Saturday, August 26, 2017

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The cry will go out to destroy Mt. Rushmore, because all 4 presidents depicted there were racists — were. Dogmatic cultural cleansing is gaining popularity. But for these men, those were the times. Those were the currents of thought that were prevalent. It’s demanding too much after the fact to create a sanitized history. Removing memorials that elicit all sorts of thoughts and feelings, for and against, disrespects the experiences of the past that belong to everyone in the country in memory. This disrespects the people of the past who erected these memorials. Wrong or right, they lived according to their lights and darknesses. The destroyers act as if they have found and know the truth for all time and as if they know how to make it explicit to the eye and mind, but do they know that truth and do they know how to memorialize it? Do they have a right to destroy that which annoys them?"
Michael Rozeff

"In a winner takes all political world, elections are weapons. Unless and until we learn to reject politics as the overarching method for organizing society, hatred and fear of 'the other' will remain pervasive. Americans understand viscerally that government has far too much power over who wins and loses in our society, but haven’t fully grasped the degree to which the political class benefits from division. We still want to believe in grade-school notions of democracy and voting. 
People of goodwill don’t impose themselves on others politically any more than they do militarily. Libertarianism, with its goal of radically diminishing the scope of government and politics in our lives, offers a path to a more peaceful future. Only libertarians can claim the mantle of anti-authoritarianism, because only libertarians would deny government the power and size to become authoritarian. The political world isn’t working, so why do we insist on more politics to fix it?"
Jeff Deist

"Relying on the external authority feels safe because it is the status quo. It feels like freedom because we have endured mass brainwash telling us our slavery is freedom and democracy.
But freedom and happiness is only restored through self-reliance and acting on our own judgment. Self-sufficiency and self-worth produces ultimate happiness and human liberty."
Bob Livingston

"To abstain from all forms of unsustainable, life-destroying degeneracy these days is to be a revolutionary. Moderation is the new counterculture."
Chris Campbell

"It is disheartening to see so many American elites, privileged in wealth and position within the media and/or government be so completely of one, unthinking mind.  They all have braces on their brains (Auntie Mame).  So afraid to buck the rigid mindset of their peers, they have become mouthpieces for their own group identity.  Do they believe the nonsense they spew?  Who knows? Those in Congress, all the Democrats and the anti-Trump Republicans essentially care about one thing and one thing only: getting re-elected.  They cannot afford to offend their donors or the lobbyists whose largesse fills their coffers.  So they trip over each other getting to the nearest camera to align themselves with whatever opinion they think will put them on the right side of the money people.  They are wrong so often."
Patricia McCarthy

"What about hate speech? The remedy for it is not to silence or censor it, because we need to know from whence it comes. The remedy is more speech — speech to challenge the hatred, speech to educate the haters, speech to expose their moral vacuity. More speech will create an atmosphere antithetical to hatred, and it will reinforce the right of every individual to pursue happiness, which is the American promise."
Andrew Napolitano

"The political left in the U.S. has gone 'full retard' as they say, and it is my belief that this is by design. The current behavior of SJW groups like Antifa is similar in numerous ways to the actions of Maoists in China during the Cultural Revolution. Maoists sought to erase all vestiges of China's 'imperialist history' in a wave of violence that resulted in the destruction of priceless pieces of Chinese historical significance, and the prosecution of political opponents."
Brandon Smith

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy

"Education has so deteriorated in the US that many people can no longer tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse or justification. In the US denunciation of an orchestrated hate object is a safer path for a writer than explanation. Truth is the casualty."
Paul Craig Roberts

"Trigger warnings, safe spaces, snowflakes and other accouterments of cultural Marxism stand in the way of human improvement, just as does economic Marxism undermines economic development and prosperity."
Walter Block

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