Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"When talking about past, present, or future wars, it is imperative to understand that being 'unwinnable' or 'winnable' is never a valid reason to justify going to war. To say that the country should not be in a war because it is unwinnable is to imply that if it were winnable, war would be warranted. How difficult is it to see the insanity of this thinking?"

Gary D. Barnett

"Socialism, democratic or otherwise, rides on the back of government force and violence. You can wrap it up in platitudes about a just and charitable society. You can sell it with promises of healthcare for all and social justice. You can promote it through pretty politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or grandfatherly figures like Bernie Sanders. But when they step aside and drop the veil, you will find a government agent pointing a gun at your head demanding obedience."

Mike Maharry

"The whole idea of hate crimes came out of the left, not out of the right. All of the mass murderers of recent history – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – were collectivists. Some will say Hitler was 'right wing,' which is ridiculous. He was a national socialist, with all the left’s views, adding a hatred for Jews, and a passion for nationalism.

That said, I don’t have particularly high regard for most of my fellow men once they form groups. Watch a political rally – something collectivists love – and it’s easy to see humans as just highly evolved chimpanzees. But I do like individual people. Leftists on the other hand say they love humanity in general, but they hate most people one-on-one."

Doug Casey

"The self-sufficiency, the civic independence, of the citizens of a republic, the idea that the citizens should support themselves economically, should be able to defend themselves,educate themselves, and discipline themselves, is closely connected to the idea of public virtue…A self governing people is simply too busy, as a rule, with the concerns of self-government to take much interest in other peoples’ business…A self-governing people generally abhors secrecy in government and rightly distrusts it. The only way, then, in which those intent upon…the expansion of their power over other peoples, can succeed is by diminishing the degree of self-government in their own society. They must persuade the self-governing people that there is too much self-government going around, that the people themselves simply are not smart enough or well-informed enough to deserve much say in such complicated matters as foreign policy…We hear it…every time an American President intones that 'politics stop at the water’s edge.' Of course, politics do not stop at the water’s edge unless we as a people are willing to surrender a vast amount of control over what the government does in military, foreign, economic, and intelligence affairs."

Samuel Francis

"In effect, education has become a brainwashing operation that is focused on discrediting 'whiteness creations' such as Western civilization and science. White heterosexual males are becoming objects of hatred. They are routinely discriminated against in university admissions and employment, in corporate employment and promotions, even in the military where, according to reports, promotions of white males are more or less on hold while race and gender balance is obtained.

Defense of 'whiteness' is impermissible. It is proof that one is a 'white supremicist.' Illogical double standards are everywhere obvious. Only whites can be guilty of 'hate speech' and 'hate crimes.' Yet white people can be called every name in the book and accused of all evil in the world. White DNA has been declared to be 'abominable.' As a student newspaper in Texas put it, the world will be liberated when white people die off. Indeed, white people 'shouldn’t exist'."

Paul Craig Roberts

"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles"

Jeff Cooper

"The whole world knows about the U.S. military industrial complex war machine and its pursuit of profits. But Americans tend to turn a blind eye. They still buy the propaganda that foreign wars are defending American 'freedoms.' The opposite is true.

Wars are not for our freedom or patriotism or democracy, as we are propagandized. Wars are to kill and to benefit big business — which reaps massive profits from the killing and sacrifice of young men (lambs) on all sides of combat — and for the banksters. And the U.S. is only a republic in name. We have some of the symbols — an electoral college, an elected House — but the Senate is now a national one controlled by moneyed interests and the Supreme Court is an all-powerful oligarchy that creates laws from thin air and strikes down those passed lawfully by the states and their people, which renders states powerless under an ever-expanding national government. And Congress is a feckless body that has ceded its authority to a dictatorial presidency and the alphabet soup federal agencies.

There is nothing republican about it. It's fascism and benevolent totalitarianism."

Bob Livingston

"What if I privately took the property of one American to give to another American to help him out? I’m guessing and hoping you’d call it theft and seek to jail me. When Congress does the same thing, it’s still theft. The only difference is that it’s legalized theft. However, legality alone does not establish morality. Slavery was legal; was it moral? Nazi, Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal, but were they moral?"

Walter Williams

"Democratic socialism is Marxism, and as Marxism it condemns private property. It condemns private ownership of capital, or the means of production, which is everything that goes into producing the goods that keep us alive, sheltered, clothed, healthy, fed, entertained, and other such values. In Marxism, everyone is called upon to work to the extent they can for a common good or a common pool of goods. One doesn’t work directly for oneself. One doesn’t try to progress, because it gets you nowhere. The more you try to build up your wealth, the more that it’s taken away from you.

Marxism promotes freeloading and shirking. Everyone has an incentive to let others do the work and to draw goods from the common pool. This never works to promote the production of goods. Starvation is the result. Marxism of any type always fails because its incentives are totally perverse."

Michael Rozeff

"Just for the sake of argument, we accepted critics' insistence that the rights of property are not absolute and must sometimes be curtailed, it would not follow that it is the state rather than the individual conscience that must do the curtailing.

State power to aggress against property owners inevitably encourages man's most predatory instincts, giving him an incentive to devote less time to satisfying the needs of his fellow men and more time to using the state's machinery of coercion to loot them for his own selfish benefit. To put this in language more familiar to our critics, the release of such instincts undermines the common good."

Tom Woods