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|  Lord Acton | Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. | |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. | |
| Samuel Adams | How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words! | |
| Alfred Adler | A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous. | |
| Aesop | Any excuse will serve a tyrant. | |
| Aesop | Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction. | |
| Aesop | Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. | |
| Aesop | Appearances often are deceiving. | |
| Gary Allen | By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax. | |
| Gary Allen | If one understands that Socialism is not a “share the wealth” program but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting Socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately Socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite. | |
| Gaius Petronius Arbiter | We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. | |
| Aristotle | 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. | |
| Matthew Arnold | Believe me, it is not failing to speak out with promptitude and energy that is the matter with you; it is having nothing consistent or valuable to say. | |
| Thurman Arnold | It is a part of the function of “law” to give recognition to ideas representing the exact opposite of established conduct. Most of the complications arise from the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies. | |
| Alan Barth | Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims. | |
| Charles Baudelaire | The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist! | |
| Charles Baudelaire | The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. | |
| Henry Bellmon | In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse' . | |
| W. Lance Bennett | Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution. | |
| Georges Bernanos | Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. | |
| Georges Bernanos | The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. | |
| Edward Bernays | The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. | |
| Tom Bethel | No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country. | |
| Ed Biersmith | What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people. | |
| William Blake | More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress. | |
| William S. Borroughs | A functioning police state needs no police. | |
| Kenneth Boulding | A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government. | |
| Harry Browne | For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| Edmund Burke | No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. | |
| Edmund Burke | The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. | |
| George W. Bush | We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. | |
| Samuel Butler | I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. | |
| Simon Cameron | An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. | |
| Thomas Carlyle | Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects. | |
| Andrew Carnegie | I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors. | |
| James Carville | The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd. | |
| William Cash | Considering that senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service are fully aware of the fact that there is no law currently in existence making a U.S. citizen liable for or required to pay either the income tax or the social security employment tax, only a truly generous citizen would, upon discovering this, continue to voluntarily donate these taxes to the government by allowing them to be withheld from his paycheck on a 100% voluntary W-4 withholding agreement. But, then again, the IRS would be dead in the water without the "voluntary (and docile) compliance" of employers and employees and has said so all along. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts. | |
| Justice Salmon Chase | The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty. | |
| Lord Chesterfield | Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. | |
| Noam Chomsky | The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. | |
| Winston Churchill | In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | When you have no basis for argument, abuse the plaintiff. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. | |
| General Mark Clark | Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils. | |
| Bill Clinton | The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people. | |
| Bill Clinton | Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system. | |
| Bill Clinton | There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to him. He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election. | |
| Bill Clinton | No one wants to get this (Lewinsky) matter behind us more than I do, except maybe all the rest of the American people, | |
| Bill Clinton | It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. | |
| Bill Clinton | It depends on what the meaning of the word is. If the– if he– if "is" means is and never has been, that is not– that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.... Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true. | |
| Bill Clinton | You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Frank I. Cobb | This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others. | |
| Florida Supreme Court | We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters…. The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right. | |
| Noel Coward | It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. | |