Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"All of the CIA’s propaganda can be turned against the agency. 9/11 was due to CIA failure, and to nothing else. Putin’s theft of the US presidential election was due to CIA failure, and to nothing else. All the bombings in France, UK, and Germany are due to intelligence failings, and to nothing else, as is the Boston Marathon bombing and every other alleged 'terror event.'
There is no reason for Trump to tolerate spurious charges against him by the CIA. At best the CIA is incompetent. At worst the agency is complicit in, or organizer of, terrorist events."
Paul Craig Roberts

"In times of war, the pack must swarm in tandem; the herd must stampede in unison. In order for a collective to work coherently and deliberately toward a single war effort, it needs not only regimentation, but leadership. So people under siege seek a leader of the pack, a shepherd of the flock. This leadership is sought in the government."
Dan Sanchez

"There is a valid reason for everything an animal does. You cannot say that for the government. Animals don’t run out and kill people over foreign policy or ideology. They haven’t got one. I would rather live amongst hundreds of wild animals than near one bureaucrat. Because it would be easier to relax."
Jack Perry

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Self-controlling individuals pursue happiness by using their own knowledge to achieve their own ends. Those who pursue happiness may not always achieve it, but when someone does, it is his or her achievement, which is something that slaves, serfs, subordinates, subjects, and those subjected to the coercive will of others cannot say."
Tom G. Palmer

"The thorny issue of immigration, rife with very real externalities and distorted by 'public property,' calls for market order. There is a market for immigration, just as there is a market for security. Open borders advocates ignore the in-group preferences of the marketplace, just as they ignore the tremendous externalities caused by sudden influxes of migrants. The real question is not whether borders are open or restricted, but rather who decides? When someone asks for the libertarian position on immigration, my response is that libertarians want as much or as little immigration as the market demands."
Jeff Deist

"There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures…. it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship pervasive…. Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."
Professor Neil Postman

"When one studies the history of money, one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.
This can be explained only by the myth (that the government prerogative was necessary) becoming so firmly established that it did not occur even to the professional students of these matters (for a long time including the present writer!) ever to question it. But once the validity of the established doctrine is doubted its foundation is rapidly seen to be fragile."
Friedrich Hayek

"I know better ways to live among other people. I know how to improve individual safety, and thus 'public safety.' I know how to end inflation. I know how to protect property rights and end the 'immigration' conniptions. These things are NOT rocket science, and it has taken hundreds of years of ignorance on top of stubbornness on top of stupidity to make them seem hard. In other words, it has taken statism."
Kent McManigal

"Politicians are violence brokers and nothing more. There is no such thing as a statesman, a mythic fiction foisted by court historians through the ages to champion their country’s psychopaths in suit and tie."
Bill Buppert

"Does anyone seriously believe that if taxes cease to be coercively collected by a bloated statist criminal gang calling itself 'government' that everything would just simply dry up and blow away? Isn’t it eminently likely that without taxes new ways of voluntarily financing things that people actually want will be found?"
Garry Reed

"Like clockwork every eight years, America’s short-term memory forces us to relive the disillusioning nightmare of déjà vu all over again… that the new boss turns out to be same as the old boss simply because he’s never been the boss to begin with. The figurehead occupying the White House has always taken his marching orders directly from the ruling elite. Perhaps the globalist design to dumb down Americans has been so successful that we may never learn this critical history lesson, however harsh the consequences."
Joachim Hagopian

"The US is far too big; it’s actually a good idea to break it up. So the fact that these fissures are showing, I think it is telling the truth…So the people who want to live in a Communist society, more power to them, go right ahead just don’t have anything to do with me and the people I care about; the businesses and taxpayers, and so forth who are the actual producers in American society. So I think they just should go their own way. The rest of us should just ignore them to the extent we can. If they are violent, if they are breaking store windows and beating up people in a typical Communist fashion, then, of course, there has to be a defensive reaction."
Lew Rockwell