Saturday, June 17, 2017

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The abandonment of all human decency is the soul of military culture, and a needed abandonment. A pilot bombing Baghdad knows that he is splattering people, that they have done nothing to him or his, that he is leaving children screaming at what is left of Mommy with funny things coming out of her middle and gurgling. He knows this because it is impossible not to know what five-hundred-pound bombs do. But he does it anyway. He doesn’t care. If he did, he wouldn’t do it."
Fred Reed

"'We have to defend America!!!” From who? Come now. There is no nation on this planet that wants to conquer the United States. No one can afford to take on the debt."
Jack Perry

"This definition of freedom is fundamental. It means free people should be able to use their minds, bodies, and talents to advance their well-being (whether material, intellectual, or spiritual) as they see fit. It does not mean they can demand freedom from material want, or scarcity, or illness, or unhappiness, or unpleasantness generally. It does not mean anyone owes them housing, medical care, food, or a 'living wage.' It means, in sum, the freedom to be left alone. And this is precisely what the political class of all stripes cannot abide."
Jeff Deist

"Texas is a nation of laws and borders, and the multi-racial people of Texas expect that both be respected. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Sweden or Tijuana, you need to show deference and courtesy for the land you visit or want to call your home. But even with the issues caused by illegal immigration, I believe that there is more sympathy in Texas for an illegal alien trying to earn a living than there is with a violent politician trying to exploit them for political gain and the federal government they ally with."
Ryan Thorson

"Big business loves regulation, and the more complex the better.  Complex regulation kills off the little guy, the start-up.  Complex regulatory requirements drive up the cost of the product, which drives up revenue and margins.
Big business loves government-created markets which force consumers to buy products (that only big business can produce) that they would otherwise not want to buy.
Big business loves government programs, as big business does not then have to market and sell to millions of individual consumers but instead to a handful of bureaucrats."
Bionic Mosquito

"Even if friendly aliens landed on the roof of the White House and gave the government a cornucopia, they’d find some way to turn it into a nightmare. You’ve got to understand that government, and the people who work for it, are more interested in controlling people than controlling things. The problem is everybody’s thinking in terms of the government and the government’s problems. I’d rather solve problems that, say, Amazon, or Apple, or WalMart have. Those groups provide things that I want, and they don’t coerce or tax me like the government. People have to change their whole way of thinking about this.
Because the government, you’ve got to remember, has a life of its own. The problem is that it doesn’t survive by producing. It survives by taking things from its subjects."
Doug Casey

"The history of thought and ideas is a discourse carried on from generation to generation. The thinking of later ages grows out of the thinking of earlier ages. Without the aid of this stimulation, intellectual progress would have been impossible. The continuity of human evolution, sowing for the offspring and harvesting on land cleared and tilled by the ancestors, manifests itself also in the history of science and ideas. We have inherited from our forefathers not only a stock of products of various orders of goods which is the source of our material wealth; we have no less inherited ideas and thoughts, theories and technologies to which our thinking owes its productivity.
But thinking is always a manifestation of individuals."
Ludwig von Mises

"Climate alarmism is home to the Marxists of old who lost their cause when the Soviet Union fell and they needed a new vehicle to promote their utopian central planning ideology. But it’s also a cause embraced by the banksters, Wall Street types and multi-national corporations that stand to profit immensely off the money-laundering schemes involved in it.
The Paris accord in and of itself was based on false science: that CO2 emissions are causing temperatures to rise – the temperatures are not, and there is no evidence that the emissions do so – that there is some magical ideal global temperature that needs to be maintained and we know what that temperature is, and that by reducing said CO2 emissions the atmospheric levels of CO2 will drop and temperatures will stabilize."
Bob Livingston

"'Proud to be an American,” says one bumper sticker. 'One nation — indivisible,' says another. America was, of course, founded on the opposite principle… the idea that people were free to separate themselves from a parent government whenever they felt they had come of age. But no fraud, no matter how stupendous, is so obvious as to be detected by the average American. That is America’s great strength… or its most serious weakness."
Bill Bonner

"Teachers used to tell schools kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat."
Lew Rockwell

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