Quotes of the Week

From the Light:

“In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.”
Paul Craig Roberts

“I am amused at the reaction of government officials who feign indignation – and threaten criminal prosecution – over individuals or groups who engage in harmless hoaxes to promote their interests, but who pip not a squeak when the state – with the support of its paid propagandists (AKA as the mainstream media) – actively fosters hoaxes that serve its ends. Why does this self-righteousness not rise to the level of demands for the criminal prosecution of those who fabricated – and continue to operate – that deadliest of recent hoaxes, the so-called ‘war on terror?’”
Butler Shaffer

“Stop voting, stop cheering on these liars and usurpers and invaders of your life. Choose independence and freedom. Do not consent to be governed. Choose no government.”
Alex R. Knight III

“Since the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its purchasing power. The fact that the dollar can be used to purchase anything of value is an abiding testimony to the power of official myths to contort the thinking process of human beings en masse.”
Will Grigg

“Training, as the word suggests, involves following the lead of someone else. Little wonder, then, in a world that has so strongly emphasized training over education that we have so many people who view socialism favorably! The fine division of labor couldn’t come about any other way except to train people to obey others and act their role within the colony. Training people for jobs has trained them for socialism.”
Will Groves

“Switzerland was an idea, and like America, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Doug Casey

“The self-interest motivations of individuals assures us that they will always act for the purpose of enhancing their lives, however they define such ends; to be better off after acting than if they had not chosen to act. Liberty is the condition in which individuals are able to act in pursuit of their highest interests. By its very nature, then, liberty enhances the quality of life.”
Butler Shaffer

"Large authoritarian organizations make easier the compartmentalization of morality."
Fred Reed

“Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command.”
Robert Higgs

“The statist system itself is based on utopian thinking. We are told that a strong central government is necessary because, human nature being what it is, the public needs to be protected from evil miscreants. We are then asked to assume these same miscreants will not do everything they can to gain control of the state apparatus. This is contrary to all theory and experience and is thus utopian. Logic tells us that evil people will gravitate to positions of state power so they can lie, cheat, steal, and murder with the impunity granted by their legal monopoly.”
James Ostrowski

“In the absence of the state, the social order becomes a market. Its customers — the individuals composing society — are free to choose between lefty “innovative ideas” and rightist “proven ideas.” They’re also free to change their minds, and to take their business elsewhere — even to the point of developing completely separate social groupings which isolate themselves one from another to avoid “contamination.” Not only does this make it easier to figure out “what works best,” but it allows everyone to choose “what works best” for them.”
Thomas L. Knapp

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From the Darkness:

"As a nation, we have prepared at all levels of government, and as individuals and communities, taking unprecedented steps to counter the emerging pandemic."
Barry Obama, freaking out over H1N1.

"The dollar will remain the principal reserve currency for a long time."
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner

“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”
Rocco Landesman, Obama's handpicked chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

“We have had a lot of unfair public criticism and attacks in an attempt to scare people about a vaccine that’s potentially life-saving. We have seen it before with vaccines like MMR [the combined jab for measles, mumps and rubella], and now extremists are doing the same thing again.”
Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer in England, commenting on people refusing to take the H1N1 vaccine.