Sunday, December 18, 2011

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.”
Robert Higgs

“I don’t have to prove freedom to be true; I only have to prove slavery to be false.”
Chris Dates

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness."
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness."
Vicktor Frankl

"When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence."
Gary Lloyd

“The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished...The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be...”
Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.)

“In the coming New Year, 2012, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day. This is an ironic juxtaposition of events. One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication. The other involves a groundhog.”
David Galland

“To me, to be a citizen of a country means you belong to that country, which means the country – really, the government, or the community as a collective – owns the individual within the territory. Citizenship cancels out self-ownership as well as any notion of private property ownership. One of your most important aspects of private property is your own life. The individual’s most important private property is one’s own person, labor and what one honestly acquires through voluntary trade. But what the statist conservatives want, and what most people seem to want, unfortunately, is for the collective of the territory to seize ownership and control of the entire territory and all property, capital and resources within it. That includes the people themselves.”
Scott Lazarowitz

“Respecting the inviolability of the boundaries that enclose our neighbors’ property claims accords them our respect for the autonomy that is essential to any meaningful form of individual expression. In acknowledging one another’s realms of unimpeded activity, we not only confirm our sense of their self-justifying existence but, in so doing, dissolve the barriers of distrust that separate us. Only in a condition of such mutual respect can we expect to find a reasonable basis for social harmony.”
Butler Shaffer

“American presidential candidates generally fall into three categories. Those who are obviously incompetent. Those who are scalawags. And those who are jackasses. The job of the voters is to choose the defect most suited to the time.”
Bill Bonner
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From the Darkness:
“[Under competition] businesses are forced to cut every corner, cheapen every product, cut out every service, lay people off, cut people's wages while adding hours, gut benefits … and probably go under anyway because when every business does the same 99 percent of us can't afford to buy or do things anymore.”
Dave Johnson

"Our strong presence in the Middle East endures. And the United States will never waiver in the defense of our allies, our partners and our interests."
B. Obama [Translated: “Still more wars on the way!”]

"We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond."
B. Obama, audacious enough to ask for the return of his drone that was spying on Iran

"Let's get beyond the anger."
Cameron Munter, US Ambassador in Pakistan, asking Pakistanis to forget and move on after the November 26 attack by US drones that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers

"We need election systems that are free from fraud, discrimination and partisan influence — and that are more, not less, accessible to the citizens of this country."
Attorney General Eric Holder [This from a man that run guns to the Mexican drug cartels…..and lies about it.]

“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it [Iranian captured US surveillance drone] had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone.”
Dick Cheney, also looking to create more death and destruction to glorify the state

"Eight years from now is a death sentence on Africa, told me. For every one-degree celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level."
Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Friends of the Earth International

“I’m sure that the [Ron] Paulistas will find a way to claim that their man has been right about everything, even though his predictions have been all wrong. But he really has built his political career around the notion that he’s an expert in a subject about which he actually understands nothing.”
Paul Krugman

"To be sure, the cost was high — in blood and treasure for the United States and for the Iraqi people. But those lives were not lost in vain: They gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq."
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, at a ceremony in Baghdad marking the second “end” of the Iraq War

“There's a reason our military is the most respected institution in America. They don't see themselves or each other as Democrats first or Republicans first. They see themselves as Americans first.
For all our differences and disagreements, they remind us that we are all a part of something bigger, that we are one nation and one people."
B. Obama [Hiel!]

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