"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell "Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right." -- Martin Luther King Jr. "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 "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. "There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal." -- F.A. Hayek "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." -- Ronald Reagan "I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." -- Thomas Jefferson "There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness." -- H.L. Mencken "How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!" --Samuel Adams (1722-1803), letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776 "Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count." --Robert Heinlein "Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives." -- Ayn Rand
"... 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 | "One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances." -- Thomas Sowell "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" -- Karl Hess for Sen. Barry Goldwater; attribution to Cicero "It is not the right of property which is protected but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights but the individual has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to life, the right to his liberty and the right to his property. These three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty is to take from him all that makes life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty is still to leave him a slave." -- Justice George Sutherland "The story of the transformation of the fundamental principle of American government from liberty to democracy is compelling, partly because the powers embodied in America's twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century Americans revolted against to escape." "Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently – and for the very same reason." -- Anonymous "Education – compulsory schooling, compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can." -- "The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all." -- H.L. Mencken "Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." -- H.L. Mencken The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." "Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave." -- Andrew Fletcher, 1698 '"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken
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