“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

~H.L. Mencken~

“The Power of Nightmares - Politics of Fear”

A Classic BBC Video Perspective

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

Notes on Virginia [1782]

“It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

Draft Kentucky Resolution [1798]

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?”

~George Washington~

Farewell Address [September 17, 1796]

“Avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

~George Washington~

Farewell Address [September 17, 1796]

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.”

~Noah Webster~

“An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution” [1787]

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“Democracy in America” [1835]

“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“Democracy in America [1835]

“It is therefore most especially in the present democratic times that the true friends of the liberty and the greatness of man ought constantly to be on the alert, to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times, no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“Democracy in America” [1835]

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

~William Casey~

Former CIA director, at his first staff meeting (1981)

“The truth is that the state must hide not only its wars but all of its activities. It hides its inflation. It hides the effects of its taxation and its protectionism. It fears anyone who draws the cause-and-effect connection between its activities and their deleterious consequences for the rest of us. It is the most destructive force in our world. Because that truth is so momentous, the state does everything possible to hide the smallest drop of blood.”

~Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.~

 “The Seen, the Unseen, and the Hidden
Costs of Statism” [July 28, 2008]

“Nothing alarms me more than the thought of an irrational person in the White House. I'm OK with stupid. I can live with venal. I can tolerate a womanizer, even a drunk, but a crazy person in command of our nuclear forces gives me the heebie-jeebies. Somebody who can't tell the difference between a nuclear-free Iran with no ICBMs and Russia with thousands of nuclear warheads sitting atop advanced intercontinental missiles has no business being allowed in the White House, even as a tourist.”

~Charley Reese~

Syndicated Columnist & Political Commentator

“Americans should remember that if it's a messiah or salvation they seek, neither is to be found in politics or in government.”

~Charley Reese~

Syndicated Columnist & Political Commentator

(SCROLL DOWN)

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

~Mahatma Gandhi~

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

“In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot.”

~Mark Twain~

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

~Marcus Aurelius~

“History is lies agreed upon.”

~Napoleon I~

“God cannot alter the past, though historians can.”

~Samuel Butler~

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

~George Orwell~

“All democracies turn into dictatorships, but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it is Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.”

~George Lucas~ Film Maker: Dark Victory – (April 23, 2002)

“Modern nationalism and collectivism have, by the restriction of migration, perhaps come nearest to the “servile state.” …Man can hardly be reduced more to a mere wheel in the clockwork of the national collectivist state that being deprived of his freedom to move.... Feeling that he belongs now to his nation, body and soul, he will be more easily subdued to the obedient state serf which nationalist and collectivist governments demand.”

~Wilhelm Röpke~ Economist

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

~ James Madison~ (1798)

“Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle. This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest. It is probable that scientists will discover some methods of defense against the atomic bomb. But this will not alter things, it will merely prolong for a short time the process of the complete destruction of civilization.”

~Ludwig von Mises~ Human Action

“..War memorials, while they pay homage to those who made ‘the ultimate sacrifice,’ dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

~Chris Hedges Author, International Columnist, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist

"Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace, the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State."

~ Randolph Bourne~ (1919)

"Is it not just possible that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece and Rome were demoralised by their contact with Asia?"

~ Richard Cobden~ (1850)

'When fascism comes to this country [America], it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

~Sinclair Lewis~

“Washington, D.C. is a place where delusions go to thrive.”

~Steve Chapman~ Columnist and editorial writer - The Chicago Tribune

"Any gang of politicos is like the eighth circle of Hell, but the American breed is ‘specially awful because they take it seriously and believe it matters."

~George MacDonald Fraser~ Author: "Flashman and the Redskins" (1982)

“It's important to understand that the cause of terrorism is political, and therefore there is no military solution. If killing terrorists were the solution, the Israelis wouldn't be enclosing themselves inside a wall and carrying guns all the time. Unless you solve the political problems that cause terrorism, you will never eliminate it.”

~Charley Reese~ Syndicated Columnist & Political Commentator

“The concept of nonintervention in foreign policy was never difficult for me to reach, although over the years it has grown on me to the point where I am convinced it is the key, most important issue that we have to deal with right now in a political sense.”

~Rep Ron Paul, M.D./OBGYN~ From his speech delivered at The Future of Freedom Foundation's 2007 conference "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties”

“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”

~William Ramsey Clark~

"I worship Christ who was the prince of peace, not pre-emptive war. A superpower like the United States should use all of its resources ... to promote peace.”

~Jimmy Carter~

“It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.”

~General Douglas MacArthur~

“If you take the profit out of war...there is no war. Today’s cowardly patriotism resides only within the perimeter of profit – and safety. If you require those calling loudest for war to fire the first shot, the guns remain silent.”

~Dr. James N. Herndon~

“No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“A hated government does not long survive.”

~Seneca~

"My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union." 

~Abraham Lincoln~ Lincoln explained the purpose of the war in a letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley (August 22, 1862)

"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. "

~Harold Pinter~ British Nobel Laureate, Playwright, Author

“After all, it is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.”
 

~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne~

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

~H. L. Mencken~

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

~H. L. Mencken~

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”

~Sir Peter Ustinov~

The enormous gap between what US leaders do...and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments...”

~Michael Parenti~

"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our media is -- I wouldn't even say corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us anything that the government doesn't want us to know."

~Gore Vidal~

“All government bureaucracies, if allowed to fester, metastasize like a malignant cancer cell… once created, the bureaucratic imperative becomes paramount.”

~Werther~

“The greatest of all oxymorons is ‘public servant’.  Rather, that term is the cover or spin for the ruling elite and the political class.”

~Harry E. Teasley Jr. ~ Political/Economic Commentator, Investor & Philanthropist

”I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.”

~ General David Sharp ~ Former US Marine Commandant, (1966) 

“The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised, and nothing promotes its growth as much as war. Wars not only impose huge financial costs, they also leave institutional legacies that enhance government power at the expense of the people’s liberties. Perhaps most important, war has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties. In this way, government war measures change the very characters of once-free people, by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist tyranny.”

~ Robert Higgs ~

“All governments rely directly or indirectly on the cultivation of fear to prop up their rule. If the people were not afraid, either of the government itself or of some threat from which the government purports to protect them, they would not submit to being fleeced and bullied as they are by their rulers, and the government would collapse.”

~Robert Higgs ~ “The President Is Trying to Scare Us Again” (August 6, 2007)

“As a rule of thumb, don't believe anybody above the rank of lieutenant colonel. That is the rank at which most warriors are forced to retire. Most of the rest are politicians in uniform.

~ Charley Reese~

“As for the moral burden of guilt on the state, don’t worry. The state is a machine. It has no conscience and no soul. The state kills innocent people all the time, usually in wars.” 

~ Charley Reese~

“History is a record of human stupidity writ in blood. I have often said that history is a lot scarier than Stephen King’s horror stories.”

~ Charley Reese~

“Experience in politicians is not unlike experienced whores in a brothel. It’s not necessarily a desirable trait.”

~ Charley Reese~

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

~Kurt Vonnegut~ A Man Without a Country

“There is no "smart" way to run an empire: in the end, it runs you. And then it ruins you. The smart thing to do is to refrain from acquiring an empire, and, if one seems about to acquire you, then the really smart strategy is to run, not walk, away from it.”

~Justin Raimondo~

“This is what it means to be an empire: foreign lobbyists and satraps gather 'round the imperial throne, scheming and plotting to gain the emperor's favor and the privilege of using his praetorians as an instrument to advance their own ends. If it wasn't the Israelis, it would be someone else – perhaps the Brits, as in the two previous world wars. In any case, until and unless we make real changes in our foreign policy – fundamental changes – we'll never get out of this box, and war clouds will loom large on our horizon well into the foreseeable future.

~Justin Raimondo~

”Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.”
 

~ Rudolph Rummel~

”To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship.”
 

~ Ludwig von Mises~

“No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.”

~Ludwig von Mises~

“Constant apprehension of war has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force with an overgrown executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

"Although ancient states were great, they inevitably perished when they were fond of war."

~Sima Rangju~

“During war, the laws are silent.”

~Quintus Tullius Cicero~

"Guard against the imposters of pretended patriotism."

~ George Washington~

“The dangerous patriot… is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory.”

~Colonel James A. Donovan~ USMC

“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.”

~Friedrich Hebbel~ German poet and dramatist

”Everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.”
 

~Carroll Quigley~

”Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”

~Mahatma Gandhi~

“The selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.”

~Hans Hermann-Hoppe~ Democracy: The God That Failed

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

~Thomas Jefferson~

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

~Samuel Adams~ Hero of the American Revolution

“The federal government does not have even one small agency that spends a minute to discover new or expanded rights for our citizens. There is no agency whose mission is to find and discard unneeded laws, each one having some impact on liberty. How foolish to assume that any branch of the federal government is watching out for our freedoms. Today the federal government serves somebody's idea of a utopian collective good. Patrick Henry's style of plainspoken English has been replaced by legalistic doubletalk that allows bureaucrats to trample our liberties. Freedom of speech and the freedom to bear arms are threatened. Any freedoms that may offend an aggrieved special-interest group are snatched away without regard to the future impact on our national character, such as the virtues of thinking independently or questioning authority.”

~Gary Aldrich~ Former FBI agent and later Author who served in the Clinton White House

“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“Fear is perhaps the greatest enemy of candor. How many men fear to follow their conscience because they would rather conform to the opinion of other men than to the truth they know in their hearts? How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?”

~ Thomas Merton~ From No Man Is an Island (1955)

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe~

“Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.”

~John Adams~ Federalist, 6th President of the United States who ironically lost any chance at reelection because he decided to keep America out of war with France

”The intention makes the crime.”
 

~Aristotle~

“We cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others--even when we cause it.”

~James Carroll~ Author, Columnist-Boston Globe

"We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos."

~Gertrude Scholtz-Klink~ Chief of the Women's Bureau under Adolph Hitler explaining the Jewish policy of the Nazis

“We are all part monsters in our subconscious, so we have laws and religion…”

~Commander John J. Adams~ From the movie: The Forbidden Planet, (1956)

“A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”
 

~Plato~

"Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its form."

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

”The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interest and his own are the same.”

~Marie Beyle~

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

~Frederic Bastiat~ French Economist (1801-1850)

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

~Voltaire~ (1764)

 “The State calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.”

~Max Stirner ~ The Ego and His Own (1907)

“... What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen…”

~Leo Tolstoy~

 “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. ...”

~Plato~

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than a creation of a new order of things.”

~Niccolo Machiavelli~ The Prince (1513)

“The gods do not smile on efforts to remake the world in one’s own image. They did not smile on Napoleon when he invaded Spain and Russia. They did not smile on Hitler when he invaded Russia. They did not smile on Japan when it bombed Pearl Harbor. The lesson: If you are going to try to do good, you are best advised to be careful and modest about it. Do not attack anybody. Do not steal anyone's money. Say 'please' and 'thank you.' Remember that you are a fool, too – along with everyone else.”

~Bill Bonner ~ Publisher, Author, Financial Pundit

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”

~Aldous Huxley~ The Doors of Perception

 “The Mills of the Gods Grind Slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine."

~Ancient Pagan Aphorism~

 “New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

~John Locke~

“Power always thinks…that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”

~John Adams~

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

~Anne Lamott~ Writer

“Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.”

~Charles V of France~

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”

~Aristotle, philosopher~ (384-322 BCE)

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

~Voltaire~ philosopher (1694-1778)

“We burned the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.... Ho Chi Minh had said people were like the sea in which his guerillas swam.  We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable.  In the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shoot your enemy or starve him to death?”

~Colin Powell~ Former Secretary of State - United States of America

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

~Aldous Huxley~

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

~Henry Kissinger~ as quoted in the book “Kiss the Boys Goodbye”

 “Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

~Robert Green Ingersoll~ lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

~George Orwell~

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

~Sun Tzu ~

“Of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” 

~Hermann Goering~ Nazi leader In custody at the Nuremberg Trials, shortly before being sentenced to death.  
 

“The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it.”

~Woodrow Wilson~ A historically ironic observation by America’s 28th president

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental~men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre ~ the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

~H. L. Mencken~ The Baltimore (Sun, July 26, 1920)

 “Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”

~Percy Bysshe Shelley~

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

~Voltaire~ (1694-1778)

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency.  Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.” 

~General Douglas MacArthur~ (1957)

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

~Joseph Heller~ novelist (1923-1999)

”Scare the hell out of the American people.” 

~Senator Arthur Vandenberg~ Telling President Harry Truman what he needed to do in order to tax the American people to pay for the weapons and covert activities of the US National Security State that was being planned, to destroy the Russian Communist State

”Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

~Thomas Paine~ Common Sense (1776)

“Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.”

~Ayn Rand~ "Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors?"

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of... Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

~ Thomas Paine~ From: The Age of Reason -To Paine belongs the honor of naming our country the United States of America. He was the first to use the name in print, and it was his own creation

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

~Blaise Pascal~

“Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
 

~William Pitt ~ 

”Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.”
 

~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn~

“We should... be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all.  If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.”
 

~Richard Mitchell~

“Mystical references to ‘society’ and its programs to ‘help’ may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”
 

~Thomas Sowell~

”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 only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

~John Stuart Mill~ Essay: On Liberty

“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action--which means; the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)”

~Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness [1964]

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better,” is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.”

~C.S. 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~

“In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is never to let them find out.”
 

~Robert Heinlein~ From the notebooks of Lazarus Long

”The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.”
 

~Albert Jay Nock~

“There is nothing to fear from the gods. There is nothing to fear from death. Pain can be endured. Happiness can be attained.”
 

~Epicurus~

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”
 

~ Robert Heinlein~

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”
 

~Thomas Sowell~

“Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.”

~Aristotle~

“Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.”
 

~Democritus~

”Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.”
 

~Robert Lynd~

”The greatest productive force is human selfishness.”
 

~Robert Heinlein~

”The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”
 

~David Friedman~

”The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
 

~Thomas Sowell~

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.”
 

~Denis Diderot~

“Mankind is at its best when it is most free.  This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty.  We must recall that the basic principle of liberty is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.”

~Dante Alighieri~

”All my major works Have been written in prison. I would recommend prison not only to aspiring writers but to aspiring politicians, too.” 

~Jawaharlal Nehru~

”The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-by to the Bill of Rights.”
 

~ H. L. Mencken~

”Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.”
 

~ Ayn Rand~

“No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
 

~George Orwell~

”Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men.  A creative genius cannot be trained.  There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.”
 

~Ludwig von Mises~

 “ALL I want them to do [U.S. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE-INS] is to commit themselves to make a very deliberate effort that no Border Patrol Officer will be unmindful of the fact that regardless of what their objectives or pursuits are they have to, have to, be in conformity with what’s contemplated by our constitution and laws in terms of (civil) protections. Nobody’s exempt from that.”

~Filemon Vela~ Hispanic United States Federal Judge comments after being stopped for the second time on the way to court in south Texas by the highly militarized U.S. INS Border Patrol(October 1, 2000).

“The more arbitrary power government employees possess, the more they are transformed into a master class. At some point, the sheer accumulation of penalties and threats in the statute book fundamentally changes the citizen’s relation to the government. Rather than a government of laws, it becomes a government of threats, intimidation, and browbeating. If Congress and the courts want to restore the credibility of the federal government, the federal statute book and the Code of Federal Regulations must be stripped of those edicts that hang like thousands of swords of Damocles over the heads of peaceful Americans. The time is come to end the reign of the czars and to cease expecting salvation from arbitrary power.”

~James Bovard~ ”Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power under Clinton-Gore” 
 

“If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.”

~Thomas Sowell~

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”
 

~Robert Heinlein~

“The plans differ; the planners are all alike.”
 

~Frederic Bastiat~

“How perilous it is to free a people who deserve slavery.”
 

~Niccolo Machiavelli~

”We should... be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all.  If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.”
 

~Richard Mitchell~

”The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity.  For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.”
 

~Charles Peguy~

”The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”
 

~Thomas Paine~

”The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.”
 

~Lord Hailshan~

”The increase in the world’s population represents our victory against death.”
 

~Julian Simon~

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
 

~Albert Einstein~

”A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.”
 

~ Walter Bagehot~

”The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.”
 

~ Mark Twain~

”Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.”
 

~ Ludwig von Mises~

”In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, irresolvable, and necessary.”
 

~Kathleen Norris~

”For in a Republic, who is “the country”? Is it the Government that is for the moment in the saddle?  Why, the Government is merely a servant- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
 

~Mark Twain~

”When the people have no tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.”
 

~Lord Lytton~

”A society that puts equality...ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”
 

~Milton Friedman~ 

”When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”
 

~Matt Groening~

”It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”
 

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

”In a general view, there are few conquests that repay the charge of making them, and mankind are pretty well convinced that it can never be worth their while to go to war for profit’s sake.  If they are made war upon, their country invaded, or their existence at stake, it is their duty to defend and preserve themselves, but in every other light, and from every other cause, war is inglorious and detestable.”
 

~Thomas Paine~

”Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.”
 

~Milton Friedman~

”Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it.  Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.  Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality.  But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

~Alexis de Tocqueville~

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”
 

~Thomas Sowell~

”It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it.  But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.”
 

~Ludwig von Mises~

”No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.”
 

~Thomas Jefferson~

”I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”
 

~Thomas Jefferson~

”Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge.  Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...The progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”Being intelligent is not a felony.  But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.”
 

~Robert Heinlein~

“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”
 

~Leonardo da Vinci~

”Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.”
 

~W. Somerset Maugham~

”Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”The tyranny of the multitude is a multiplied tyranny.”
 

~Edmund Burke~

”The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.”
 

~Walter Williams~

”The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.”
 

~Ludwig von Mises~

”When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals”?
 

~Mark Twain~

”Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people - namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making.  Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.”
 

~Thomas Sowell~

“The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.”
 

~Eric Hoffer~

“The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.”
 

~Leonardo da Vinci~

”Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
 

~William Pitt~

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” 

~Joseph Stalin~

“Words are loaded pistols.”

~Jean-Paul Sartre ~

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

~George Orwell~

”There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”

~Thomas Edison~

”Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without knowing in the least what it wants.”
 

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe~

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”
 

~Eric Hoffer~

”The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crises these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.”

~Leonard Peikoff~

”The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
 

~H. L. Mencken~

”Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
 

~Anton Pavlovich Chekhov~

”So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
 

~Bertrand Russell~

“It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and every-where, to assume... that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly  for an excuse for withholding it from him.” 

~H. L. Mencken~

”The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and thus clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” 

~H. L. Mencken~

”Every era has a currency that buys souls.  In some, the currency is pride, in others, it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.”
 

~Eric Hoffer~

”There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic.  Force or persuasion.  Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic have always resorted to guns.”
 

~Ayn Rand~

”The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.”

~Bertrand Russell~

“All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.”

 ~Ludwig von Mises~

“Wine makes everyone hopeful.”

~Aristotle~

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