Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“The key to government control is voluntary compliance. Without self-government, the civil government cannot exercise control. Self-government relies on widespread trust far more than widespread fear.
Widespread trust is fading. Widespread fear will fade with it.”
Gary North

“Regardless of the rationalization, the State, by a process of moral alchemy, or moral laundering, claims to turn bad things into good. By this ideology, rulers have kept the idea of freedom tightly contained, when it is in effect at all.”
Sheldon Richman

“The state is the ultimate weapon in Hobbes’s 'war of all against all,' and so long as it remains loaded it shall be continuously fired by those whose fingers have access to the trigger. You can have the state or you can have peace, but you can’t have both.”
Thomas L. Knapp

"It's odd that people trust the government when the government doesn't trust them at all. If the government treats you like a criminal, a terrorist, a lab rat and a vaccine depository, doesn't that only prove they don't honor you as a sovereign individual?"
Mike Adams

“My experience convinces me that participation in electoral politics is more than futile: it only adds energy to the system; it confirms the central premise of all political thinking, namely: important change can occur only within the halls of government. Besides the fact that the electoral process is unavoidably rigged in favor of the status quo, it also assures that, no matter who you vote for, the government always gets elected. Voting is designed to give people the false sense that they are in control of the machinery and the policies of the state.”
Butler Shaffer

“Market anarchists envision a world without poverty or war, where individuals are not forced to subsidize the domination of one another, nor have our own lives paternalistically guided by bureaucrats, politicians, or generals, irrelevant of how they were placed in a position of political power.
This world is possible, and it isn’t really all that complex of an idea: there should be no arbitrary political boundaries and thus no forced collectivization. Political relationships should be based upon consent and problems resolved through decentralized common law negotiation amongst the affected parties, not non-refusable legislative representation based upon geographical lines.”
Ross Kenyon

“A war crime is an artificial construct hatched in the ‘advanced’ Western mind. Take a look at the Hague Convention of a century ago and consider the weapons described. For a war crime to have any meaning, no distinction should be made between the means of killing.”
Hiroaki Sato

“Formerly trained to kill people and break things, American soldiers now attend to winning hearts and minds, while moonlighting in assassination. The politically correct term for this is ‘counterinsurgency.’”
Andrew J. Bacevich

"The net result of the state’s involvement in economic life is and always has been to diminish the bargaining power of the proles while cultivating the appearance of benevolence. Equality is a worthy goal, and we should scrutinize corporate power at every opportunity, but it is crucial to dislodge that goal from the case in favor of statism.”
David D'Amato

"Fashion consultants and beauticians are indispensable to the professional politician. Voters refuse to accept a candidate that looks like an ordinary person. At a time when fewer and fewer people wear suits and ties, it is odd that people expect politicians to wear the costume of the least trusted people in society - lawyers, insurance salesmen and television news readers."
Tom Blanton

“'Government of the people’ means that Washington can do whatever it damn pleases in their name.”
Kirkpatrick Sale

“Initiatives that begin as 'state services' invariably end up making us servants to the state. And, in the end, voters only have themselves to blame.”
Joel Bowman

“Modern authoritarian movements tend to adopt the strategy of avoiding talking about or even hinting at the coercion they will adopt to deal with those opposed to the supreme rule of the all-powerful state apparatus. They deny that they are fascist movements and instead adopt a slew of fanciful euphemisms for the coercive policies they propose to inflict on their brutalized subjects.”
Ben O’Neill

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From the Darkness:

“Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”

David Broder, Washington Post

“I'd like to ask a simple question: Why isn't Julian Assange dead? . . . WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb. . . So again, I ask: Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?  It's a serious question.”
Jonah Goldberg

“The government has a wide range of options for dealing with him [Julian Assange]. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.”
Marc Thiessen

"We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back."
Nancy Pelosi, after her party got its butt kicked in the latest gang war.