Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Emotional responses are gradually crowding out fact and evidence based reason. Truth is losing its connection to objectivity and is becoming agenda based. If it serves the agenda, and agendas are increasingly emotion based, it is truth. Many can no longer comprehend the content of what they read. Words become like a bullfighter’s red cape. They set off emotions, not thought. Depending on how people have been programmed by their education, indoctrination, and value inculcation, they have emotive responses. One consequence is that discussion is replaced by denunciation."

Paul Craig Roberts

"The death squads and concentration camps of history were never staffed by rebels and dissidents. They were were run by those who followed the rules."

Etienne de La Boetie 

"Everything is a lie.

Everything.  Out of the mouths of politicians, news reporters, journalists, thought leaders in sports and entertainment.  Well, not everything.  On the rare occasion we hear some truth from any of these, they are shut down and ostracized.

Everything we are taught about history is a lie.  Not a little lie, like George-Washington-cut-down-the-cherry-tree lie; big lies – lies that have resulted in the deaths of millions and the cost of trillions.  The dead can be considered the trophies in the game rooms of the liars and the sacrifices of a worshipful population; the cost is going into the pockets of the same liars.   Whenever someone sticks his head up and says “wait, that isn’t true,” he is labeled a conspiracy theorist – before being shut down and ostracized.

Do you want to succeed by the standards of this world?  Be a champion of the biggest lie.  Do you want to survive?  Don’t openly challenge any of the lies.

Do you want to do righteous work?  Speak truthfully."

Bionic Mosquito

"Might does not make right. Laws made by governments do not define justice. If they did, tyrants and tyrannical governments could declare all their crimes as both legal and just. A free people has other independent standards of justice. A free people holds government to account according to these standards.

The term social justice is correctly defined as justice in the public realm, that is, freedom from violence initiated by a government against innocent persons. Violence initiated in the private realm by persons privately are correctly termed crimes and torts. Such private violence is not social injustice."

Michael Rozeff

"The use of force backed by the threat of violence is the bedrock upon which all government programs are built. Their very existence relies on compelling citizens to pay their taxes lest they be punished for their resistance. And to be clear, such threats are not leveled against the perpetrators of any crime, but rather against innocent victims who have aggressed against no one.

By contrast, private charity programs rely on peaceful, voluntary donations for their existence. Donors are free to refrain from turning over their money to an organization which they object to the goods or services being provided, or feel the organization is not effectively using funds to benefit those in need.

Contrast that with how the government would react if you decided to stop paying taxes because you don’t like the services it offers and provides in return. Agents of the government would descend upon you and threaten fines and imprisonment — resorting to physical assault if necessary — if you didn’t obey.

So, without you having threatened or aggressed against anyone, but merely by boycotting the submission of your property (via taxes) to the government, this organization would not stop short of invading your property and initiating violence against you."

Bradley Thomas

"The only thing valid about it is that each individual human being is a unique intersection of varying attitude, aspirations, and aptitudes on a variety of subjects, issues, skills etc. I am amused at the intersectional cannibalism emerging from the myriad factions of mental illness parading as political discourse that seem to teem on the intellectual plains of the left-wing culture. I am convinced daycare and two working parents have caused trauma or irreversible damage to most children that makes them vulnerable to the deadly swansong of government supremacism.

But remember, the left always pretended they opposed McCarthy on principle, when in reality they were only upset that it was their idols being blasphemed. Now that Woke Leftism has the cultural whip hand, they are gleeful at the prospect of enforcing their own blasphemy laws and dealing out McCarthy’s tactics to their enemies in triplicate."

Bill Buppert

"Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of duty not exacted by compulsion, but the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name."

Friedrich A. Hayek

"I’m pushing against a cultural dogma that’s been mainstream doctrine for generations, but I really find all this blather about adventure and the indomitable human spirit of exploration quite tedious and idiotic when it comes to space colonization. We’ve got creatures swimming in our own oceans with brains many times larger than our own, and we’re killing them all off before we’ve even developed any kind of real theory about what they’re doing with all that extra gray matter. There are parts of the moon that are better explored than vast expanses of our own seas. We don’t even know what consciousness is, and science is largely uninterested in answering this question. I don’t believe the spirit of exploration and adventure is what’s driving our longing to break for the stars. I think it’s nothing but garden variety escapism."

Caitlin Johnstone

"Money is not a magic wand that governments can wield to summon economic growth. It is a measuring stick, or a clock. The way to measure valuations across time and space is not in currencies and price indices but in time-prices: calculating the real price of anything by the amount of time it takes to earn the money to buy it. Real wages are measured not in dollars and cents that can be manipulated – but in immutable hours and minutes."

George Gilder

"Disarmament comes via democracy. As long as we defend democracy, we are for gun control whether we are conscious of it or not.

What, pray-tell, caused the great loss of freedom of the American people? Democracy, of course. Democracy is the American version of National Socialism.

Passive words like democracy disarm the mind, and then it is only a matter of time before you volunteer to hand over your guns. 'To keep and bear arms' is the opposite of democracy."

Bob Livingston

"We are not a nation of ethnicity, religion, geography, or even of history. All we have are our principles. And the most important one is the freedom to say what we want without grievous consequences. 

America’s Overton Window should be wider than anywhere else on Earth, and that is an absolute fact."

Isaac Simpson

"Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The Left warns us that if we don’t have leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans, big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The Right warns that in the absence of leviathan, society will collapse in cesspools of immorality lorded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion.

The goal of both the Left and Right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn’t matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality."

Lew Rockwell

"Why shouldn’t you ever surrender your guns?  Quite simple, really.  They are the main line of defence for individual liberty in the world.  Anyone who wants to take away your guns wants you to be a victim of crime, either by street criminals or by the government or by both.  Victim disarmament is inexcusable, unjustiable, and despicable.  No one who ever says anything in favour of disarming people has any good intentions, and such people should be, at least, ostracised."

Jim Davidson

"We are getting ever closer to the finality of sanity as we have known it, and a continued collective fall from grace will necessarily be the death knell of our society. This truism is ignored by most, but truth is our only salvation. Truth can defeat deceit, but only if there is enough courage left to accept it."

Gary D. Barnett

"The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient."

Ludwig von Mises