.G. Wells, The New World Order, 1939

``Nothing really matters.
Love is all we need.
Everything I give you all comes back to me.''
-Madonna, from the song ``Nothing Really Matters'' from the album ``Ray of Light''. In the accompanying video, she wears the traditional bright red garb of Tibetan Buddhist holy men.

``All you need is love, love is all you need.''
-John Lennon, front man of the Beatles

``Democracy is the road to socialism.''
-Karl Marx

``The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy [...]''
-Albert Einstein, in Why Socialism?, Monthly Review, New York, May 1949

``the whole of National Socialism is based on Marx''
-Adolf Hitler

``Hitler's rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations... if they had not had the confidence of the masses.''
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

``Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.''
-Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

``When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.''
-Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), American socialist

``...I would like to be clearly understood...we, the Soviet people, are for socialism.... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.''
-Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988

``More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life [...]''
-Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988

``The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.''
-Horatio Seymour

``Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.''
-James Madison, Federalist #10

``The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.''
-Alexander Hamilton

``Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting to decide what's for lunch.''
-Marshall Fritz

``... the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.''
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to P.S. Dupont De Nemours, 24 April 1816

``Democracy is indispensable to socialism.''
-V.I. Lenin

``The goal of socialism is communism.''
-V.I. Lenin

``He was one of the few leaders whose high ideals, moral integrity and personal modesty inspired people right around the globe.''
-James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, lauding Tanzania's now deceased former President Julius Nyerere. "[...] dictator of a one-party state and principal architect of one of the poorest, most dysfunctional economies in the world [...] Nyerere was a flawed leader, a tireless advocate of unworkable socialist doctrines." (from Investors Business Daily)

``[...] when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people [...] will hate the new world order [...] and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.''
-H. G. Wells, in The New World Order (1939)

``That which is cannot be true.''
-Herbert Marcuse, summarizing a core principle of Hegel's dialectical ``logic,'' the immediate intellectual ancestor of Marxism, in Reason and Revolution (1941, Boston: Beacon Press)

``Over the years I have come to believe that the intellectual either of the right, left or center, will never be able to accept that means are the only thing out there, and the goals are an ever receding chimera.''
-Edward Harper (journalist, novelist), Unintended Consequences (Rutledge, 1999)

``There was only one catch and that was Catch 22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask, and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.''
-Joseph Heller, Catch 22

``Conversancy with Hegel tends to deprave one's intellect.''
-John Stewart Mill

``No arbitrary regulation, no act of the legislature, can add anything to the capital of the country; it can only force it into artificial channels.''
-J.R. McCulloch, economist (1789-1864) Principles of Political Economy

       The story was also told of an English valet in the 1930's who used his evening off to attend Communist Party meetings. But one week, after a speech on redistribution of wealth, he defected from the Party -- and his employer asked him the reason for his change of heart. ``Well, sir,'' said the valet, ``last Friday our speaker explained to us that if all the wealth were divided equally we would each have fifty pounds.''
       ``What's wrong with that?'' asked his employer.
       ``Well, sir,'' said the valet, ``I've already saved fifty-five pounds.''
-Kirk Brothers

``He could rage at the `hypocrisy of the capitalist system.' He could refer to a representative in England of an American philanthropy as `the one who distributes the Rockefellers' blood-stained money''' -from Edward R. Murrow: An American Original by Joseph E. Persico

``Competition is a sin.''
-John D. Rockefeller

``So why is Pataki focusing on capping rates rather than on increasing supply? Taken another way, why is the governor attempting to repeal the law of supply and demand?''
-New York Post editorial, 2001-Jan-8

``The customer is the enemy, the competitor is our friend.''
-internal mantra at Archer Daniels-Midland, of Lysine trust infamy

``When I hear the word `culture,' I get out my revolver.''
-Paul Joseph Göbbels, Nazi minister of propaganda

``There are only 90,000 people out there, who gives a damn?''
-Henry Kissinger, on the Marshall Islands, which include Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, sites of at least 66 full scale US nuclear (including dirty fusion) bomb tests

``When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.''
-Plato, 347, BC

``This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.''
-Plato, circa 400 BC

``[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.''
-H R Haldeman to his diary, unknowingly relaying Nixon's regurgitation of the justification for the Drug War that Kissinger had fed Nixon in pursuit of the agenda of the House of Rockefeller

``Recycling hazardous waste into fertilizer is good for America and Americans.''
-Rufus Chaney, US Department of Agriculture

``We try to let the animals tell us where they want to live...''
-wildlife biologist John Seidel, USFS division of wildlife, on the Vail lynx sanctuary (reported by Jason Blevins in the Denver Post 1998-Jul-5, ``Vail locals rip access curbs''

``Do you have any advice for dishwashers?''
``Just keep washing.''
-Bob Dole, answering a question from ``Dishwasher Pete'' Jensen at the 1998 National Restaurant Association convention (the obviously communist Pete can be reached at PO Box 8213 Portland, OR 97207 - he puts out a weekly humorzine)

``I was coming to work early this morning, down Fifth Avenue in the predawn darkness, and it reminded me of the old days when I was doing the `Today' show, because I saw the homeless people in the church shelters and the park benches...And you feel great sympathy for them. But you also envy the extra hour of sleep that they're getting...you go by and say `If I were them, I would still be sleeping.'''
-Tom Brokaw, consummate rat racer councilhead, 1999-Mar-8, guesting on NBC's Today Show (by my estimation this envy is sincere)

``If you don't do it excellently, don't do it at all. Because if it's not excellent, it won't be profitable or fun, and if you're not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?''
-Robert Townsend

``It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.''
-Muhandas Gandhi

``Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.''
-Mark Twain

``That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.''
-William J.H. Boetcker

``One man with courage makes a majority.''
-Andrew Jackson

``This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.''
-Winston Churchill

``Never give in. Never, never, never, never! Never yield in any way, great or small, large or petty, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.''
-Winston Churchill

``While some self-defense is in order, it is important to keep in mind that an apocalypse now and then is good for us, however uncomfortable it might be in the interim. For the alternative is a universally-imposed gray global bureaucracy that relentless squeezes the last iota of individual initiative and freedom out of the system.''
-J. Orlin Grabbe, from The Collapse of the New World Order

``The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.''
-Grover Cleveland (President of the US 1885-1889 and 1893-1897)

``The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.''
-Karl Marx

``The Romans brought devestation, but they called it peace.''
-Tacitus, on the Roman sacking of Carthage in Tunisia

``Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.''
-Mark Twain

``A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.''
-Herm Albright, Reader's Digest, June 1995

``You must be the change you wish to see in the world.''
-Muhandas Gandhi

``The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.''
-Dante, The Inferno

``All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice to the act.''
-The Talmud

``For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.''
-Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland

``Sentiment without action is ruination of the soul''
-unknown, from http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/quote

``The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.''
-Edmund Burke 1729-1797

``To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.''
-William Shakespeare

``It all seems so stupid, it makes me want to give up.
But why should I give up, when it all seems so stupid?''
-Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses, ``Shame,'' 1983

``Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

``You can't place faith in material things
material things will fail you
a hurricane triggered by a butterfly's wings
your conspirators betray you
Don't place faith in human beings
human beings are unreliable things
don't place faith in human beings
human beings or butterfly's wings
You can't place faith in a new regime
that fascist faith will kill you''
-Machines of Loving Grace, ``Butterfly Wings''

``Everyone can see what's going on
They laugh `cause they know they're untouchable

Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace

Maybe it sounds mean
But I really don't think so
You asked for the truth and I told you

Through their own words
They will be exposed
They've got a severe case of
The emperor's new clothes''

-Sinead O'Connor, ``The Emperor's New Clothes''

``If sand waves were sound waves
What song would be in the air now?
What stinging tune
Could split this endless noon
And make the sky swell with rain?
If war were a game that a man or a child could think of winning...
What kind of rule
Can overthrow a fool
And leave the land with no stain?''
-Suzanne Vega, 99.9F° (1992), "Song Of Sand"

``There is a hot wind blowing
It moves across the oceans and into every port
A plague. A black plague.
There's danger everywhere
And you've been sailing.

And you're alone on an island now tuning in.
Did you think this was the way
Your world would end?
Hombres. Sailors. Comrades.

There is no pure land now.
No safe place.
And we stand here on the pier
Watching you drown.
Love among the sailors.
Love among the sailors.

There is a hot wind blowing.
Plague drifts across the oceans.
And if this is the work of an angry God
I want to look into his angry face.
There is no pure land now.
No safe place.
Come with us into the mountains.
Hombres. Sailors. Comrades.''

-Laurie Anderson, ``Love Among the Sailors,'' Tightrope, published 1994