Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“If space is to be more than a government jobs program, a source of prestige for politicians, a playground for the ultra-rich, or a new domain of drudgery and exploitation, then the values of liberty and discovery must be cultivated on Earth with the desire to carry them into the heavens where they will be shaped anew.”
Darian Worden

“Just as rap songs about killing cops scared conservatives out of their wits in the 1990s, the ravings of some marginal Americans in the woods who had been infiltrated by the FBI are the new social epidemic worrying the left, worthy of censorship and a stern government response. The government is now the most persecuted victim group – worthy of far more advocates in journalism than the Muslim children being liquidated by U.S. remote-control robots every day.”
Anthony Gregory

“Given that the democratic State is already in place this means that there are enough armed men to enforce the State's dictates. The masses do not participate in the actual violence that must be committed to compel compliance. Thus, it is easier for the masses to tolerate and advocate aggressive policies because they themselves do not have to engage in the actual violence. The masses do not break into the houses of drug suspects and shoot their pets. The masses do not arrest tax resisters. The masses do not fight wars in foreign countries. Rather armed men who either ingest a much, much stronger cocktail of statist ideology or are thugs by nature enforce these laws and fights these wars. This means that the typical liberal or conservative can advocate his policies without the guilt of actually having to beat or jail or kill someone who disobeys a dictum of the State.”
Brutus

“All that the ‘United States’ is comprised of is an arbitrary geographical region over which a variety of governments arrogantly proclaim jurisdiction, under the ridiculously lame excuse that someone’s “right to vote” makes such an arrangement legitimate. No one, under any guise whatsoever, can claim control over another’s life, liberty, or property with any degree of righteousness.”
Alex R. Knight III

“The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government -- assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist -- must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual.When that error is coupled with a fertile topic of public concern -- such as terrorism, drug addiction, child abuse, or illegal immigration -- politics becomes pregnant with large-scale abuses of individual rights.”
Will Grigg

“America needs real champions of freedom – not poorly informed Republican accomplices. Either tea partyers should become more principled or they should ditch their Gadsden flags and wear T-shirts of the lobbying group that organizes the rally they attend.”
James Bovard

“Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes – ‘collateral damage’ – when they are the norm, not the exception, not what's collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the "rules of engagement," those ROEs, to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.”
Tom Engelhardt

"A free and responsible people can manage its affairs without the platitudes and paternal custodianship of a Great Leader, and exhibits no superstitious reverence toward the occupants of political office. Once a society begins to absorb this revolutionary discovery, it has already embraced the culture of enterprise."
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

“Why do we become enchanted with the belief that our ruler-governors are just and benevolent, when we experience evidence otherwise every day, everywhere? Why do we allow so many abuses of liberty and property, if the power the rulers possess is only that which we bestow onto them? Why do we let them treat us like beasts?
Tyranny ends when we cease to support voluntarily our own serfdom.”
Helio Beltrão

“Security is an illusion. If you seek it you will end up being hurt and enslaved. You are better off taking your chances in the real world, knowing there are no guarantees, than handing over your liberty to someone who has only your subjugation in mind.”
Kent McManigal

“From what we can tell, immigrants from across the border are doing the country a big service. And illegal immigrants are the best kind. They work cheap. They stay out of trouble. They use few public services. And they don't vote. What's more, they know how to dance. If we were all illegal immigrants, the country would have a much healthier economy. Labor rates would fall to levels where we could compete with other exporters. Social costs - food stamps, unemployment compensation, social security, medicare/aid - would drop. And non- voters couldn't demand more bread and circuses from the legislature”
Bill Bonner

“States have successfully managed to persuade their subject populations that they themselves are the state, and therefore that any insult to the honor of the state is an insult to them as well, any questioning of its behavior or intentions a slap in their very own faces. It becomes second nature for many people to root for their state in a way that does violence to reason and fact.”
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

“When it comes to understanding economics, liberals have a blind spot. They honestly believe that all that is needed to end poverty in the world is passing laws.”
Jacob Hornberger

“An obsession with the truth, by the way, is a trait I’ve noticed in all decent people. They want to know the truth. People who don’t care about the truth, or who are happy to believe lies because it is more convenient, are usually people I try to avoid.”
Ryan McMaken

“The state, as Obama implies, feels itself weakened by the reaction to its mass murder, mass looting, mass redistribution, and mass counterfeiting and subsequent economic depression. There has never been a state so big and so rapacious as the US, and the more people who begin to see through its propaganda, the more silly speeches to government audiences the government leader will try to give. The supremely rich taxing-killing machine is “us”? What blithering nonsense. The government is a separate, leech-like entity that lives by lies and aggression off the rest of us, and impoverishes us in the process, not to mention taking our freedom and destroying all that is good in human society.”
Lew Rockwell

“It’s important to emphasize again and again and again that this notion that we, the people, are in any way the government is fraudulent. The government is not us. It cannot ever be us. If it were, there’d be no need for signs that say 'Property of the United States Government' with warnings to trespassers because how can citizens — who are sovereign — trespass on the property over which they are sovereign? It’s the problem of socialist property writ large, and it’s why popular sovereignty is bunkum. All human societies become societies in which a relatively tiny elite rule a majority, and democracy (along with ideology) is just modernity’s method of legitimizing that elite rule. I have compared democratic rituals to religious rituals before, and I do believe that elections are the central sacrament of democracy. A pointless sacrament of an idolatrous religion.”
Charles Featherstone

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From the Darkness:

“Although President Bush has left the White House, he remains a living symbol of individual freedom; a symbol that must be defended at all costs. If we don’t correct the historical record about President Bush and the war in Iraq, his legacy of supporting democracy around the world will suffer.”
From the “Honor Freedom” website.

“I don’t think there’s much doubt that there will be a bank tax.”

Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee Chairman

“The Middle East is unstable. This will help stabilize it."
Harry Reid, voicing support for sactions against Iran.

“I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal? That’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s a lot cheaper than building a fence they can tunnel under.”
Pat Bertroche, Iowa Republican congressional candidate, offering his solution to “illegal” immigration.

“Make the border airtight. In short, start using the resources of the federal government to carry out its one-and-only legitimate function: securing and protecting our borders.”
Justin Raimondo, offering his solution to “illegal” immigration.

“If you see this page rather then what you were expecting, then access to the site or network you were trying to reach has been blocked due to information security concerns.”
What appears on the computer monitor when attempting to access LewRockwell.com from a DOD computer in Europe.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here, For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification. People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification. We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, promoting a Democratic leader’s proposal requiring every worker in the US to carry a national identification card with biometric information.

“It troubles me when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad. For when our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us.”
B. Obama, while receiving an honorary degree for loving government. [See Lew Rockwell’s and Charles Featherstone’s quotes above.]