Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Perhaps it is useful here to consider freedom as a concept, not an institution or a political or geographical location. Certainly one cannot point to freedom on a map, nor is it defined - regardless of laws attempting to render it otherwise - by the color of one's passport or skin. It resides neither in the wooden speeches of politicians nor in the empty promises of their sophistry, where it is prone to being debased, corrupted and molested. Instead, it lives and thrives in the impenetrable safekeeping of those who seek to achieve it. As such, it is only natural that the torchbearers of mankind's greatest attribute should seek a home in which they can live their lives unencumbered by the coercion of others.”
Joel Bowman

“When someone claims to be for ‘smaller government’ while simultaneously clamoring for “border security” and against “amnesty” for peaceful people whose only ‘crime’ is crossing an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a street gang on steroids, they’re contradicting themselves.”
Thomas L. Knapp

“It’s a sick and cynical thing, this monster known as government. By its very nature it distorts and obfuscates the truth in order to accrue supporters to itself, and ever grow and expand its brutal powers. Polar opposite the mythology, humanity cannot long survive – certainly not in any meaningful or agreeable condition – if governments are permitted to continue to exist.”
Alex R. Knight III

“From ancient Sumer to the present, all governments have been composed of elites. All states originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, exercise a monopoly of crime over their subjects through war and taxation, indoctrination and propaganda, and the conscription of resources and persons.”
Charles Burris

“In short, government ‘law’ is not, never was, and never will be the cornerstone of anything except tyranny and injustice of the most repugnant order. ‘Our’ cornerstone, the cornerstone of a free and equitable society, is an unfettered marketplace absent of all political government. And nothing whatsoever besides.”
Alex R Knight III

“The Department of Defense couldn’t even defend its own headquarters on September 11th. It was too busy occupying, defending, and building golf courses in other countries.”
Laurence Vance

"‘Law,’ as something created and enforced by the state, is a product of nothing more than the preferences of those who control the machinery of the state.”
Butler Shaffer

“Go back and look over that list of things that you're expected to give your loyalty to and even sacrifice your life for. Over the centuries, they've learned to make it all sound wonderful and noble. However when you begin to see these institutions as nothing more than bunches of individuals, each with no more rights in the natural world than you have (and no extra, or bonus rights miraculously obtained by claiming to be something other than what they are, nothing more than a bunch of individuals), they start to look like tribes of cannibals or vampires, eagerly anticipating the tasty sacrifice of another deluded victim.”
L. Neil Smith

“The systemic defects inherent in government bureaucracy cannot be overcome, as they are due (mostly) to the absence of a profit motive. The government simply cannot provide quality services at market prices; often, the government cannot provide quality service at any price. What the government can do, however, is provide brutality very cheaply, for a while.”
Mike Barnett

“On the surface, it [democracy] seems like a marketplace of consumers buying products, albeit political ones. The reality is that nothing checks out. We don't get what we buy. What don't know what we are buying. We don't know what the thing we are buying is supposed to do. What are we really buying? We are expending no real resources on the purchase other than our time.”
Jeffrey Tucker

“Real freedom isn’t about doing the kind of stuff government wants us to do. Real freedom is about doing stuff the government doesn’t like, without being wiretapped or herded into a ‘free speech zone.’’
Kevin Carson

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From the Darkness:

“You know Arizona has been under terrorist attacks, if you will, with all of this illegal immigration that has been taking place on our very porous border. The whole issue comes back, that we do not and will not tolerate illegal immigration bringing with it very much so the implications of crime and terrorism into our state.”
Arizona Governor Brewer.

“If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that, somebody who’s homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something, it could be anything.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomburg, guessing the motivations of the Times Square bomber.

“Miranda warnings are counterproductive in my view.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham

“Don’t give this guy [the Times Square bomber] his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about."

John McCain

“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”
Elena Kagan

“I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

Elena Kagan in 1993

“Complete the danged fence.”
John McCain, speaking of the border fence between the US and Mexico.