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... after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill |
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-- Gen. George Washington to obese artillery commander Col. Henry Knox, about to cross the Delaware to surprise the Hessians and British late at night. Word of Washington's order to Knox spread among the troops, cheering and warming them that frigid night before the Battle of Trenton, the war's turning-point. |
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of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation." -- Camille Paglia |
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en route to the airport before their first Baghdad trip together |
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-- The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy |
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give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. -- Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941 |
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A speculator risks just 10% in anticipation of earning 100%." -- Doug Casey |
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Freedom's Nest |
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly
saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer,
is to have kept your soul alive."
-- Robert
Louis
Stevenson (1850-1895)
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"A lot of people out there pay good lip service to the idea of personal freedom … right up to the point that someone tries to do something that they don’t personally approve of." -- Neal Boortz
"A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police." -- Ludwig von Mises
"Freedom requires tolerance of foolishness. ... Without this tolerance for the freedom of others, no one's freedoms are secure." -- Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux
"The Golden Rules comes from REALITY. Anyone with even a room-temperature IQ can size up people who get along and people who don't and see clearly what's right and what isn't. Saying the Golden Rule derives only from religion or the supernatural cheapens it and relegates it to being an arbitrary matter of opinion." -- Rick Gaber
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein
“Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.” -- H.L. Mencken
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
"[O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader -- the barbarians enter Rome." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"A man on his owns knows that he is best advised to leave his dumbbell neighbors alone. But let him join a political party, and he fantasizes that he has the right and the power to tell everyone on the block what to do." -- Bill Bonner
"Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"[T]he most fundamental objection to draft registration is moral; [a] draft or draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending." and "[The draft] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state.... That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea." -- Ronald Reagan
"The ultimate test of a belief in free speech should be whether it can be extended to people you hate." -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Ethics is not a mystic fantasy -- nor a social convention -- nor a dispensible, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival -- not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life." -- Ayn Rand
"[I wonder] if we actually find advanced life on another planet whether they'll be as obsessed with their own genitals as we are." -- Albert Brooks
"If you support the war on drugs in its present form, then you're only paying lip-service to the defense of freedom, and you don't really grasp the concept of the sovereign individual human being." -- Neal Boortz
"People who are obsessed with what's legal usually have no concern about what's moral. They care only about what they can or cannot 'get away with,' not about doing what's right and feeling good about it." -- Rick Gaber
"American history has proven when people live in freedom the vast majority of sovereign individuals believe in, and practice, the golden rule." -- Rick Gaber
"In small towns as well as large, good people outnumber bad
people by 100 to 1. In big towns the 100 are nervous.
But in small towns, it's the one." -- Paul Harvey
"There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions." -- Dr. Milton Friedman, as interviewed in "Is America No. 1?" by John Stossel.
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Benevolence in public institutions has a short half-life no matter how noble its original intentions." -- Richard A. Epstein, Principles for a Free Society
"Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel-Prize-winning economist.
"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man." -- H. L. Mencken, The Impossible Mencken
"Why is it that any time government takes over something for a few years, it's assumed that people are too incompetent to do it for themselves?" -- Julian Sanchez
"If government had taken over the auto industry in 1920, today we'd all be driving Model-T cars -- and saying, 'If it weren't for the government, we'd have no cars at all.' " -- Harry Browne
"An individual who can rise above the social trends that sweep along his fellows so that he can observe their operation has an incalculable advantage over all those who do not." -- Robert R. Prechter, Jr.
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is
able to think things out for himself, without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos." -- H. L. Mencken, 1919
"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." -- Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens
"I appreciate how religion gives comfort to the sick, the
worried, the depressed, the anxious, the lonely. I also like
how it gives people a sense of community when the Rotary
Club falls down on the job. I can't stand arrogant,
self-righteous, unfeeling folks, especially militant
atheists. But that doesn't mean I believe every God-damned thing
in the Bible." -- Rick Gaber
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." -- Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)
"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it." -- John Quincy Adams
"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." -- James Madison, National Gazzette, 1792
"The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary." -- Judge Joseph Story, 1852
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -- Winston Churchill
"I am ready to meet my maker. Whether or not my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." - - Winston Churchill
"Perhaps the most important point of all is that government officials operate in a fog ... it is important to remember that the information that government has is often no better than what is available to private individuals." -- Arnold Kling
"In some professions, a large part of the time of first-rate people is spent countering the half-baked ideas of second-rate people and trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the disasters they create." -- Thomas Sowell
"Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen." -- Richard Mitchell
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct." -- Julian Sanchez
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal." -- F.A. Hayek
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime." -- Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights." -- Erwin N. Griswold
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." -- Gandhi
"Other than the gifts of God and Nature, that which is free is free only because someone else has paid for it." -- Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." -- J.L. "Jack" Gaber
“Nothing can be public where nothing is private.” -- Jean Bodin, Six Books of a Commonweale
"I am of the firm opinion that nobody's mind was ever polluted by too much knowledge." -- Ted Koppel
"Patience is what you need when you don't enjoy what you're doing." -- bonsai tree hobbyist Bob Hampel
"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time, is today." -- old Chinese proverb
"Sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators." -- Chris O'Connor, reviewing The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
"If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans." -- James Herriot
"We should be discussing principles, not making wholesale accusations with tendentious nicknames. Rational discussion is impossible if "left" and "right" are reduced to synonyms for good and evil. The essence of civility is the acknowledgment that even your enemy may have something to teach you." -- Joseph Sobran
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -- Henry David Thoreau
“Hyper-hyperbole. It’s massive!”-- article title in the UK newspaper The Observer, Feb. 27, 2000, criticizing news media which use exaggeration and even hysteria. “It’s apocalypse now as world boils over.” -- headline: same newspaper, same day. -- from THISsource
"Accurate reporting loses out to sensationalistic reporting every time. Thus we like to say that, at least when it comes to long term accuracy, no pundit survives contact with a historian. ... Editors also rely on the fact that most consumers of mass media news do not revisit old stories to see how accurate they were. Historians, however, do that all the time." -- Jim Dunnigan
"Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free....The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate"
“Any bit of nonsense can be computerized -- astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching -- but that doesn’t make the nonsense any more valid.” -- John Allen Paulos in his book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences
“Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!" -- Isaac Asimov in the tenth-anniversary issue of The Skeptical Inquirer
"Whenever the government causes a crisis, Congress and the president of the United States will almost surely give even more power and authority to the agency that is most responsible for the calamity." -- William L. Anderson
"Scratch the surface of an endemic problem ... and you invariably find a politician at the source." -- Simon Carr
"Trade is always beneficial to both parties -- trade never harms one party at the expense of the other." -- Laurence M. Vance
"Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." -- Ayn Rand
"Yet the foolish notion of one-worlders persists: Let the lion lie down with the lamb chop." -- P. J. O'Rourke
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." -- Bill Cosby
"Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism." -- Ayn Rand
"Minimum-wage laws are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of racists." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams, June 13, 2002
"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." -- Ayn Rand
"Some environmentalists assert that "species diversity" is beneficial to humans. Yet, environmentalists are among the staunchest opponents of genetic engineering, which has vast potential for creating new species." -- Glenn Woiceshyn
Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely." -- Mike Ruff
"Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.'' -- Abba Eban
"The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal." -- Peter Brimelow
"Our policy is simple: We are not going to betray our friends, reward the enemies of freedom, or permit fear and retreat to become American policies. ... None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It is weakness ... that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments." -- President Ronald Reagan
"Now’s not the time to go wobbly, George." -- Margaret Thatcher to George H.W. Bush, after Iraq invaded Kuwait
"'Solve' and 'problems' are not in the Constitution." -- Doug Newman
"The constitution did not contemplate that the government would do everything for everybody." -- Alan Ackerman
"If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing." -- Mel Thompson
"Ain't no right way to do the wrong thing." -- Rep. Dick Armey
"Life is too short for bad beer." -- Lyle Maryniak
"You can't hold on to what belongs to me and don't belong to you." -- Lyle Lovett, "Don't Touch My Hat"
| "There
can be no doubt of this:
"All America is divided into two classes,--the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with us until our women bear nothing but kings. "It
was through the Declaration of Independence that we
Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of
man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried
aristocracy. We had seen little men
artificially held up in high places, and great men
artificially held down in low places, and our own
justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to
human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every
man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find
his own level. By this very decree we
acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy,
saying, 'Let the best man win, whoever he
is.' Let the best man win! That is
America's word." -- Owen Wister, The
Virginian (1902) |
"Any stray mediocrity
rushes into print with plans to control the production of
mankind -- and ... no one questions his right to enforce his
plans by means of a gun." -- Ayn Rand,
"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Bad and discredited ideas, it seems, never die. Neither do they fade away. Instead, they keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla in the old Japanese movies." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men." -- Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us noble and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Celebrated Historian Paul Johnson
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906
"When Western countries in the past were as poor as Third World countries are today, these Western countries nevertheless had one big advantage: There was no large and influential class of the intelligentsia to impede their progress with unsubstantiated theories and counterproductive propaganda." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"If you wrote down on 5x7 index cards what the average American college student knows about economics, wadded those index cards up into one spit wad, and then shoved that spit wad up an ant's butt, it would rattle around in there like a BB in a boxcar." -- Neal Boortz
"Wealth may provoke envy, but it seldom provokes the truly venomous levels of resentment provoked by achievement. There is no surer way for a minority group to become hated than to enter a country as destitute immigrants and then, through long hours of hard work, rise to a level of prosperity above that of the indigenous population." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"If concern for human poverty and suffering were one's primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask : Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in sub-human misery? History and specifically the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the 19th century would give an immediate answer : capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance - and the key to capitalism is individual freedom." -- Ayn Rand, "Requiem for Man", Chapter 24 of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"Western civilization was the child and product of reason -- via ancient Greece. In all other ciivilizations, reason has always been the menial servant -- the handmaiden -- of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated -- imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals -- but still, dominated by reason. Youu may observe the results of that." -- Ayn Rand
Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely." -- Mike Ruff
"If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet, striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality." -- Tibor R. Machan in Private Rights and Public Illusions
"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." -- Tom Clancy on Kudlow and Cramer 9/2/03
"A welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out." -- Harry Browne
"...the question becomes, are you going to have everyone play by the same rules, or are you going to try to rectify the shortcomings, errors and failures of the entire cosmos? Because those things are wholly incompatible. If you're going to have people play by the same rules, that can be enforced with a minimum amount of interference with people's freedom. But if you're going to try to make the entire cosmos right and just, somebody has got to have an awful lot of power to impose what they think is right on an awful lot of other people. What we've seen, particularly in the 20th century, is that putting that much power in anyone's hands is enormously dangerous." -- Thomas Sowell, in an interviewin Salon11-10-99
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell
"Socialists do not merely want a welfare state, they absolutely must have one. They must have a grovelling dependent class from which to obtain their daily opiate: an hallucinogenic euphoria which comes from the delusion of being superior to, and more altruistic than, all others. They must have 'the poor, huddled masses' in much the same manner as vampires must have the blood of their victims." -- Edward Britton
"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy." -- John Derbyshire
"Dan Rather and hundreds of Marxist professors across America and Europe still don't understand how Reagan won the Cold War and died a national hero." -- Joe Scarborough
"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." -- Milton Friedman
"Today, in the Twenty-First Century, an age of jet aircraft, personal computers, wireless telecommunications, laser surgery, and incipient space travel, the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages." -- George Reisman
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." -- Thomas Sowell
"When will the
world wake up and realize that most politicians, especially in
the poorest countries of the world, are nothing more than
glorified gangsters who view government as simply a monopoly
on every form of compulsion and extortion to be perpetrated in
a specific geographical area? Why do you think the
largest amounts of 'foreign aid' extracted from the gullible
diplomats of wealthier countries wind up in those politicians'
pockets or Swiss bank accounts, despite all the
virtuous-sounding rhetoric?" -- Bert Rand
"This government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way." -- Henry David Thoreau in his essay, "Civil Disobedience"
"I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." -- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 12/20/1787
"I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer." -- Christopher Hitchens
"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer has over me is far less than that which the smallest functionary who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work." -- F. A. Hayek
"In truth the only way to reduce corruption in high places is to have less high places and which party is on top makes very little difference." -- Perry de Havilland
"The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state." -- Adam Michnik in Letters to a Young Contrarianby Christopher Hitchens
"The trick, of course, is that doing nothing in the public policy world allows much more to be done in the real world." -- Thomas Hazlett in the March, 1997 issue of Reason
"As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by a average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place." -- P.J. O'Rourke
"Elected leaders tend to believe they are responsible for a lot more than they really are. Like the little boy on his first plane trip 'helping' the plane by flapping his arms as the Boeing 747 begins to ascend, legislators often seem to believe that somehow they run the economy and solve lots of problems. ...The individual legislator must remember that the elixir for all that ills is economic growth. And economic growth is spurred by low taxes, limited regulation, equitable justice, and the ability to raise capital." -- Curt Leonard
"Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr.Thomas Sowell
"If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good. ... wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and ... the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor..." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich
"The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to assure the unhindered development of the individual." -- Albert Einstein
"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward." --Igor Sikorsky
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."-- Winston Churchill
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." -- Albert Einstein
"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities." -- Robert Nozick
"I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies." -- William F. Buckley Jr.
"Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes." -- Justice Learned Hand
"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the 'voluntary' sector; and...the 'public sector' is, in fact, the 'coercive' sector." -- Henry Hazlitt
"I believe in doing good, but I do NOT believe in forcing people to do good. THAT is WORSE than counter-productive; it turns a good into an evil, and it fosters resentment in people with the most intense life-force burning in their bellies. Besides, considering force as an option is usually a symptom of cynicism, ignorance, laziness and/or uncertainty on the part of its advocates; they don't believe in their missions strongly enough to get out and use honest persuasion and apply a realistic time-perspective." -- Rick Gaber
"Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth." -- Ken Schoolland
"The freedom of individuals to choose, without intrusive state regulation, is the prerequisite of morality. A coerced 'choice' does not reflect virtue, only compliance. In other words, you cannot force a person to be moral; you can only make them conform. True morality requires freedom and cannot exist without it." -- Wendy McElroy
"People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"No single person possesses anything close to the invisible collective knowledge held by the society as a whole." -- Jonah Goldberg, paraphrasing Friedrich Hayek, here
"The Many are Smarter than the Few" by James Surowiecki
"The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn't any practical way to put it together." -- John Hinderaker, as quoted in Time
"The power of the blogosphere (more properly, the internet) does not lie in a handful of bloggers with well-read sites. It resides in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of smart, well-informed, engaged readers who, collectively, have amazing knowledge and expertise in just about any area you can think of. What is new is the ability to bring together these disparate sources of knowledge, analyze them, and disseminate them in real time. We help to do this, but on a big, fast-breaking story like this one, the real impetus comes from our readers--a point we make in every interview we give." -- John Hinderaker
"Question: What does the stock market know that the mainstream media do not? Answer: almost everything." -- Larry Kudlow
"There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions." -- Dr. Milton Friedman, as interviewed in "Is America No. 1?" by John Stossel.
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." -- Murray N. Rothbard
"The most ridiculous, most despicable of all con artists are those pompous, condescending, so-called 'intellectuals' who purport to use the intellect to 'prove' the worthlessness of human intelligence -- and thereby, of the intellect. They don't even seem to realize all they're doing is admitting their own self-negation in the most pathetic way possible, in public, to all but the most gullible." -- Rick Gaber
"As the author of the
first
HMO bill ever to pass the Senate, I find this spreading
support for HMOs truly gratifying. Just a few years ago,
proponents of health maintenance organizations faced bitter
opposition from organized medicine. ... HMOs have proven
themselves again and again to be effective and efficient
mechanisms for delivering health care of the highest quality. HMOs
cut hospital utilization by an average of 20 to 25 percent
compared to the fee-for-service sector." -- Sen.
Edward
Kennedy, March 3, 1978
"Today, if your child has a rare congenital heart defect…your
[HMO] plan can condemn your child to second-rate care…" -- Sen.
Edward Kennedy,
May
15, 2001
"With a few rare exceptions, people in government are pathetic mediocrities who accumulate power over others as their neurotic substitute for their missing sense of self-worth, a sense which becomes ever-more elusive as time erodes any likelihood of their leaving government for the real world and creating new values which never existed before -- instead of stealing and redistributing old ones which did." -- Bert Rand
"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back." -- Leo Tolstoy
"The intelligentsia congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible. Yet they're still too damn ignorant to realize, or too damn stubborn to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code possible, nor that it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all. This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion." -- Rick Gaber
"The purpose of most Democrats is to invent the scariest justifications and rationalizations for the perpetual accumulation of power by politicians and bureaucrats. The purpose of most Republicans is to come up with the feeblest, most transparent and pathetic reasons to oppose them. The purpose of most mainstream journalists and columnists is to focus all attention to those just mentioned, and to make sure that no sensible, rational, Constitutional, moral or far-sighted opposition ever sees the light of day, or if it does, to present it only in the most bizarre, twisted and frightening way possible." -- Bert Rand
"So let me record my grateful acknowledgment that this government has never quartered a single soldier in my home. Whatever can be said about the rest of the Constitution, the Third Amendment is alive and well." -- Joseph Sobran
"The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education." -- Frédéric Bastiat
"The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental
movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the
biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about
it." -- P.J. O'Rourke
"There are just two things standing in between the American people
and their freedom: Democrats and Republicans." -- Joe
Seehusen
"He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own." -- Aesop
"A moderate is either someone who has no moral code of his own, or if he does, then he's someone who doesn't have the guts to take sides between good and evil." -- Rick Gaber
"Moral relativists are staunchly uncertain, adamantly indecisive, self-righteously impotent and defiantly irrelevant." -- Rick Gaber
"Hypocrisy is not the hobgoblin of enslavable minds so much as it is the hallmark of their would-be slavemasters." -- Rick Gaber
"Prosperity cannot be achieved without freedom, but freedom can be achieved without prosperity." -- Rick Gaber
"...in the much more virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy ... the creature ... does not desire the value: it desires the value's destruction."-- Ayn Rand
"The best thing you can do with your assets is to leave them to Warren Buffet (or someone with his abilities) because he will invest them much more efficiently than someone on the street, thereby creating lasting employment for the people of the world. " -- Nic Roets
"As property, honestly obtained, is best secured by an equality
of rights, so ill-gotten property depends for protection on a
monopoly of rights. He who has robbed another of his property,
will next endeavor to disarm him of his rights, to secure that
property; for when the robber becomes the legislator he believes
himself secure." -- Thomas Paine, Dissertations on First
Principles of Government
" In other words, 'Gun control' isn't just 'victim
disarmament'; more precisely, it is 'making the world
safe for control-freak politicians and bureaucrats (and,
yes, for criminals and gangs, too, by the way)'." --
Bert Rand
"The trouble with so-called 'sensible gun laws' is that they make absolutely no sense. The politicians who pass them are asking Americans to believe that a cunning serial killer will walk into a gun store, produce a valid ID, and buy a firearm that can be traced directly to him. The American people may be scared, but they're not scared senseless." -- George Getz
"Much of the American left fools itself that civilian firearms don't matter in the political power equation, but conservatives know better." -- Eric Raymond
"There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare." -- Harry Browne
"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- Eric Blair, aka George Orwell
"Anyone who thinks that government -- any government -- has the right to disarm its citizens is not a libertarian." -- David F. Nolan, Founder, Libertarian Party
"There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers." -- Ayn Rand
"Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval." -- W.A. Lewis
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." -- Thomas Jefferson
"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." -- Ayn Rand
"A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government." -- Lysander Spooner, 1867
"A clever theft was praiseworthy amongst the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst the Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale." -- Herbert Spencer
"Ethics is not a mystic fantasy -- nor a social convention -- nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival-- not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life." -- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
"That which is proper to each thing is by nature best and
most pleasant for it; for humans, therefore,
the life according to reason is best and most pleasant, since
reason more than anything else IS human.
This life therefore is also the happiest." -- Aristotle, The
Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Ch. 7
"People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost." -- Bertold Brecht
"The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside." -- Sam Harris
"Those of us who are fans of Ayn Rand have been saying that conservatives are no friends of freedom for a long time. There is simply no valid substitute for a rational, principled understanding of the philosophical basis of a free society. Religious faith won't do, tradition won't do, majoritarianism won't do, and pragmatism won't do." -- Paul Blair
 Milton Friedman, PhD, Nobel
Laureate, 1912-2006: Rest in Peace "Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." -- Milton Friedman THE BEST of all the SCANDALOUS BIRTHDAY PARTY REVELATIONS: "... regarding the Great Depression: You're right, we did it."-- what Federal Reserve Board Governor (now Chairman) Ben Bernanke finally said to Nobel Laureate Dr. Milton Friedman, at Milton's 90th birthday celebration, meaning that indeed, the Great Depression WAS caused by, AND prolonged by, THE GOVERNMENT, as Friedman had always said. [Financial Review, 12-9-2002] "If a government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, within five years they’d have a shortage of sand." -- Dr. Milton Friedman "There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions." -- Dr. Milton Friedman, as interviewed in "Is America No. 1?" by John Stossel "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel-Prize-winning economist "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." -- Dr. Milton Friedman "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned." -- Dr. Milton Friedman "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." -- Milton Friedman |
"Only the mediocre are always at
their best."-- Jean Giraudoux
"Learning is not
compulsory. Neither is survival." -- W.
Edwards Deming
"The future of human liberty ... means the
future of civilization." -- Henry
Hazlitt
"50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong." -- typically idiotic
old French
saying
"If 50 million people say a stupid
thing, it's still a stupid thing."-- David Severn
"Nothing happens until somebody sells something."-- an old
sales managers' admonition
"You want to see
multiculturalism in action? Look at Yugoslavia, at
Lebanon, at Sri Lanka, at Northern
Ireland, at
Azerbaijan, or wherever else group 'identity' has been
hyped." -- Thomas Sowell in Is
Reality
Optional?
"Education is a weapon,
whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at
whom it is aimed."-- Joseph Stalin
"The
Europeans sit and pout. What else can they do? ...
The real problem is their irrelevance." -- Charles
Krauthammer
"For those looking for
security, be forewarned that there's nothing more
insecure than a political promise."-- Harry Browne
"They that can give
up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."-- Benjamin Franklin
"Asking liberals where
wages and prices come from is like asking
six-year-olds where babies come from." -- Dr.
Thomas
Sowell
"Liberals seem to assume
that, if you don't believe in their particular
political solutions, then you don't really care about
the people
that they claim to want
to help." -- Dr. Thomas
Sowell
"Socialism, like the
ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the
distinction between government and society. As a
result of this,
every time we object
to a thing being done by government, the socialists
conclude that we object to its being done at all."
-- Bastiat
"Whenever you come across a screw-up
this big, you know the government is behind it." -- Ann
Coulter
"Most of
the 40-odd wars going on in the world right now are being
fought in the name of religion." -- Paul Harvey
"The Constitution does NOT stipulate any
"separation of church and state." What it DOES prohibit
is any law effecting 'an establishment
of religion.' This should include
the churchless new religions of dogmatic earth-worship,
government-worship and elitism. " -- Bert Rand
"I would
rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too
much liberty than to those attending
too
small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson to Archibald
Stuart, 1791.
"In my experience, those who profess
to believe in animal rights don't believe in human
rights." -- L.
Neil
Smith
"Sin lies only in hurting others
unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented
nonsense." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"Anyone who believes any 'Jewish conspiracy'
is even possible just doesn't get the
thousand-year-old joke that says if
you put12 Jews in a room, you come out with
13 different opinions." -- Fred Anders
"Pardon me
for saying so, my friend, but I think we're up to our ears
in killer gods." -- Edward Britton
"I've set my own rules to live by. The
first one is: 'Never believe ANYthing the government
says.' " -- George Carlin
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more
dangerous way of making decisions than by putting
those decisions
in the hands of people who pay no price for
being wrong." -- Thomas Sowell
"Most government most of the time
wreaks incredible destruction on people’s lives and is
completely
unaccountable for it." -- David
R.
Henderson
"Elected officials are no longer afraid of the
law or the people. The people are uneducated and believe
whatever
ABC, CBS, NBC tell them." -- Jerry
Jones
"Doing nothing in the public policy world
allows much more to be done in the real world."
-- Thomas
Hazlett
"I may not agree with what you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to say it."
-Voltaire, to Helvetius
"Everything the government touches turns
to crap." -- Ringo Starr
"To err is human, but it takes a politician
to really screw things up." -- Old
American Adage
"Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the
worship of jackals by jackasses." -- H.
L.
Mencken
"The government is the biggest
special-interest group there is." -- The Godfather
"Politicians, Like Bombers, Seldom See Their
Victims..." -- Donald Boudreaux
"Giving
money and power to the government is like giving
car keys
and whisky to teenage boys." -- P.J. O'Rourke
"I'm for a flat tax -- as long as the flat
rate is zero. The object is to get rid
of big government, not find a new way of
financing it." -- Harry
Browne
"No matter who you are or what you believe,
you have to understand
that some day the worst control-freaks among
your bitterest enemies
will control the federal government, and you
better have restored
effective, working constitutional limitations
on that government
before that time arrives." -- Rick Gaber
| "Reason
is the faculty which perceives, identifies and
integrates the material provided by man's senses.
Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory
means of knowledge.
"In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics. 'Renaissance' means 'rebirth.' Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason-- of man's mind. "In the light of what followed -- most particularly, in the light of the industrial revolution -- nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it was taken in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance has automatically converted everybody to rationality; far from it. It means only that so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle's Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to arouse men's hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their minds and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead." -- Ayn Rand, HERE |
| "Mysticism is insanity on a mission, often
involving missionaries." -- Bert Rand
"Those kinds of mystics who preach that killing and destruction are on a par with creativity and production are way beyond nuts -- they're freakin' screaming bizarros. If you've ever wondered what allows and enables pure evil, you have it right there: it's mysticism." -- Rick Gaber "Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive." -- Ayn Rand |
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