Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Our well-intentioned great-grandparents didn’t mean to saddle anyone with trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities when they let Congress pass the Social Security Act of 1935, but that’s exactly what they did.    

So when gun control advocates insist they simply want commonsense measures imposed, or that 'nobody wants to take your guns,' the answer for many Americans is clear: we don’t believe you."

Jeff Deist

"My best suggestion is to argue with actions, not words. Live the life you deserve, the life that makes you a free individual. The government talks big and thumps its chest, but really they just make an example of a few people and the rest fall in line. Fly under the radar, refuse to engage with the divisive politics, and let people judge you by your actions and lifestyle."

Joe Jarvis

"There is an incentive problem with companies running prisons when their costs are paid by taxes. Their incentive is to extract more taxes. Their incentive is to stiffen laws so as to produce inmates. Their incentive is for costs of imprisonment to rise. These perverse incentives can be ended and reversed by companies that supply law enforcement competitively. If they supply imprisonment demanded by their customers, then they internalize the costs. They then have the incentive to control such costs. They have an incentive to supply rehabilitation and reduce time spent in prison."

Michael Rozeff

"Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward."

Soren Kierkegaard

"Unlike cousins from other species who depend upon an abundance of instincts to guide their behavior, we humans must rely upon our conscious and unconscious minds for direction in an uncertain and unpredictable world. We have a survival need for energized intelligence; but in a world in which virtually every facet of human action is dominated by political intervention, control, and dictate, the processes of intelligent thought are replaced by coercively-enforced whims and fantasies. Only individuals are capable of thought; groups of people are not. Civilizations are created by individuals; they are destroyed by collectives."

Butler Shaffer

"Repeated words or word phrases, like viruses, are biochemical organisms that cause an altered state of consciousness. It is electro-chemical pathology that numbs the senses, resulting in programmed thought patterns. 

With words and phrases like democracy, and others I call 'code words,' the elites who become the masters over the collective can get individuals to commit acts they wouldn’t normally commit. The individuals get the benefit of attributing those acts to the collective, thereby avoiding individual blame and responsibility.

This word manipulation subverts human individuality, the ego, into group consciousness. Indications are dependency on the group and dependency on authoritarianism. We see this with the clamor for 'federal gun laws' and all other manner of cries for liberty to be taken away in order to achieve the appearance of safety and peace."

Bob Livingston

"Today an American, or one in the important cities, cannot look himself or herself in the mirror unless they have ripped off some trusting or powerless person or persons. Judging by the carnage that Americans have inflicted in the 21st century alone on Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Pakistanis, Somalias, Serbians, and, by supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia, on Palestinians and Yemenis, Americans have ceased to consider others except as unexceptional and dispensable people, who can be driven into the ground without upsetting any American’s concept of right and wrong."

Paul Craig Roberts

"The time is fast approaching when we all must recognize that the U.S. is too big and too deeply divided along values and politics to ever really be one people. If we want to avoid civil-strife, self-determination is the only peaceful answer. A people has a right to make its own determination about what laws are useful to their society, even if they are considered by outsiders to be the wrong decision. After all, like individuals have the right to their own bad counsel, so a society is entitled to its own bad government."

Ryan Thorson

"Know this. The government is a death cult no matter how appealing the colored rags fluttering, the bad music playing and vapid stares by fellow Helots star-struck by the latest promises of loot in the land of milk and honey."

Bill Buppert