Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Attention Deficit Democracy begets Leviathan because rulers exploit people’s ignorance to seize more power over them. The contract between rulers and ruled is replaced by a blank check. And regardless of how many secrets the government keeps, the rulers still act like the people are liable for all the government’s abuses.”
James Bovard

“The American political tradition, beginning with that instrument of sedition called the Declaration of Independence, clearly distinguishes between government and lawful authority, making the former subordinate to the latter, which itself is vested in the people. That same literary product of irrational anti-government fanaticism also states unambiguously that there are times when defense of lawful authority requires that the people 'alter or abolish' the government ruling them.”
Will Grigg

“Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a ‘child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here.’ There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.”
Dana Visalli

“I think that people who feel ‘we need government’ have a mistaken notion of reality. They seem to feel that individuals are prone to be selfish, brutal, dishonest, and base, but putting a lot of these same individuals together into a group cancels out these bad traits and makes them to do the right thing. They seem to think that the evil is canceled out by the large numbers of people involved.
Bad people will always exist. It is foolish to allow them to establish, impose, and enforce rules on the rest of us. It is suicidal to allow them to claim legitimacy as they do so.”
Kent McManigal

“Libertarianism generally, and property rights specifically, are ‘about’ not infringing upon others. Politics is based directly and inexorably upon majority-based infringement! One cannot change this moral fact by becoming conversant in the writings of Aristotle or Ayn Rand or expert in every facet of Austrian economics. Government is force, ipso facto controlling it orthogonal to libertarian law.”
Wilt Alston

"The anarchist approach to politics is oblique to either left or right wing statism and to minarchist/statist libertarianism. Within the context of the state, the anarchist may prefer one set of policies to another for various reasons, but always with the understanding that something fundamentally unjust (the state is based in violence) and also nonsensical (the state is a social fiction) is going on."
Anna O. Morgenstern

“Wannabe-rulers and petty authoritarians who attack civilians to further their political goals are exhibiting the same behavior, operating from the same premises. Modern terrorism is just small-scale statecraft. Osama Bin Laden is just Hillary Clinton with a different set of resources to work with.”
Darian Worden

“In assigning human ethics and human empathy to the inhuman bureaucratic state, we the people are faced with a choice. We may either believe the ruling-class fantasy being foisted upon us daily, willfully ignoring ample evidence to the contrary, or we may honestly reject anthropomorphism of the state, and understand it simply as a prescient American President once did, as fire and force.”
Karen Kwiatkowski and Walter Block

“If one can successfully illustrate the absurdity of an ‘occasional’ or strictly historical right to secede, a rational person must then either approve of the right of secession for people at the current moment or should begin clamoring for world government. They cannot reasonably believe in the right of historical actors to secede but not of people now living, or those who will live in the future. They will then become secessionists or join their statist brethren in true and consistent form and openly embrace the philosophy of world government which they have been unknowingly espousing.”
Ross Kenyon

“What the man on the street seems to want is cheaper gasoline, free health care, food stamps, Social Security, wars and boondoggles. At least, that's what the evidence suggests. He wants protection from everything and a free lunch too.”
Bill Bonner

“What the state has done by increasingly insinuating its tentacles into every aspect of life is to completely corrupt society. Both the intended and unintended consequences are going to be ugly, because it blurs the morality of daily life. It's entirely perverse that defaulting on debts can even be considered as a good thing, and inversions like this are proliferating.”
Doug Casey

“….Individuals are either free to do anything peaceful or they are not. If politicians decide, we have arbitrary government. But government is force, and force is moral only in response to force.”
Sheldon Richman

"Statism is the national religion that causes neighbors to kill each other. A violent institution used by those in power to further centralize and concentrate their power justified through massive misinformation campaigns and scare tactics in public schools and the talking heads in the mainstream media. Statism turns the only rational species on earth into unthinking sheep."
Pete Eyre

“The pentagon uses twice as much oil as the entire nation of Ireland. It sends soldiers in oil-burning airplanes to places of no apparent importance where they drive around in oil-burning machines for no apparent reason.”
Bill Bonner

“It's a dog and pony show. What can he really do? If he wants to do something, let him get out there and pump some mud and cement into that hole.”
Billy Ward, homeowner, commenting on Obama’s photo-op on Louisiana’s oil soaked coast.

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From the Darkness:

“I have always rejected anarchism, not because I'm deaf to its objections to states - not at all - but because I am too pessimistic about human conduct to believe in the prospects for non-states.”
Michael Neumann, author of The Case Against Israel [And yet you will allow a few of those same, poor behaving humans rule you?]

“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas.”
From the US State Department’s America.gov web site.

“The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources and the gulf between developing countries and westerners living a bountiful ‘pie-in-the-sky’ existence must be addressed.
One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable. I think we have to find ways where we’re not having to scrap our effluent junk and are a really sustainable planet.”
Jeremy Irons

“You want to respond forcefully enough so that North Korea is deterred from doing it again, but you also don’t want to start a war.”
Victor Cha, senior adviser and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speaking about an appropriate “response” to North Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean ship. [You mean kick a hornet’s nest without getting stung? Instead, why not mind your own freaking business?]

“Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must — must — redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.
The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
Donald Berwick, Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Rand Paul believes in a strong national defense, opposes closing Guantanamo Bay, and believes that Iran is a serious threat….”

Text of Rand Paul campaign ad, March 2010

“Foreign terrorists do not deserve the protections of our Constitution. These thugs should stand before military tribunals and be kept off American soil.”
Rand Paul in a Nov. 19 release.

“No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous consistency.”
Ross Douthat

“Libertarianism itself is what's stupid here, not just [Rand] Paul. We should stop tip-toeing around this belief system like its adherents are the noble last remnants of a dying breed, still clinging to their ancient, proud ways. The libertarian who insists that the state has no place beyond basic night-watchman duties is like a teenager who, having been given a car, promptly starts demanding the right to stay out all night. Sometimes, someone else really is looking out for your best interests by saying no.”
Gabriel Winant

"We desperately need Congress to act -- to recognize the emergency for what it is. We have to keep hundreds of thousands of teachers teaching."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, supporting Obama’s plan to spend $23 billion to avert an estimated 100,000 or more school layoffs. [Hey, Teach- welcome to the real world!]

“This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.”
Hillary the War Wench, foaming at the mouth over the prospect of war.

"It has in recent years been essential for the federal deficit to increase as the economy has gone into recession and has been severely constrained by demand. And I cannot agree with those who suggest that it somehow threatens the future to provide truly temporary, high-bang-for-the-buck jobs and growth measures."
Larry Summers, President Obama's top economic policy moron.

"The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it's individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are."
Queen Hillary [So, I guess it follows that 100% taxation of everyone will create heaven on earth?]

“Because ultimately, if nations do not believe that what the United States is trying to ask them to do or making the case for them to do is in their interest, that’s a nonstarter. Some nations have expanded the definition of what’s in their interest.”

Hillary, the Bully Bitch [My, my- Her Highness seems to be feeling a bit bloody this week, is she not?]