Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"We are oppressed by government and most people are unaware of it because they themselves have assumed government morality from childhood. It is impossible to change what you believe in your heart. If you are taught that democracy means freedom of political choices, you never question it, and the façade of politics serves for reality. Any challenge to this paradigm is written off as nuttery or conspiracy"
Bob Livingston

“Don't equate being passionate about the truth with being psychologically dependent on everyone else agreeing with you. 
If you want to help cure the world of its madness, you have to find a way to maintain your own sanity even when others react to you as if you've gone mad."
T.K. Coleman

“Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators, and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.”
Albert J. Nock

“It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces war upon us, but the imagination. Imagination is the driving force, especially when imagination has been preconditioned by the media, education, and religion, and fed with aggressive boosterism and pathetic pieties by the state’s need for enemies. The imagined phantom swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity.  The archetypal idea gains a face.  Once the enemy is imagined, one is already in a state of war.  Once the enemy has been named, war has already been declared and the actual declaration becomes inconsequential, only legalistic.”
James Hillman

“If you are forbidden to do what you have a right to do, you are being enslaved. If someone claims to have a right to tell you where you can live, what you are allowed to put into your bloodstream, how you use you property, can take your property from you against your will, and says they can forbid your right to carry tools, they are trying to enslave you. If they kidnap and cage you for doing what you have a right to do, the slavery has gone from the abstract to the concrete.”
Kent McManigal

“The entire human race, wherever situated, is the ‘enemy’ of the institutionally-structured political establishment. Our make-believe “choice” between being ruled and destroyed by either the Trump or Hillary franchises, is as meaningless to our well-being as choosing between emphysema or lung-cancer!”
Butler Shaffer

“The so-called ‘social contract’ is a crock of shit. There is no contract if I did not choose to sign it. The society does not have a right to impose its will on me, even if it is purported to be for ‘the greater good.’ I must have choice to opt-in to any system. I must have choice where my tax dollars go. I must have choice what I do with my own body, including both sex and drugs. I must have choice in what is public and what is private. I must have choice in everything, not orders from ‘authority figures.’”
Mike Margolies

“The free-market solution to the migrant situation is quite simple. If all the property of a country is privately owned, anyone can come and stay as long as he can pay for his accommodations. When even the streets and parks are privately owned, trespassers, beggars, squatters, migrants, vagrants, and the like have a problem. A country with 100% private property, and zero welfare, would only attract people who like those conditions. And they’d undoubtedly be welcome as individuals. But 'migration' would be impossible.
So, again, I'm all for open borders. Anybody should be able to go anywhere if they can support themselves. In a free market society, however, nobody's going to give you money just for existing. You have to produce goods and services in order to be able to buy food, shelter, and clothing.”
Doug Casey

“What’s the psychology behind America’s support of its government’s evil wars? The scar and shame of 9/11 loom large. That was a defeat. More generally, Americans won’t accept defeat. They fear it. They fear not being numero uno. They fear even a loss of prestige, and politicians even use that as an excuse for maintaining losing commitments and interventions. Americans fear a loss of control, even if such control is counterproductive. Their psychology demands winning and being on top, being the big honcho, the world’s policeman.”
Michael Rozeff

“The entire world has now learned a new lesson about the putrid, cynically corrupt, criminal nature of American ‘democracy’ with its vote rigging, orchestrated acts of violence, censorship, and the creation of a de facto state-run media with its never-ending avalanche of lies in support of the regime, little different from the ‘media’ of the Soviet Union.  No one in the world wants to import this!  Which of course is why the U.S. government is not ‘the world’s policeman’ but the world’s bully that invades, conquers, and instigates revolutions, all in the name of ‘American exceptionalism’ and ‘bringing democracy’ to other part of the world.”
Tom DiLorenzo

“People accuse me of being overly cynical about America. To that I say: Guilty as charged! When some hipster wraps his brand-new McMuscle car around a power pole because his face was buried in a cell phone screen trying to ‘capture’ some Pokémon critter that exists in McLa-La Land, I fail to see how this society can function much longer.”
Jack Perry

“Politicians are like celebrities getting ready to release a new album or film:
When you hate them they win.
When you love them, they win.
When you fear them, they win.
When you praise them, they win.
When you spread lies about them, they win.
When you tell the truth about them, they win.
As long as you believe they are the primary ones worth talking about, they win.”
T.K. Coleman

“The more we exist outside the system, the more creative we are.”
Beatrice Wood