 The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment. 
Jeff Melvoin
An “anti-something” movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program that they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.
Ludwig von Mises
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.
Joseph Stalin
Denouncing masculine oppression, Women's Lib screams protests against the policy of regarding women as "sex objects"—through speakers who, too obviously, are in no such danger.
Ayn Rand
I guess I missed the memo from the international coalition rushing aid to our citizens devastated by hurricanes in our southern American states, a region that still suffers from widespread unemployment, homelessness and governmental neglect. I guess I missed the memo from the international coalition rushing to aid to my friends in Southern California after the devastating floods there, continuing as I write.
Mark Holden
The Columbia Flyer
"Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other."
Garet Garrett
Being all on fire is not just being emphatic and deliberately passionate, it is not just being extremely principled, it is going out and actively molding the world to one's principles.
Jeff Landauer
"All On Fire"
... we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.
General Patrick M. Hughes
Congressional Quarterly, Oct. 27, 2004
So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.
Winston Churchill
Speech, November 12, 1936
Fortune favors the brave.
Virgil
Aeneid
[T]he Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say...[T]hey shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out...[F]reedom is a two-way street...I...don't really care what the Dixie Chicks said. I want to do what I think is right for the American people, and if some singers or Hollywood stars feel like speaking out, that's fine. That's the great thing about America. It stands in stark contrast to Iraq...
President George W. Bush
Wikipedia quote of a President Bush interview with Tom Brokaw April 24th 2003 following uproar over anti Iraq war comments by Dixie Chicks band member Natalie Maines
Liberty is the Mother, not the Daughter, of Order.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman
"The only people who could ever fire me are the American People. If they don't want to hear me any more they won't buy my books, they won't read my columns.
Ann Coulter
Is It True What They Say About Ann?
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
Joseph Stalin
It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with "solutions" to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions. In many cases, the most efficient thing to do would be to repeal their previous solution and stop being so gung-ho for creating new solutions in the future. But, politically, that is the last thing they will do.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4044
 |
If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued, and the adjustment of the boundaries between it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty. But the evil is, that individual spontaneity is hardly recognised by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its own account. The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
"A political machine feeds on patronage and power and is a natural enemy of people who preach independence. The key words in machine politics are loyalty and obedience.''
Mike Royko
"Mike Royko: One More Time"
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
A Designer Universe?
As the old saying goes "you can lead a horse to water, but ya can't make 'em drink". As long as they're a PEACEFUL nation that hates us, it's better THAT, than a VIOLENT nation with weapons that hates us.
Russell Kay
SOLO Forum: http://www.solohq.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0247.shtml#4
This Election Day...we should reject those who wish to reduce our republic to mob rule. Instead, we should vote for those, to whatever extent they can be found, who are defenders of the essence of America: individual freedom.
Alex Epstein
"The Meaning of the Right to Vote", Ayn Rand Institute op-ed, October 26, 2004
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost
John Quincy Adams
I am voting for George W. Bush, because I don't want Johnny Cochran appointed to the Supreme Court.
P. J. O'Rourke
Reason
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop (ca. 550 BC)
While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again.
Aesop (ca. 550 BC)
The Lion, the Fox, and the Beasts
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
There are...only three possible political and economic conditions: liberty, tyranny or chaos. All systems are variants of these three...Washington's grand strategy in this 'war on terrorism.' Remove the tyranny, then call the chaos victory.
Richard Maybury
Richard Maybury's U.S. & World Early Warning Report, May 3, 2003
The essense of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade--i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges--the opening of the world's trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.
Ayn Rand
"The Roots of War", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war.
Thomas Jefferson
Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
Thomas Jefferson
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our comercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
George Washington
"I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."
Peter Hansen, Commissioner-General of UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank
CBS News Online, Oct 4
The dictators in the United Nations are like diseases having veto power over the science of medicine.
Steve Ditko
The Comics, Vol. 15, No. 6, June 2004
The only flag flying above my head that I am prepared to respect is not the flag that is draped over coffins but the tiny flag clutched by a little boy who looks up at the blue sky with shining eyes and feels that there is nothing more precious than his own life. That is the one flag I will never surrender.
Sami Michael
Op-Ed in HaAretz
Politicians don't change things. Ideas do.
Jeremy Johnson
SOLO HQ Forum
Contrary to the claim by the 9/11 commission chairman, the failure to prevent 9/11 was not "a failure of imagination." It was a failure of cognition.
David Holcberg
July 27th issue of Capitalism Magazine at http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3813
No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child killers. Why don't you meet Osama Bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers?
Vladimir Putin
'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent,' [said] Isaac Asimov. Right; the competent don't wait that long.
Jerry Pournelle
http://www.technoir.nu/hplx/hplx-l/9703/msg00007.html
The best government is self-government.
Thomas Jefferson
In 1968, on Christmas Eve, the astronauts completing a loop around the moon and coming to see the earth before them were overcome by a 'spontaneous manifestation of religious awe' and began to read the King James version of the Holy Bible and to pray. Many people were stunned by that -- and the American Atheist community was much concerned. [We learned that the] Bible readings and the prayers were printed in the flight plan [and were] carefully pre-planned for many weeks. ... [We] found out that the entire prayer business had been carefully pre-planned for months ahead in Washington, DC [and] had even been code named 'Experiment P-1'. ... We decided to take it to court for it was obviously government sponsoring of religion. ... No scientist, no civil liberties organization, no university, no Humanist, Ethical Culturalist, Rationalist, or Secularist supported us in any action. The single person to come out publicly to sustain our position was Ayn Rand.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
From the October 1970 issue of the Society of Separationists Newsletter, reprinted in the April 2004 issue of American Atheists Newsletter
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
James Bovard
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
Frederick Douglass
The tyranny of the multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave
H. L. Mencken
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Mikhail Bakunin
A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill
The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.
Robert B. Reich
http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru200407060831.asp
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on the article of the Constitution which grants a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
James Madison
http://www.civicsandpolitics.com/tenth.html
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of public money.
David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35
http://www.jim.com/liberquo.htm
|
