Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation.more Billie Holiday quotes |
I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.more Homer quotes |
The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative.more Hans Hermann Hoppe quotes |
[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes |
Every single American can exclaim, 'Nothing justifies what they did in New York and Washington,' not even the bombs that our government has dropped on them for ten years or the embargo that has caused the deaths of so many children. That's of course true…The issue is simply an acceptance of reality and a fundamental fact of life: When governments do bad things to people, people sometimes retaliate.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes |
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What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.more Thomas Henry Huxley quotes |
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If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.more Robert G. Ingersoll quotes |
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort -- as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.more Robert G. Ingersoll quotes |
Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
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Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!more Jesus of Nazareth quotes |
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.more Jesus of Nazareth quotes |
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[Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses.more Ernest Jones quotes |
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Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they’ve created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.more Jon Katz quotes |
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes |
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Everything you read in the press is absolutely true.
Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge.more Erwin Knoll quotes |
In the twentieth century, the United States government forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps run by the United States government. Like the victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the property they could carry with them. Everything else—including family businesses built up over generations—had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. The camps were “ringed with barbed wire fences and guard towers.” During the war, the federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. ... the incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security justification had vanished. ... what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific, had been tempted to take revenge on the “enemy” that was, in the concentration camps, a safe target. Would killing all the Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America’s eventual victory in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “What do you think we should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?” Thirteen percent of Americans chose the response “Kill all Japanese people.”more David B. Kopel quotes |
The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'more Jonathan Kozol quotes |
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I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.more Admiral Gene LaRocque quotes |
Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution?
Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore.more Jay Leno quotes |
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others.more Doris Lessing quotes |
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No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the façade of democratic institutions.more Murray B. Levin quotes |
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not even regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
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This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.more Abraham Lincoln quotes |
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.more Abraham Lincoln quotes |
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.more Abraham Lincoln quotes |
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Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the
exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.more General Douglas MacArthur quotes |
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes |
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.more Niccolo Machiavelli quotes |
