Saturday, August 5, 2017

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"No doubt, how we speak to one another as fellow human beings is important. Indeed, culture and rhetoric are important. And, yes, though politics may often be downstream from culture, politics can also pollute the river of culture and discourse if allowed to become too pervasive. Immense political power has a way of rendering men suspicious and jealous of one another. And once politics comes to define a people through the power of a central state, all that is left is an impending battle over whose culture will be imposed through the power of that state."
Joey Clark

"As we saw in the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as in the hurried transformation of the seventeenth century Plymouth Colony, individuals are rarely driven by collective sentiments. Neither the cannibalistic premise of 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' nor the socialist mantra 'from each according his ability, to each according to his need,' can over-ride self-interested motivations. Nor will creative souls have the incentive to 'make America great again' other than as an unintended consequence of being creative for their own ends."
Butler Shaffer

"Liberty doesn’t mean ‘do what thou wilt.’ Liberty without the expectation of consequence is not liberty. It’s degeneracy.
Liberty is not a passport to hedonism. Although the biggest detractors of liberty, the hard Left, claim liberty is an excuse to be strictly self-serving, here’s the irony: The Left unabashedly perpetuates the self-serving, unsustainable behaviors it claims to detest."
Chris Campbell

"One of the great myths of our time is that the U.S. is a free market capitalist system. In reality, there is no free market in America and has not been for more than 150 years. A market with regulations and licensing and taxation and incentives and cronyism and restrictions on whom a business may or may not serve is in no way a free market."
Bob Livingston

"Liberty is not given; it is taken. Either the government will take it from you or you will take it from the government. It is time for Texans to perform their own asset seizure- independence. While Texas is under the federal yoke, the abuse will continue and the disregard of laws that were supposed to be chiseled in stone will remain guidelines to be disregarded by whoever holds the reigns of federal power."
Jesse Newberry

"One need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. One just has to accept the sanctity of the individual above all else."
Walter Williams

"The Union is headed for disaster. There is no stopping it. No amount of wishful thinking, or hoping it will go away, will change the Union’s appointment with fate. After all, what else could happen to a country in debt multiple times it’s GDP, with no hope of cutting spending, and especially with new entitlements being added and old obligations soon coming do. And if our leaders in Texas were honest, they would admit this, and start working towards the only solution that will help Texas escape the death-wish of Washington: independence."
Ryan Thorson

"Universalism provides the philosophical underpinnings for globalism, but globalism is not liberty: instead it threatens to create whole new levels of government. And universalism is not natural law; in fact it is often directly at odds with human nature and (true) human diversity."
Jeff Deist

"Decentralization is the more humane and polite thing to do. If we can’t see eye to eye, a peaceful divorce is preferable to a hostile marriage.
Family court is full of these stories. Every American gets it on a personal level, so why can’t it be expanded on a larger scale?"
Brion McClanahan

"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine."
Oscar Wilde

"When you have militarily stupid politicians listening to pathologically confident soldiers, trouble is likely. All of these people might reflect how seldom wars turn out as those starting them expect. Wars are always going to be quick and easy. Generals not infrequently advise against a war but, once it begins, they bark in unison. They seldom know what they are getting into."
Fred Reed

"Once the socialist plans are put in place, they inevitably fail.  Without capitalism’s market feedback mechanism that rewards good customer service with profits and penalizes poor service with losses, there is little incentive for efficiency.  Socialist price controls create nothing but chaos, usually by imposing prices so low that it is impossible for a farmer or a merchant to make a living.  The result, which is on display today in Venezuela, can be economically catastrophic.  If the world has learned anything from the history of socialism, it is that it is economic poison."
Tom Dilorenzo

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