Sunday, December 17, 2017

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The FDD [Foundation for Defense of Democracies] has 'top experts on sanctions, illicit finance, nonproliferation, terrorism, human rights and Iran’s domestic power apparatus.' FDD constantly monitors Iran so that it can maintain the myth of its terrorism and badness. The assumption is always that the U.S. should or must interfere. The FDD should monitor the U.S. government. Would it not find incredible regions of badness permeating the entire enterprise, including those that FDD counts on to fight and sanction Iran? Would it not find amounts of badness that are a hundred times worse than what it finds regarding Iran? For that matter, the FDD should monitor Israel, England, Australia, and other stand-up democracies whom it lauds and claims to defend. What will it find if it’s honest but more badness?"
Michael Rozeff

"Conserving biodiversity should not be an end in itself; diversity can even be hazardous to human health. Infectious diseases are most prevalent and virulent in the most diverse tropical areas. Nobody donates to campaigns to save HIV, Ebola, malaria, dengue and yellow fever, but these are key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans, all of which are ostensibly endangered thanks to human interference."
Alexander Pyron

"Civil rights replaces a Creator, who endows certain inalienable rights on all men, with the State, i.e., with politicians and bureaucrats. As if that weren’t tyrannical enough, 'civil rights' empowers those thieving, power-hungry predators to pick and choose which freedoms they’ll give their subjects."
Becky Akers

"The permanence of the misery comes from the nature of politics, which is an endless struggle that, as many mad ideologists in power have demonstrated all too well, can be terminated only by death. Politics is, among other things, a war that cannot be won unless all one’s ideological opponents are slaughtered and their ideas somehow suppressed so deeply that they too have been destroyed. This latter, however, is a result that even the most ruthless ideologue in the political saddle is unlikely to achieve. As the saying goes, you can’t kill an idea. Even if you kill everyone who now embraces an idea, the idea itself lies dormant, waiting for someone to rediscover and embrace it in the future.
'The personal is political,' if taken in the sense that everything about a person must be forced into the Procrustean Bed of an ideology, guarantees a life of bleak, endless, and futile struggle, which is all the more tragic because it was never necessary or wise in the first place."
Robert Higgs

"Collectivists, regardless of what other labels they use to identify themselves, have certain rules that they consistently follow in order to maintain power. One of those rules is that the collective is indivisible. They might pontificate endlessly about their superior democratic ideals, but when some people vote to leave en masse, either in polling booths or with their feet, the mask of benevolence always comes off and the true monster behind collectivism is revealed."
Bob Livingston

"What can it mean to say that America (or anything) is an idea or concept or 'proposition?'  An idea is an intangible or incorporeal sort of thing.  Ideas, in other words, are without bodies, nonphysical.  They are without borders.  In principle, then, any given idea can be discovered and, hence, endorsed by anyone, irrespectively of culture or history.  One may become consciously aware of an idea at a specific juncture and courtesy of culturally and historically-specific circumstances; but the idea itself, considered as an idea, needn’t owe anything to the contingencies of space and time.
An idea, inasmuch as it is thought to transcend all civilizational differences, is universal."
Jack Kerwick

"Unfortunately, in our current age of envy there are many people who actually believe that everyone should be protected from failure.  They do not understand that in a free society, people must be allowed to fail, because when you take away the right to fail, you also take away creativity and resourcefulness.  If no one ever took risks, nothing would ever be created.  Just as death is a part of life, so, too, is failure."
Robert Ringer

"The solution for America?  Secession.  Take the election map from last year, by county.  Let’s start with that.  There is no other peaceful solution.
In the meantime, if the kooks on the far left and the kooks on the far right want to fight it out, I have a solution that will satisfy the kooks and me: organize the next protest in an area within two miles of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  There are so relatively few of you that I think you will all fit in this space.  Bring death and destruction to everything within your path – re-enact Sherman’s march.
If you happen to catch a few liberal arts professors at every college and university while you are on your way between your hometown and DC for this showdown, I won’t complain."
Bionic Mosquito

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
William Boetcker

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