Sunday, December 11, 2011

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
From the Nuremberg Tribunal’s Final Judgment

“What's the great need for a monopoly state that may simply end up being a vehicle for some few persons in power to suppress minorities? Obviously those who feel they can win power and rule will want the single-government outcome, and that's all the more reason to avoid it as an institutional structure for a society that has divisions (and every society has them) that matter and that really is not one society for many practical purposes and according to the subjective values of many persons and groups. The identification of disparate persons as one society and the further identification of that single society as the ground for a single government and state are at fault here, in my opinion. These false presumptions then are used to rationalize the domination of a few over everyone else, which seems to be the human drive that needs to be mitigated, not given more ground to expand.”
Micheal S.Rozeff

“It's clear the so-called government and it's plethora of bloated agencies are not there to help you, but to manage, seduce, suppress, subjugate and control you. Yet they convince you otherwise to keep you dependent and upside down and backwards while telling you everything's on the up and up.
Their fundamental technique is trauma-based mind control and cognitive dissonance. Keep affronting your senses with violent images and then reversing your sense of right and wrong and telling you white is black and black is white long enough and you'll finally give in.”
Zen Gardner

“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly, that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
Etienne de la Boetie

“We still cling to the myth that the state virtuously declines to exert its monopoly on coercion in order to respond to its own institutional incentives. Whether we recognize it or not, however, the state does — consciously or otherwise — serve the oligarchs orbiting around its center of gravity, around the headspring of privilege created by authority.
In doing so, allotting favors to the ruling class, the state produces imbalances that represent the difference between labor-saving, streamlined economies of free decisions, and the rigid, inflexible economies of today. In short, widespread corruption and widespread insolvency are natural companions.”
David S. D'Amato

“Soldiers are meant to be killed, and politicians are meant to be bought.”
Russell Longcore

“Far from protecting us, the government has now spent more than a century busily making enemies for Americans around the globe. Some protection! If the government were a private security guard, we would have fired him in 1898 and never purchased his trigger-happy services again. Americans desperately need to clarify a basic distinction: protecting the just rights of Americans here in America and exercising a globegirdling hegemony over other people are two different things.”
Robert Higgs

“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
Henry David Thoreau

“To wield power over an individual’s ability to choose is the same as wielding power over his body. It is the power of choice that makes us who we are. The body is the vehicle for free choice, and when the individual’s ability to freely choose is coercively forced, then the individual has become nothing more than an organic robot. An individual’s individuality spawns from the choices he makes; it is what makes up his personality. To remove the decision making from a person because you think he is too stupid or too selfish to decide for himself is to remove the very thing that makes him human.”
Chris Dates

“[The average man] is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.”
H.L. Mencken

“If ‘war is the health of the state,’ as Randolph Bourne wrote, then conservatives are the health of war.”
Joel Poindexter
********************************************************************************
From the Darkness:
"The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, ‘See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn't getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.’ ... And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem."
Danielle Pletka, head of foreign policy at the American Enterprise Institute

“Proper procedures were followed.”
A unnamed TSA spokesman, after an 85 year old woman complained about being strip searched at Kennedy Airport

"[T]here is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. 'The market will take care of everything,' they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes--especially for the wealthy--our economy will grow stronger.
Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked."
B. Obama

"In the United States, we don't much govern at gunpoint. We require willing ... participation.”
Judge James Zagel while sentencing Illinois’ former Thief-in-Chief Rod Blagojevich, to 14 years in prison

"We're in this economic moment coming out of a severe financial crisis, almost slipped into a great depression, inequality's been rising … the middle class is getting squeezed. There's a sense that the same rules don't apply for the people working hard out there in America and the people at the top."
B. Obama [“...the people at the top?” You mean like your Wall Street buddies who give you millions in campaign bribes?]

"I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date. …(I) believed that (MF Global's) investments in short-term European debt securities were prudent."
Former Wall Street high-flyer and Democratic politician Jon Corzine, telling US lawmakers he did not know what happened to an estimated $1.2 billion that disappeared from the accounts of now bankrupt broker MF Global.

"Those of you that will be 21 by November the 12th, I ask for your support and your vote.”
Rick Perry, seemingly not interested in the votes of 18-20 year olds

"Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab community, and they had the chance to go many places."
Newt Gingrich [Gingrich commits cultural genocide without firing a shot. Why do any group of people have to align themselves with a state to be recognized?]

"We want to work with the Senate to ensure our counterterrorism professionals have the tools and flexibility they need to keep America safe."
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor looking for more abolition of individual rights

"The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) strives to provide the highest level of security while ensuring that all passengers are treated with dignity and respect. TSA has programs in place for the screening of people with all types of disabilities and medical conditions and their associated equipment."
Statement from the TSA claiming that it is planning its own advocacy service to immediately act on complaints by passengers over security screenings.
[So now strip searching old ladies is a “program.”]

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