Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“America is, despite the conservative and liberal propaganda to the contrary, essentially as much a welfare state as most other nations of the West, and the hugest chunk of the entitlement expenditures are going not to the easily scapegoated classes, but rather to the respectable masses.”
Anthony Gregory

“It is the duty of the state to always feign crisis wherever possible so as to justify their existence and the employment of their multitude of divine agents who exist to protect us from annoyed sisters, unlicensed lemonade sellers, raw milk, unapproved advertising slogans, and the Muslims hiding in our closets. Thus, the state has fostered a dependency on itself, on the part of the masses, in order to warrant its immense growth and intrusive deployment. The state has created a need for the state by the masses who can no longer survive daily rituals, let alone modest abnormalities. The masses have been dumbed-down, made into milksops, and turned into yellow-bellied flakes by the paternal state that enslaves them.”
Karen DeCoster

“In every time and in every country the ruling class forcibly extracts what it wants from its domestic livestock: eggs from chickens, milk from cows, wool from sheep, honey from bees and taxes from humans.”
Garry Reed

“All great systems of commerce are fractured: It is their eventual cohesion that gives rise to empires. But the natural state of humankind is one of dissipated authority. It is from this that freedom arises, and freedom midwifes wealth.”
Anthony Wile

“Accepting the idea of sovereignty of the individual brings much responsibility, but that responsibility leads to a freer society. A freer society leads to a society based upon voluntary cooperation. Voluntary cooperation is the basis for free markets. Voluntary cooperation and free markets leads directly to prosperity.”
Gary D. Barnett

“Political government is the past. Anarchy is the future.
Political government brought you hundreds of millions of murders in the last century, and sent you the butcher’s bill.”
Thomas L. Knapp

“At bottom, the success of despotic governments and Big Brother societies hinges upon a certain number of political, financial, and cultural developments. The first of which is an unwillingness in the general populace to secure and defend their own freedoms, making them completely reliant on corrupt establishment leadership. For totalitarianism to take hold, the masses must not only neglect the plight of their country, and the plight of others, but also be completely uninformed of the inherent indirect threats to their personal safety. They must abandon all responsibility for their destinies, and lose all respect for their own humanity. They must, indeed, become domesticated and mindless herd animals without regard for anything except their fleeting momentary desires for entertainment and short term survival. For a lumbering bloodthirsty behemoth to actually sneak up on you, you have to be pretty damnably oblivious.”
Brandon Smith

“Ideas, be they right or wrong, are indestructible. The only possible change is people's attitude toward them. There is indifference or acceptance or rejection. Ideas on liberty are greeted more by indifference than by rejection, an attitude that tends to harden if left undisturbed. But when we try to turn indifference into acceptance by obtrusive and officious methods we get only rejection for our pains and, for good reason: these are not the methods of liberty.
The sole force that will turn indifference into acceptance is the power of attraction. And this can be achieved only if the eye is cast away from the remaking of others and toward the improvement of self. This, as an aim, is in harmony with personal and human evolution; the effort demanded of each individual is not a sacrifice, but the best investment one can make in life's highest purpose.”
Leonard Reed

“In the same way that some battered wives cling to their abusive husbands, the more debacles the government causes the more some voters cling to rulers. The craving for a protector drops an iron curtain around the mind, preventing a person from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket.”
James Bovard

“There is no such thing as a courageous politician because they are self-selected strata of psychopathy whose prime directive is preservation and expansion of power at everyone’s expense except their own. Any expectation otherwise will always result in severe disappointment on your part. It is ironic that the worst elements of humanity are those in charge but history is rife with such folly.”
Bill Buppert

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From the Darkness:

“When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as political leaders. But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity
Great crisis leaders are not like the rest of us; nor are they like mentally healthy leaders. When society is happy, they toil in sadness, seeking help from friends and family and doctors as they cope with an illness that can be debilitating, even deadly. Sometimes they are up, sometimes they are down, but they are never quite well.”

Nasser Ghaemi

"A Norway incident could definitely happen here; the same things that played into the Norway suspect's mindset are here in this country. If anything, extremists are much more capable of committing violent acts here due to their access to weapons and ammunition, which they don't have in Europe."
Daryl Johnson, DHS domestic terror analyst

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police."
From a flyer issued by the London Metropolitan Police

“We may come to a point where defense is more actively and aggressively defined even for the private sector and what is permitted there is something that we would never let the private sector do in physical space… Let me really throw out a bumper sticker for you. How about a digital Blackwater?”
Gen. Michael Hayden, suggesting that mercenaries were needed to deal with growing cyber threats

“We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”
Rep. Mike Doyle, lasing out at tea party Republicans
 
“Robert E. Lee is important historically because he devoted himself to a cause that was, at its core, anti-American; yet he -- among countless other Confederates -- was convinced that he acted only as a paragon of patriotism. It’s the essential delusion of every traitor.”
Glenn W. La Fantasie, Salon

"He's nobody's boy. He's your president and he's our president. And that's what y'all have got to get through your head."
Al Sharpton, responding to Pat Buchanan describing Obama as “your boy in the ring”

“I am appalled by the Syrian government’s use of violence and brutality against its own people. The reports out of Hama are horrifying and demonstrate the true character of the Syrian regime. Once again, President Assad has shown that he is completely incapable and unwilling to respond to the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people. His use of torture, corruption and terror puts him on the wrong side of history and his people.”
B. Obama, ignoring the log in his eye

“Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission. No American politician was more allergic to debt or taxes than Thomas Jefferson, but he also appreciated the need to have the resources to make the Louisiana Purchase and insisted that on his tombstone it be written that he founded the University of Virginia.”
Thomas Friedman, NY Times