Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“The state, its proselytizers argue, is necessary as an external, neutral means of disincentivizing what we might call ‘bad behavior,’ for ensuring that human nature’s dark side (greed, wrath, etc.) isn’t left unchecked. And if the state really could be thought of as something apart from the actual human beings that comprise it, then that argument would be persuasive enough. By ‘the state,’ we’re meant to imagine something that can be abstracted away from the fact that it is, in fact, a human institution, subject to all of the same characteristic flaws that it is purportedly established to counteract. Do we imagine that Ron Paul could change any of this?
We are supposed to imagine that the best results are achieved from an organization that has absolutely no incentive to serve the citizenry, that itself is subject to no outside check on its power, but why? If human nature really is as gloomy as Hobbes was convinced that it was, with the brutish war of all against all sitting just below the surface of all human affairs, then indeed the state seems to be the very worst and most ill-conceived of our possible options for the good society.”
David D'Amato

“…..Killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.”
Robert Higgs

“Good citizens, whether in Ancient Greece or today, are expected to fall in line with what they're told, and any measure of dissent or intellectual discourse is met with derision and public ridicule. Anyone who questions the nation's hallowed truths is labeled as an enemy... or at least, accused of supporting the enemy.”
Simon Black

“How many Americans will have the wits to wonder why the ‘terror mastermind’ – who defeated not merely the CIA and the FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with Israel’s Mossad and the intelligence services of NATO, who defeated NORAD, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US Air Force, and Air Traffic Control, who caused security procedures to fail four times in US airports in one hour on the same day, who caused the state-of-the-art Pentagon air defenses to fail, and who managed to fly three airliners into three buildings with pilots who did not know how to fly – has not pulled off any other attack in almost ten years? Do Americans really believe that a government’s security system that can so totally fail when confronted with a few Saudi Arabians with box cutters can renew itself to perfection overnight?”
Paul Craig Roberts

“Our government claims that it killed bin Laden and then gets rid of the body before any independent entity can verify its claim? And the reason the government did so was to respect Islamic law? The U.S. Government does not respect its own laws nor does it respect the lives of Muslims, but all of a sudden the U.S. Government respects Islamic law regarding the burial of a dead Muslim terrorist suspect while said government routinely kills innocent Muslims in violation of Islamic law. Or any law for that matter.”
Brutus

“The monster of the east [bin Laden] is gone, but the beast that is the U.S. government is alive and well, and planning chaos. Our eyes should be open and our minds clear, for what is coming is vile. War is criminal and it is unholy, and our government is planning even more aggression. This bin Laden farce is evidence enough. Those who purposely cause and wage war, and do so to gain money and power, are savage, depraved, and evil. But those who applaud the murdering of others in the name of false defense are the enablers. Without the consent of the people, the government would be forced to stand down.”
Gary Barnett

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
Osama bin Laden, shortly after 911

“Every action taken by the government ruling us that abridged individual liberties and enlarged the public debt was a small victory for bin Laden's vision. The same is true of every CIA-conducted Predator drone strike that wiped out a helpless Muslim family, thereby sowing seeds of rancor that will blossom into anti-American terrorism.”
Will Grigg

“If, as American presidents have never tired of claiming, Al Qaeda attacked us because ‘hey hate us for our freedoms,”\’ they must like us a whole lot more now. If Al Qaeda is really fighting us because they hate our freedoms, the war is already over.”
Kevin Carson

“Like all social structures, the American empire makes heavy use of falsity, lies, illusions, deceptions, and myths that come to be taken as truths by those who are immersed in a structure. There is no social structure, be it family, society, state, business, association, church or religious establishment, that does not hide truths about itself and whose members do not act according to various falsehoods that pass for truths. The state and empire are not exceptions.”
Michael S. Rozeff

“Institutions based on coercion are inherently self-destructive – whether they are the openly dictatorial kind or the polite, dishonest kind that hide behind hypnotic words like ‘democracy’ and ‘republic.’”
Lawrence Ludlow

"Look carefully and you’ll see that the only difference between Obama and Osama is BS.”
Robert Katz

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From the Darkness:

"Let us not forget that the battle to stop al-Qaida and its affiliates does not end with one death."

Queen Hillary, preparing us for still more killing

"All over the world we will press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people."
Queen Hillary, spreading hypocrisy

“This is bigger than the moon landing, this is huge."
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera on the death of Osama bin Laden

“I would assume that the enhanced interrogation program that we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden’s ultimate capture.”
Dick Cheney [...and when you "assume" you make an "ass" of "u" and "me."]

“Well I don’t know if everyone knows this or not, but you mentioned the fact that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Osama. We obtained that information through waterboarding. So for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, who say it should be stopped and never used again, we got vital information which directly led us to bin Laden.”
Rep. Peter King

"It is not in our national security interests to allow those images [of a dead bin Laden], as has been in the past been the case, to become icons to rally opinion against the United States."
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney [Apparently, drone bombing innocent people doesn’t motivate people to “rally.”]

"We can't fight every war. We can't undo every injustice in the world. We don't go looking for dragons to slay. We are not a nation in decline. . We will remain the world's abiding beacon of freedom."
Sarah Palin

“This is not an administration proposal. This is not a bill supported by the administration. This was an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration, does not taken into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”
White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, commenting on the Obama administration floating a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.
[Yea, right. The Emperor doesn‘t support the idea. That’s why the proposed bill includes $300 million for “field trials.”]

“Based on information released by the administration, the covert military operation that brought down the most wanted terrorist in the world appears to have been gutsy and well executed. It was also lawful.”
Washington Post editorial

“The reason they’re called ‘soft’ [terrorist targets] is because it’s so easily accessible to anyone. There has to be security checks for the safety of all people.”
Security consultant David Boehm, keeping the fear alive

“Welcome to hell, bin Laden.”
Mike Huckabee, self-professed “Christian”