Saturday, December 24, 2016

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"What the ruling political elites and their mainstream media shills fear is a wide-open, chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas.
They fear this so profoundly because they all know, somewhere in their hearts and minds, that their narrative is bankrupt, and that it no longer explains the world around us. It has failed, and this failure is now self-evident.
The mainstream media has faithfully promoted a neoliberal, neoconservative, Keynesian narrative that has failed to produce the expected results. No wonder trust in the mainstream media has declined sharply in the past few years."
Charles Hugh Smith

“'Greed' is ‘reprehensible acquisitiveness’ and the beauty of capitalism is that the market speaks louder than government dictates or ‘greedy capitalists.’ When the government says, ‘I’m here to help you,’ it’s time to hold onto your wallets. With capitalism, it’s your choice. Greed doesn’t work; markets do."
Peter Lorenzi

"Even if America stands for freedom and possesses exceptional power, we have no obligation to free other peoples whom we consider unfree, using force unilaterally or not using it. There is no such moral law that says ‘free other unfree people.’ There is no greatness or honor in trying. Under the Golden Rule, we do not expect or allow others to invade us and our country in attempts to free us as they see fit; therefore, we should not do that to them, even if we think they are unfree."
Michael Rozeff

"Like the trees in forests and the cells in living organisms, humans too are ‘intimately interconnected’ to each other. One such important way is through our markets, the mechanisms we’ve used for millennia to interact and trade our labors, goods, services, capital, technologies, discoveries, cultures, arts, music and rhythms, ideas, compassion. And, we humans also naturally respond to signals and incentives. And, also like those varying tree species, human individuals, and communities possess various skill sets and comparative advantages. Like the forest, trading on our diversification and specialization provides mutual benefit allowing us, individually and communally, to survive and prosper."
Marc Guttman

"You know you’re a statist when you contend that state punishment and threats is the only thing that keeps you from harming your family."
Bll Buppert

"I want to oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which one has to use later directly in life. The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible.
The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost."
Albert Einstein

"A great variety of special interests always understood that if they could capture the powers of government to back their schemes of enrichment and empowerment, they could make themselves better off at the expense of everyone else. So with the spread of ‘democracy,’ the plunder that had previously been confined to a much narrower set of plunderers was made much more comprehensive, giving rise to the real war of all against all. Of course, this ceaseless political war-making wreaks havoc with the creative forces that private individuals and organizations are exerting, and sometimes it overwhelms them completely, as during serious business contractions and great wars."
Robert Higgs

"We now have a political system which is nominally democratic but increasingly authoritarian. The Rule of Law has been defined down to finding a single federal lawyer to write a secret memo vindicating the president’s latest unpublished executive order."
James Bovard

"Democracy is war by other means. Superficially, it is waged with ballots instead of bullets. At the end of the day, those ballots become bullets. Elections load real guns and aim them at real people. If you disobey the commandments handed down by elected officials, beefy men with shaved heads and Ray-Ban sunglasses will come to take you away. If you resist them, hot lead will fly. Elections are scrambles for control over the service weapons that propel those rounds. In such contests, every faction is trying to point the gun barrels at someone else."
Dan Sanchez

"Everywhere you go, everyone is glued to their phones. If all the cell phones in America were suddenly turned off, I wager about 90% of the population would die of thirst and starvation sitting and staring into their cell phones, waiting for them to come back on."
Jack Perry

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