Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Profits make great things happen. Socialism produces only human misery. Socialism takes cotton candy dreams and turns them into brussels sprout lies. "From each according to their ability and to each according to their need." Sounds great! It is the snake oil that will cure all of society’s ills! Actually, it is a recipe for turd soup that creates only famine, bone-gnawing dreariness and unspeakable violence on a worldwide scale. It creates a world where people are motivated to be needy, not able.”
Brian Wilson

“Isn't science supposed to be so much more than monkey see, monkey do? Is there so much peer pressure being generated here that such reputedly intelligent humans are willing to trash their own disciplines in order to fit in with Al Gore's clique?”
Bill Huff

“Both Left and Right are reactionary and authoritarian. That is to say, both are political. They seek only to revise current methods of acquiring and wielding political power. Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target is politics itself.”
Karl Hess, 1969

“Neutralism=security. Empire=horror.”
Lew Rockwell

“A decent economist is rarely offered the job of Fed chairman. The public wants miracles. A real economist knows he can't deliver them, so he takes himself out of the running before embarrassing anyone. A scoundrel like Alan Greenspan, on the other hand, squeezes his role like a ham actor, even though he knows the juice is bogus.”
Bill Bonner

“Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people.
Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people.”
Paul Craig Roberts

"It is not inconceivable that Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world safe for democracy, owing to the train of consequences it set in motion, may ultimately make the world safe for democracy, to be sure, but not safe for mankind."
Robert Higgs

“Government is the only human enterprise that profits from failure. Once that principle is understood, many otherwise inexplicable choices made by ruling elites and their servants can be made intelligible.”
Will Grigg

“When you support a politician, you end up not only being partially responsible for all the evil he inflicts, but you also end up having to justify that evil. You become a useful idiot, a minion of a power-hungry pathological liar and ego-maniac , and you have to betray your own principles and values in order to rationalize the evil your guy is responsible for. How foolish.”
Mike Barnett

“Exactly how does the TSA expect us to ‘engage in self-defense actions’ after stealing our knitting needles and pocket-knives? Heck, once a screener finishes robbing us, we can’t even squirt Listerine at a terrorist’s eyes. Shouldn’t these wingdings hand out Saturday Night Specials at the gate instead?”
Becky Akers

“A billion is only a thousandth of a trillion, and they’re now thinking in trillions. Obama may soon have to ask his science czar what comes after a trillion.”
Doug Casey

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From the Darkness:

"Our system did not work in this instance. No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way."
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, commenting on the recent “firecracker in a condom” airplane bomber.

“Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”
Sen. Joe Lieberman

“Senator Lieberman tosses out a fascinating idea when he talks about preemptive action.”

Sen. Arlen Specter

"The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season."
B.O., The Great Protector [That’s what worries me.]

"This was a serious reminder of the dangers we face and of the nature of those who threaten our homeland."
B. Obama, pooping his pants in fear of underwear bombers.

"Yes, there is some brief violation of privacy with a full body scan. But on the other hand, if we can save thousands of lives, to me, we have to make that decision."
Rep. Peter King, peeing his pants in fear of underwear bombers.

"This plot is an example of something we've known could exist in theory, and in order to be able to detect it, you've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at. It's either pat-downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."
Michael Chertoff, on the verge of vomiting in fear of underwear bombers.

“Amazon’s in-house counsel should help the company meet its civic obligations — and toss “entity isolation” in the trash can. Amazon’s employees are too scattered, its customer base and its sales too large and the states’ fiscal crisis too grave for it to continue to play tax-avoidance games.”
Randall Stross, NY Times

“We need a new policy of systematically going after terrorists that involves explicit profiling and explicit discrimination for behavior. It is time to go to profiling of dangerous people.”
Newt Gingrich

“There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.”
Talk radio host Mike Gallagher, giving his idea for improving airport security.

“I didn't learn anything new about monetary economics or the Federal Reserve, but I did learn a lot about the thinking of Ron Paul. It turns out to be a curious mix of the sensible and the delusional. To put it differently, Paul has wrapped a mostly cogent critique of central banking in general and the Fed in particular inside a decidedly utopian view of what a world without central banks would look like.”
Justin Fox, Time Magazine