IMPORTED 2016-7-14 *************
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus." -- Michael Crichton
"It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data." -- Orson Scott Card, HERE
"The next time somebody in the media denies that there is media bias, ask how they explain the fact that there are at least a hundred stories about the shrinking arctic ice cap for every one about the expanding antarctic ice cap, which has now grown to record size." --Thomas Sowell
"When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome." -- Arnold Kling"Those who support the death tax generally do so not for economic reasons but for political ones. They want to make the tax code 'fair' by taxing away the lifetime wealth of others." -- William Beach-- See THIS."When the US government ended 'welfare as we know it' in 1996, it handed responsibility for reform to the states. In so doing, it also created a real-world test of two competing economic strategies used to fight poverty. The results are in and the lessons are clear: Low tax rates lift up the lives of America's poor."
-- from The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 15, 2006
"In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market." -- Andrew J. Coulson
"They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most prehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." --Justice Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. U.S.)
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson, 1824
"Control freaks who sneer at people who have 'faith' in the free market (voluntary trading) must be fantasizing an allegedly 'higher' political end than freedom." -- Rick Gaber
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end." --Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare." --Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"The single most frightening thing you encounter is confidence-in-government because it's so common." -- Rick Gaber
"THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated." -- Neal Boortz
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy."-- Don Luskin
"It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation." -- Camille Paglia
"We turn sacred cows into hamburger."-- Lowell Ponte
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across." -- Julian Simon
"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 right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." -- Justice William O. Douglas
"In matters of principle, stand like a rock." -- Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography.
"The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.' The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."
"Although it had its share of strenuous Christians... the gathering at Philadelphia was largely made up of men in whom the old fires were under control or had even flickered out. Most were nominally members of one of the traditional churches in their part of the country.. and most were men who could take their religion or leave it alone. Although no one in this sober gathering would have dreamed of invoking the Goddess of Reason, neither would anyone have dared to proclaim his opinions had the support of the God of Abraham and Paul. The Convention of 1787 was highly rationalist and even secular in spirit.
-- Clinton Rossiter, 1787; The Grand Convention, pp. 147-148
"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass." -- Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), 1964 Presidential Candidate
"What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure." -- Leonard E. Read, in "Neither Left Nor Right"
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities." -- celebrated historian Paul Johnson
"The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power." -- Albert Jay Nock
“You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”- Benito Mussolini to Grover Whalen, 1939
"The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera." -- Perry de Havilland
"Those who complain the most about the quality of the people in power are the ones who put all that power there in the first place. Well, what kind of people did they expect it all to attract, anyway? Sheesh!" -- Rick Gaber
"You don't have to scratch liberalism very deeply to find socialism underneath, nor socialism to find authoritarianism underneath." -- Don Luskin
"Free enterprise capitalism exists only when people in the private sector are free to pursue their own interests without direction from government. When politicians start passing laws to tell them what to do, or bureaucrats start issuing edicts to tell them what to do, it is no longer capitalism; it's fascism." -- Rick Gaber
"Anyone who confuses liberty lovers with nazis or other fascists is
waaaayy too stupid (or evil) to deserve respect." -- Bert Rand
"Free enterprise capitalism exists only when people in the private sector are free to pursue their own interests without direction from government. When politicians start passing laws to tell them what to do, or bureaucrats start issuing edicts to tell them what to do, it is no longer capitalism; it's fascism." -- Rick Gaber
"It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care
what people do, as long as it is compulsory." -- George Will
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." -- G. K. Chesterton
"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?" -- Henry David Thoreau
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.' "
-- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964
"The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything."-- Marshall Fritz"Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks
is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves." -- Bert Rand
"The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell." -- Rick Gaber
" 'Extremism' is a word deliberately chosen for its vagueness and used by intellectual slobs who are too desperate, sneaky or lazy to say exactly what they mean. Its only purpose is to deliberately try to confuse the difference between people who are extremely good (usually because of devotion to their principles) with people who are extremely bad. The sleazeballs who use this supposedly scary, yet undefined word are not only trying to smear people of conviction and integrity, but they're also trying to divert attention away from the fact that they are obviously not people of principle themselves." -- Rick Gaber
"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 and Barry Goldwater; attribution to Cicero
"Extremism in pursuit of moderation is not necessarily a virtue." -- Jonah Goldberg
"A moderate is either someone who has no moral code of his own, or if he does, then he's someone who doesn't have the guts to take sides between good and evil." – Rick Gaber
"Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves." -- Bert Rand
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell
"I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it is responsible for thousands of deaths abroad." -- Nobel Laureate Dr. Milton Friedman
"Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." -- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning free market economist, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 1989.
"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning,
why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting
anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the
Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the
smartest race of people on earth!" -- Will Rogers
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." -- Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), Dec. 18, 1840
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." -- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
-
"I see that you, too, put up monuments to
your great dead."-- a Frenchman on viewing
the Statue of Liberty during Prohibition
"There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare." – Harry Browne
"Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help."
-- Dr. Thomas Sowell "People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."
-- H.L. Mencken"Public Choice theory, if nothing else, has taught economists to consider the state as it is, not as it should be in a dream world: the state is a potential tyrant, not a benevolent God." -- Pierre Lemieux
"Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all."
-- Financial Times, London, Nov 22, 2001
"Historically, it has been Big Business, not consumers or progressives, who have been primarily responsible for creating most government regulatory agencies. ... Indeed, virtually all regulatory agencies have had the effect of limiting entry and competition in the industries they oversee." -- Bruce Bartlett
"The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive 'reforms' -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works." -- John Stossel
"As the federal government has progressively become larger over the decades, every significant introduction of government regulation, taxation and spending has been to the benefit of some big business." -- Timothy P. Carney
"Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. ... The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad ..." --Karl Hess
"In fact, the big corporations who understand the regulatory game can actually benefit from it. They can lobby for expensive regulations only the largest corporations can afford, effectively keeping upstarts and competitors at bay." -- Radley Balko, HERE
"In a free market, consumer sovereignty and competition tend to create instability when sellers learn to game the system too well... In a technocratic system, it is more difficult for consumers to exercise countervailing power. Innovative competitors are often precluded by regulation. Suppliers tend to apply concentrated lobbying power to protect their interests, while the diffuse interests of the consumer are poorly represented in the political process. ... Centralized, regulated systems look good on paper, and they may be effective as they start. However, market systems learn faster, because competitive innovation prevents a market from getting captured by the incumbents who have learned how to game the system." -- Arnold Kling, HERE
"'For every $1.00 major corporations gave to conservative and free-market groups, they gave $4.61 to organizations seeking more government,' according to a study by the Capital Research Center, a Washington think tank." -- Thomas Sowell, HERE
"In the 2004 presidential election campaign 92% of contributions of $1 million or more went to Democrats. Pro-Democratic 527s, meanwhile, spent more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts." -- Jacob Laksin, referring to the statistics in Byron York's new book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. || WHICH is the party of the rich? See THIS.
"While it would be silly and ungracious to insist that intelligent deliberation on public issues is nowhere found in modern communities, it would be naive to imagine that wise deliberation can survive the constant pounding from self-interested political behavior. Benevolence in public institutions has a short half-life no matter how noble its original intentions." and "Once [a] program is in place, its day-to-day administration falls into the hands of a professional cadre besieged by powerful interest groups whose influence grows as public interest wanes. . . . A slow process of disintegration and reconfiguration sets in, transforming and expanding a program from within." -- Richard A. Epstein, Principles for a Free Society
"The ['Hillary Care'] plan prescribed some eye popping maximum fines:$5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment. When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton said, 'I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America.'"
-- Tony Snow reporting on Hillary's health care plan, to which Zoh Hieronimus added, "Perhaps Hillary’s legacy will be that she made fascism seem lady-like."
"Clinton realized that America could not economically afford the Protocol Gore negotiated. The Clinton-Gore's Energy Department found Kyoto would lead to $400 billion a year in lost output. ... Gore tries to throw Enron on the back of the current administration. But it was Enron Board Chairman Kenneth Lay who sold Clinton-Gore on Kyoto's cap and trade system. Gore, Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with Lay on Aug. 7, 1997 to go over goals and procedures for the Kyoto session. ... The corporate smoking memo here was not that from an ExxonMobil adviser to oppose Dr. Watson, but the Enron internal memo saying Kyoto 'would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative'." -- Ken Adelman HERE."Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant."-- Harry Browne"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Thomas SowellEnron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism. As a creature, in effect, of politicians, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their politician-friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers).
"Take a look at how the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies have totally snookered the politically-correct media and liberal establishments into fighting a 'War on Smoking' for them. After all, absolutely none of their anxiety drugs can quell anxiety or panic attacks anywhere near as cheaply, quickly or thoroughly as a cigarette can." -- Bert Rand
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a
conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to
raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such
meetings, by any law which either could be enforceable, or
would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the
law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes
assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate
such assemblies, much less to render them necessary." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely." -- Mike Ruff
“The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers – and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.” -- Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand said with the piercing clarity of her insightful wisdom,"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive." And here she said, "The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind."
Then, while trying to get you to accept the ridiculous notion that every kind of "selfishness," even just making money in the private sector (earning a living and growing a nest egg) is morally vicious,** they also try to get you to accept the even more absurd idea that the accumulating of political power by government employees and politicians (and their legal machinations to steal or control the property of others) is morally good. This is sold along with an implicit demand that their professed concern for "others" be accepted without question at face value, together with an implicit threat: "Don't you DARE point out that grasping for and accumulating political power definitely IS a kind of 'selfishness,' only this time it's the bad kind, the vicious taking-unwilling-advantage kind, the kind that's the hallmark of criminals, politicians, their intellectual excuse-makers and other aggressive parasites." --Rick Graber, Selfishness vs."Selfishness"
Many of the deliberate con artists are the "true believers" of fanatical religious or political sects who actually accept the dogma that it is a mortal sin for you to take care of yourself and your family first and in any way exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness while their precious cause is in any way neglected, underfunded or even unaccepted. --Rick Graber, Selfishness vs."Selfishness"
Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon. --Rick Graber, Selfishness vs."Selfishness"
"The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves" -- Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
"The three values which men held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural power -- died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died in World War II. As to altruism -- it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. ..." -- Ayn Rand
Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom.
...
Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.
Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need.
...
It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government.
...
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality.
-- Ayn Rand, Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World
(A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.
Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967,
and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It )
"There was a time when Christians took faith as seriously as Mid-Eastern Muslims currently do: the Medieval Era." -- Wayne Dunn, here
"So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations." -- Ayn Rand in The Roots of War
"Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth." -- Ken Schoolland
"The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy." --Thomas Sowell
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." -- Thomas Sowell
"Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion." -- Rick Gaber
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, [but that his use of brutality was] the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced." -- Ayn Rand
"Former ABC News reporter/anchor Sam Donaldson is ready to say the last rites for network news because it will soon lose its dominant position as Americans' primary source of news. 'I think it's dead. Sorry,' he said during a breakfast panel Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas." -- Bill McConnell, Broadcasting & Caable, 4/18/2005
"Print is dead... Get over it."-- John Squires, President, Sports Illustrated, Nov. 2004 quoted in the Washington Post 2-20-2005
"...the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things." -- Howard Fineman, "The 'Media Party' is over" MSNBC, 1-11-05
"...the mainstream media's monopoly on information is over." --Peggy Noonan, WSJ, Jan. 13, 2005
"Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the 'blogosphere' took down CBS News" -- James Pinkerton, Newsday, Sept. 14, 2004
"The New York Times’ account of the [CNN chief] Eason Jordan resignation provides a general recap of the story they didn’t cover, along with a good dose of excuses and justifications ..." -- Lorie Byrd, Polipundit, 2-12-2005
"The New York Times, CBS and the BBC all had to fire lead personnel over the fact that they just damn well made stuff up out of whole cloth in service to an obviously partisan political agenda."-- New Sisyphus, 3-15-05
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says he has a "great deal of sympathy for people who run the printing presses. They are screwed." here 5-7-07
"The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit." -- Laura K. Van Onymous
[However,] "The death of media influence has been greatly exaggerated." -- Thomas Sowell, May 30, 2006
"Truth and news are not the same thing."
-- Katharine Graham, the late owner of
Newsweek Magazine and The Washington Post
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." - Mark Twain
"What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS." -- Ed Biersmith, 1942
"Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff." -- Adlai Stevenson
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."-- Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." -- G. K. Chesterton
“Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh.” -- Don Luskin
“[I'm too old to] be influenced by newspaper arguments. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.” -- George Santayana in a letter to his sister, 1915
"... good people doing good things. But let me tell you, you'll never find it if you just follow the Washington media. You'll never know the good. All you get is controversy, crap and confusion." -- Fmr. Sen. Alan Simpson, 2-19-2006
“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.” -- David Brinkley
"I used to be employed as a field engineer servicing [a major broadcast network's] distribution equipment, specifically their affiliates' satellite dishes. I've had many talks with TV newsmen. The most telling was one who confessed that he didn't think he could continue his job and live with himself because he daily saw 'the difference between what I am forced to report and what's really happening.' He told me that, at the first meeting with 'corporate's' news director [from the corporate holding company that owned the station, not the network], the ND told them that 'our job as reporters was to shape public opinion.' When someone protested that their job was to discover and report the truth, the ND responded, 'Whatever the public's perception is is the truth and it's your job to make sure that they have the proper perceptions.' That man's statement is always in the back of my mind whenever I see or read anything in the 'news,' that the job of reporters today is not to report hard, verifiable facts but rather to shape public opinion using selected facts presented in carefully arranged fashion." -- Chris Meissen
"The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force." –- Alfred North Whitehead inAdventures of Ideas
"The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those "evil" business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of." -- John Dobbins
"Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds." -- David Kelley
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"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap." -- Thomas Sowell
"The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies." -- Rick Gaber
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job." -- Rick Gaber
"Nannyism is fascism on training wheels." -- R. L. Root
"Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is." -- Thomas Sowell
"The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers." -- Thomas Sowell
"The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint." -- George Will
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