Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“The left thinks they are on the side of the angels and the right thinks God is on their side. Libertarians don’t presume that they can divine the intentions of the almighty beyond the fundamental belief that we are all created equal and are endowed by our creator (whatever "creator" means to you) with certain inalienable rights.”
Doug Carkuff

“The Aughts were ruined by Wall Street. Washington will ruin the next decade. It will take the lead in spending money it doesn't have on projects it doesn't need. It will lavish money on parasites.”
Bill Bonner

“Power and authority, as substitutes for performance and rational thought, are the specters that haunt the world today. They are the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays. And politics is their familiar. Politics, throughout time, has been an institutionalized denial of man's ability to survive through the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare. And politics, throughout time, has existed solely through the resources that it has been able to plunder from the creative and productive people whom it has, in the name of many causes and moralities, denied the exclusive employment of all their own powers for their own welfare.”
Karl Hess, 1969

“No imaginary hierarchical organization can overturn the natural hierarchies. Governments are imaginary organizations populated by voluntary participants. When human beings aggress against others—regardless of the imaginary organizations to which they belong—these actions are always and without exception unethical.”
Tzo

"Jesus lived and taught in a politically charged world, but he taught an ideology that transcended each of the partisan responses of his contemporaries: violence, narrow elitism, escapism and compromise. The gospel is not a political agenda."
Scott Ritsema

“The very existence of a government, any government, is a direct threat to anyone with the natural will to survive. This is because its incentive structure drives it to constantly seek more power, criminalizing more and more in the process."
Kevin Carson

“If the dollar is an 'IOU nothing,' the euro is a 'who owes you nothing.' When it collapses, a lot of people are going to suffer a big wealth haircut.”
Doug Casey

“Governments get overthrown or subverted all the time. And agreements between governments literally aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Why should anyone trust a cockamamie artificial unit, constructed out of whole cloth by the type of people who are employed by a government?”
Doug Casey

“As a business gets bigger and disposes of more wealth, its natural next step is to deploy that wealth for the purpose of protecting its advantages and gaining even more advantages. And the natural place to do so is with the institution which helpfully inflated it in the first place … government.
The 'counterbalance' to corporate power is not government, it’s separation of economy and state.”
Thomas L. Knapp

“Survival begins not with guns, gold, and a garden. It starts with self-reliance, strong family and communal bonds, a plan of subterfuge, and clandestine acts centered in the refusal to be subdued.”
Tim Case

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From the Darkness:

“Rather than trying to diminish the Fed's independence on interest rates, lawmakers should focus on helping the Fed do a better job on its other responsibilities, particularly supervising and stabilizing the banking system. It's critically important that Congress come up with a better way to protect the economy from widespread damage when giant lenders stumble.”
The Los Angeles Times

"The most overrated is freedom. When faced with economic uncertainty, people don't want freedom. When they can't see their economic future, they want the nanny state."
John McLaughlin, declaring his choice for the "most overrated" political issue of 2009.

“This guy [the underwear bomber] in some respects looking at it in retrospective probably did us a favor. We weren’t really focused on Yemen and the terrible things that are happening there. Now we are and that’s a good thing.”
Thomas Kean, former chief of the 911 Commission.

“Our brave men and women in the military die to save fellow soldiers and fight to set people free. Jesus Christ died on the cross to save us from sin and death. He sacrificed His life for us on the cross."

From the American Tract Society

"Privacy is an inviolable right, but if a person does not have the confidence to take a plane because she fears that she could be sitting next to a man carrying explosives, that is a negation of liberty."
Franco Frattini, former European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom & Security, commenting on the use of full-body security scanners in airports.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

"If [Ron] Paul knew the realities of our military then he would know that we are not occupiers of any land. The only land we have asked for is enough to bury the men and women who gave their lives fighting for our freedom. Ron Paul incorrectly believes America is reaping what it has sown around the globe, and in his eyes this attack is an example of what America deserves when it tries to extend peace, democracy, and inclusion throughout the world. In short, Paul’s ideas on foreign policy are a danger to the safety and security of America."

Tim Graney

"The Greatest Depression that could so easily have happened in 2009 but did not is the tribute that the world owes to economics."
Arvind Subramanian, The Financial Times.

“Taking advantage of situations created by government aggression, such as Walmart, the price of gold and anything else that doesn’t require you to aggress or endorse aggression is a good opportunity for us. Other candidates for action might be: acceptance of unemployment benefits, homesteading of government resources (such as parks) and collecting social security payments.”
George Donnelly [By participating in such state produced hand outs, you DO endorse the aggression that financed them.]