 When Barbara Branden was asked by a student"What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?" she answered "If you want to help them, you will not be stopped."
Ayn Rand
The Virtue of Selfishness
Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
Mark Steyn
"The Big Easy rocked, but didn't roll," The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/09/06/do0602.xml
Justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty.
Wolf DeVoon
http://billstclair.com/organic-law/
By now you've probably seen at least one instance of this spate of tiresome ruminations on how the hurricane is some sort of ultimate gotcha to deploy against the idea of small government. This is all profoundly stupid. There is no deep overarching ideological point here, because for pretty much everyone short of the anarchists, preventing the collapse of civilization into a huge Hobbesian clusterfuck makes the list—whether yours is short or long—of things governments are supposed to do—state governments when feasible (assuming adequate preparation on the ground is better than airlifts later), federal government when it isn't.
Julian Sanchez
www.reason.com
Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes aware of it when one is choking. Similarly, it is only when one confronts political tyranny that one really grasps the meaning and importance of freedom.
William E. Simon [1928 - 2000]
P. 19 - A Time For Truth - ISBN 0-07-057378-6
"...All my interests were concentrated on political activity or study. By then I was a graduate student and all my courses were in politics. I went to a lot of meetings and was out every night, mostly to do with politics. I'd found something I was really interested in and that totally absorbed me. From 1973 on I was also earning a living at it, as a junior lecturer, and enjoying that. It was all very fulfilling.
Helen Clark
Head and Shoulders: Successful New Zealand Women Talk to Virginia Meyers.
I’m the President and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know shit.
George W. Bush
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_7267.shtml
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
Benjamin Franklin
The idea of universal rights—the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is—is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a dangerous belief that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
There is only one reason I could accept for building anything but the Twin Towers and that is if it were the will of the people — and it is not.
Margaret Donovan
www.Rebuild-the-Towers.org
Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the zionist dream, and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state.
Ahmed al-Bahar, a leading Hamas official in Gaza
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Founder of Pakistan in 1947.
Bush said he has considered candidates from all walks of life for the Supreme Court but refused to tip his hand on whom he will name, when he will do it or whether he wants to replace retiring O'Connor.
President George W. Bush
Yahoo
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
William S. Burroughs
"A product can be banned because legislatures don't like it, or because you get a majority vote," said Eugene Volokh, law professor at UCLA. "In some states, they ban the sale of horse meat, not because horses have a right to life, but just because the government thinks it's icky. There is no constitutional right to eat what you like or sell what you want to sell."
Eugene Volokh
Court TV; http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=99&e=2&u=/ct/20050708/cr_ct/potflavoredpopsahitwithcandyloversbutnotlawmakers
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangel, Leonard da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Harry Lime
Spoken by Orson Welles "The Third Man"
Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
George Bernard Shaw
Government by Bullies [A chapter from "A Treatise on Parents and Children"]
Religion has been the driving force behind the anti-choice laws, the opposition to stem-cell research, the opposition to gay rights and state-church separation. ... Some people call Atheism a 'radical' idea and it is. Radical means 'root' and Atheism addresses the root cause of the issues we struggle.
Ellen Johnson
Public Statement from American Atheists
The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. . . . That's the whole point about good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
Noam Chomsky
Before you have an argument with your boss, take a good look at both sides -- his side and the outside.
Charles Givens
SuperSelf
The Patriot Act simplifiedOnce a Man said to a Horse "If I put this saddle on you, together we can hunt and kill the Wolf, our mutual enemy." The horse agreed and was saddled. After the Wolf was slain, the Horse turned to the Man and said, "Now please take the saddle off." The Man laughed, and said "No."
Unknown
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything--and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
Clarence Thomas
http://wid.ap.org/scotus/pdf/03-1454P.ZD1.pdf
...libertarians only get their way when the semi-paralysis of divided government occurs. Once one party dominates, government and spending grow like a cheese souffle.
Paul Chadwick
Concrete: the Human Dilemma #6, May, 2005
"Hitler's holocaust 6 million, Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.
Andrew Kenny
The Spectator
I am in favor of federally funded stem-cell research for the same reason that I
am in favor of teaching evolution in public schools. Ideally, the US government
would fund neither medical research nor education--but given that it does so,
its actions must be ruled by reason, not by an effort to promote or enforce the
superstitious restrictions of any particular strain of religious mysticism.... As a symbolic issue, to spend billions on medical research while
exempting this one area sends the same message the president will send if he
uses his first and only veto to block this bill: that enforcing religious
restrictions is the government's highest priority.
Robert Tracinski
TIADaily
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
George Galloway
Testimony before the US Senate, 05/17/05
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
George H.W. Bush
A World Transformed, 1998
Any power must be the enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual ... All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development according to the individual.
Albert Einstein
Wilcox L. and George J. Be Reasonable. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1994.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
Alexander Tyler
We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.
Mark Twain
Foreign Critics Speech, 1890
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_jefferson.html
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
Ken MacLeod
The Cassini Division
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!
Thomas Paine
Common Sense
The key thing to remember is that what is history to us, was politics to them. We have the benefit of hindsight; we know how it all came out. But if we really want to learn from history, we have to try to understand, not just what happened, but how it appeared to the people who lived at the time.
Ron Merrill
http://solohq.com/Articles/RonMerrill/The_Radicalism_of_Objectivism.shtml
... you can't allow "market competition" over the very definitions and meanings of such basic legal principles as "justice," "rights," "aggression," "self-defense," etc.
Robert James Bidinotto
From "Contra Anarchism, Part III," in discussing the social need for government and law.
But as Ayn Rand memorably said at a party I attended in 1962, in response to complaints that "taxes are too high" (then 20%), "Pay 80% if you need it for defense." It is not the amount but the purpose served that decides what is "too much."
John Hospers
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1004/1004openletter.htm
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
Richard Feynman
The Meaning of It All
Of all enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. [...] In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war ... and in the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both. [...] No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison
All change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
A. J. P. Taylor
Frank, Leonard Roy. Freedom. New York: Random House, 2003.
"My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing."
Christopher Shays, Republican Congressman
N.Y. Times
"Now I answer you, I answer you on behalf of myself, and my countrymen. I dont care what your news tells you, what your television and newspapers say, this is how we feel. Despite all that has happened. Despite all the hurt, the pain, blood, sweat and tears. These two years have given us hope we never had."
Husayn Uthman
http://www.coxandforkum.com/
If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd be sorry and wish you were dead... If you had the luck of the Irish, you would wish you were English instead
John Lennon
Happy St. Patricks Day
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds...
Samuel Adams
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of all who threaten it.
US Navy Billboard
It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.
Walid Jumblatt
The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.
Cinnamon Stillwell
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/02/24/cstillwell.DTL
Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Victor Davis Hanson
"The Global Throng" http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200502040750.asp
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison
Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century...
President George W. Bush
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