Saturday, January 7, 2017

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:




"The State is a fiction that exists only in the minds of its believers. It is a superstition, an incoherent concept, because the many cannot act as one. Only individuals act. Individuals act similarly when they obey the same commandments. But it is still the individuals who are choosing such obedience."
Dan Sanchez

"Let the hoi polloi cast a meaningless vote, so they have the illusion of being in control. Instead of seeing themselves as subjects, they’ll think they’re 'we the people,' who actually have some say in what happens. That way they’ll pay their taxes willingly, enthusiastically sign on to aggressive wars on the other side of the world against people they know nothing about, and generally do as they’re told. Because it’s supposed to be patriotic. 'Democracy' is a much more effective scam for controlling the plebs than kingship or dictatorship."
Doug Casey

"This is who progressives are today: religious enforcers of an approved worldview based on an ever-shifting PC code. One thing is certain, and this is where so many libertarians go wrong: the overwhelming threat to liberty today is from the Left, not the Right. It’s frankly silly to pretend otherwise, much as we correctly insist that we are not conservatives. The existential threat to liberty is not posed by 5 skinhead idiots running around in the woods somewhere wearing bedsheets, it’s posed by millions of progressive authoritarians who are everywhere — like the one teaching civics at your kid’s school."
Jeff Deist

"The kind of 'freedom' that elections give us is the 'freedom' to determine who gets to plunder us: Plunderer A, or Plunderer B.  It is as though someone told the slaves in the mid 19th century that they would be 'free' if they were allowed to vote for who would have the job of slave plantation overseer: Overseer A, or Overseer B.  It would not matter, of course; they would still be slaves to their 'masters just as we taxpayers are still slaves to the state from January 1 until at least the end of April."
Tom Dilorenzo

"All men are created equal: it all sounded good on paper.  I have spent much of my life almost in the worship of the phrase; even at this moment, I struggle with questioning it.  Like many political theories, good on paper does not mean good in the real world."
Bionic Mosquito

"The net result of the Savior State dominating society and the economy is the rise of a pathological mindset of entitlement and resentment--the two are simply two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them. Once self-reliance has been lost, so too has self-confidence been lost, and the Savior State dependent--individual and corporation alike--soon distrusts their ability to function in an open market. This is a truly sad, self-destructive state of affairs, and deeply, tragically ironic. The calls for 'help' quickly lead to dependence on the Savior State, and that dependence quickly breeds complicity and silence in the face of repression and predation by the State and its corporate partners. In a very real sense, citizens relinquish their citizenship along with their self-reliance and self-worth once they accept dependence on the State."
Charles Hugh Smith

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Voltaire

"Someone shooting at you can be an innocent person. If a U.S. soldier travels halfway around the world to a country he has no business going to in the first place and invades, occupies, bombs, or takes sides in a civil war, then the natives who shoot at him are innocent. They may be guilty of many crimes, but aggressing against Americans or America is not one of them. In this case it is the U.S. soldier who is the aggressor."
Laurence Vance

"Libertarianism serves everyone equally except for one class of soulless humans: Those who want to use, control, manipulate, victimize, oppress and coerce others. Anyone who is not libertarian is authoritarian. There is no in-between."
Garry Reed

"The lesson liberals need to learn is that despite their arrogance, they do not have the power to alter reality."
Walter Williams

"Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint
Except what wisdom lays on evil men
Is evil."
William Cowper

"To hear the Democrats talking, you’d think it wasn’t them who continually badgered Reagan over his military spending. Which he allegedly did to counter the 'Soviet threat.' But here go the Democrats blathering on about 'the Russian threat' and Vladimir Putin. As if Putin went up to the UN, pounded his shoe on the podium, and swore to bury the United States under a heap of radioactive ash. All because their candidate lost the election. People used to say they weren’t willing to die in a nuclear war just because Reagan didn’t like the Soviets. Yeah? Well, I’m not willing to die in one because Hillary lost the election."
Jack Perry