"Ideas are the motive power of human progress, the force which shapes the world. Ideas are more powerful than armies, because it was ideas which caused the armies to be raised
Morris & Linda Tannehill
“Government employees think they are an elite class; above everyone else. Their wishes and opinions become 'law', while ours, if acted upon, are crimes.”
Kent McManigal
“As long as the American people continue to believe that their most formidable enemies are distant foreign terrorists rather than their own governments -- federal, state, local -- they will continue to lose their freedom and their wealth to the very entities they so wrongly believe exist to protect them.”
Brutus
“Historically, criminality implied intent and required at least one victim. Today, however, crimes are whatever politicians and bureaucrats say they are. The law should deal with actions, not hypothetical situations, probabilities, or the mere potential to harm someone.”
Trevor Bothwell
“In reality the state is nothing more than a group of men and women that force everyone else to buy services from them. So even if the document that they claim is the foundation of their law, the constitution, does not give them permission to do this, so what? Why should they care? They have a monopoly on interpreting and applying the constitution. No one else gets to do this. So as you would predict given this situation, they have been interpreting it in favor of themselves for years, if not outright ignoring it. It really is an irrelevant document. A 250 year old parchment is not going to stop bullets.”
Michael P.
“When people say ‘God bless America’ or ‘God bless our troops,’ aren't they really trying to cast a spell? Do they really believe words can change reality? Or that a bumper sticker that reads, ‘Support our troops’ is nothing more than a talisman (‘A trinket or piece of jewelry thought to be a protection against evil')? Isn't this exactly what magic is? The belief that mere words, in the correct incantation, can alter reality to suit your tastes?”
Bob Wallace
“The gravest threats to their security that Americans face are domestic. They come from government. Government is strongly institutionalized. It is in place. It is everywhere. Government communicates to the public. Its speech invariably gets publicity. Government still commands a significant degree of trust. Government monopolizes certain missions that are crucial to Americans. Consequently its threats to national security are much more serious than any of the threats it purports to fight, including terrorism.”
Michael S. Rozeff
“People often have a hard time believing that the terms 'authoritarian' and 'tyranny' apply to their own government, but that's because those who meekly stay in line and remain unthreatening are never targeted by such forces. The face of authoritarianism and tyranny reveals itself with how it responds to those who meaningfully dissent from and effectively challenge its authority: do they act within the law or solely through the use of unconstrained force?”
Glenn Greenwald
“The world is very complex, with billions of people reacting to each other. It is impossible to predict all of the ramifications of our actions. That’s why moral rules are so important. If we set out to do things 'for the greater good,' believing that the ends justify the means, we may realize to our horror that we have ushered in great evils.”
Bob Murphy
“The culture of war . . . is not like the culture of ordinary peace-time life. It is a culture dominated by fear, blood, and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous . . . results. It has more relation to science fiction or to absurdist theater than to actual life”
Paul Fussell
“[The] problem is the state, the one institution we allow this peculiar exemption from all of the general, moral assumptions that guide our daily dealings with one another. All ventures into politics are ultimately to prove unavailing at anything but reinforcing the untruths that hold it up.”
David D'Amato
“All politics that exist within the state monopoly are only variations on the question of what sector the wealth will come from and where the surplus that doesn’t go directly to the state apparatus will end up. This has always been the nature of the state. The state must and will continue to confiscate in order to survive.”
Gene DeNardo
“Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”
Carl Ogelsby
“A cursory vetting of the evidence reveals that elected representatives are no more deliberative, nor sapient, nor any less rapacious than the plebeians whose vote they seek. It is understandable, really: the plebeians, theoretically and in fact, are the ultimate judge of all ideas and the source of all power; thus, they demand a representative who excels in nullity and mediocrity in order to best reflect majority opinion. The plebeians demand a mirror, even if it is cracked.”
Stephen Mauzy
“Nobody is born with a mandatory obligation to invisible lines on a map. Our fundamental obligation is to ourselves, our families, and the people that we choose to let into our circles...not to a piece of dirt that's controlled by mob-installed bureaucrats.”
Simon Black
“'Treason’ to and ‘betrayal’ of the state is service to humanity.”
Thomas L. Knapp
************************************************************
From the Darkness:
"I think the man [Julian Assange] is a high tech terrorist...he's done enormous damage to our country and to our relationships with our allies around the world, and he should be prosecuted."
Sen. Mitch McConnell “When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.”
Paul Krugman
"Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now."
Paul Krugman, on the future of you heatlth care
“And we intend to follow that up with public hearings and bring some of those in front of a public hearing to explain how they justify the use of federally regulated airwaves to offend people based on who they are -- not using free speech based on what their opinions may be.”
Al Sharpton, calling for the FCC to hold hearings on “what should be standards in regard to race and gender on publicly regulated TV and radio.”
"One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money."
Ben Bernanke
"What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant."
Attorney General Eric Holder keeping the fear alive.
"It's clear that our policy is going to be to continue to impose pressure on Iran so long as it defies its international obligations."
Stuart Levey, US Treasury, announcing new financial sanctions on Iran's elite military unit and the country's largest shipping company
"I say to all Americans, gay or straight, who want nothing more than to defend this country in uniform, your country needs you, your country wants you, and we will be honored to welcome you into the ranks of the finest military the world has ever known."
B. Obama, after repealing the ban on gay men and women to killon the state’s command [You neglected to add, "Your country owns you."]
"Defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism.”
Outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter, on the tea party activists who worked to defeat GOP centrists
“Some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation."
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates [Hubris on parade.]
No comments:
Post a Comment