The Capitalist Quotes

   Capitalists are very generous when it comes to sharing their wisdom. This is because capitalists really are nicer than socialists.
   Keep in mind that being a capitalist does not mean having lots of money, owning a factory, or dressing like the fellow on the Monopoly playsets; it means accepting the idea that the government exists to secure rights, and not to make everyone happy. It means adhering to a broad range of principles, which in themselves necessitate private property and a free market system.
   I should point out that the people mentioned below may not necessarily be capitalists, but when they said these things, they were thinking like capitalists.

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

—Lord Acton (1834-1902)

"The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea."

—John Adams

"If you think the cost of health care is high now, just wait until it's free."

—American Proverb

"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege."

—Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

The Sheep, the Wolves and the Porcupines

—Once upon a time there was a land where lived a large flock of sheep, a small den of wolves and a family of porcupines. It was the habit of the wolves, whenever they became hungry, to kill and eat a sheep. But they left the porcupines alone, not wanting to get their noses poked. The sheep, fearful of the wolves' sharp teeth, but holding a majority in the government of the land, passed a law outlawing everything sharp. The wolves just laughed, because they pretty much ignored all the laws anyway. But the porcupines, wanting to be law-abiding citizens, had to remove their sharp quills. This made the wolves very happy, because they could now eat the porcupines as well as the sheep.

—Ron Bailey

"Government is not a particularly good teacher of virtue. The state tends to be effective at simple, blunt tasks, like killing and jailing people. It has been far less successful at shaping individual consciences."

"The administration has proved that it is addicted to wasting taxpayers' money..."

—Doug Bandow

"The only thing liberals have done for blacks is give them an inferiority complex."

—Charles Barkley

"The question is: What can we, as citizens, do to reform our tax system? As you know, under our three-branch system of government, the tax laws are created by Satan. But he works through the Congress, so that's where we must focus our efforts."

—Dave Barry

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."

—Frederic Bastiat

"Of course, lawmakers rarely repeal anything. They may amend a previous law, always for the worse it seems, but never repeal one. That would be like admitting a mistake and how can we worship a government that admits it makes mistakes?"

—Roderick T. Beaman

"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"

—Neal Boortz

"Arms control is the favorite device of those... who believe the problem in the world is too many guns and not enough palaver."

"Nor should the law be something that only a highly-paid lawyer or University of Michigan dean can comprehend. It should be easily understandable to the people themselves—or else it isn�t really law. It�s elitist social policy masquerading as law."

—Thomas Bray

"Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian."

—Heywood Brown

"Some of the genuine 20th-century discoveries have failed to achieve their true potentials. Space travel, for example, has benefited no one but government employees."

—Harry Browne

"If there were a drug that required politicians to divulge the true reason for their legislation, that drug should be free, and compulsory."

—William F. Buckley

"Socialism is communism without the firing squad."

—bumper sticker

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it."

—William Burroughs

"Keeping stupid people alive against their will is not in our long-term interests. These idiots we save from their own irrationality reproduce and create even more brainless people. Before you know it, you have California."

—Jon Caldara

"Those of us who know some economics are used to wincing when the typical clergyman makes a pronouncement on political economy. (To be fair, historians, philosophers, politicians and journalists tend to be just as self-confidently inept)."

—Stephen W. Carson

"Every time the government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves."

—Benjamin Constant

"What a wide difference between the American position and that imagined by the vagabond who thought of liberty as a glorious feast unprotected and unregulated by law. This is not civilization, but a plain reversion to the life of the jungle."

"The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the government. Every dollar we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant."

"The fallacy of the claim that the costs of government are borne by the rich cannot be too often exposed...the continuing costs of public administration can be met in only one way—by the work of the people. The higher they become, the more the people must work for the government. The less they are, the more the people can work for themselves."

"The method of raising revenue ought not to impede the transition of business; it ought to encourage it. I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong. We cannot finance the country, we cannot improve social conditions, through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to influence it upon the rich.... The wise and correct course to follow in taxation and in all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be successful."

"About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."

—Calvin Coolidge

"Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening."

"Until you can intelligently articulate the other side�s position, you are not an adult. You are a liberal."

"If liberals think they are losing elections because of the conservative bias in the media, they may as well give up right now."

"To be sure, conservative radio talk show hosts have a built-in audience unavailable to liberals: People driving cars to some sort of job."

—Ann Coulter

"The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty."

—Patrick Cox

"Please quit embarrassing yourself and grating on the nerves of any informed persons by repeating the inane clich� 'You cannot legislate morality!' You will sound less like a fool, and we all will thank you."

—Don Crawford

"Politicians filed out swiftly, and if press reports are any indication, they generally professed themselves 'stunned' by the talk and 'offended' by its contents. This comes as no surprise since many in the political world react badly when they have their own tacit beliefs recited to them in stark terms."

—Detroit News editorial, 3/30/98

"The Declaration of Independence presaged a vigorous attempt to kill heavily armed soldiers, rulers, and officers of the state. The Communist Manifesto presaged a vigorous attempt to kill butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers."

—James A. Donald

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

—Justice William O. Douglas

"You socialists only have one rebuttal to the argument that socialism has been tried and failed miserably; it's the same one an abused wife might hear from the drunken monster that blackened her eye: 'It'll be different this time, I swear!' "

—Dream Machine

"An unarmed man is incapable of functioning as a free citizen; his property, his body, his very life are at the command of others, since there is no risk inherent in committing depredations upon him."

—Alexandre Dumas, pere

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

—Albert Einstein

"[L]et's just say that if convicts had to live in the same conditions many military personnel have endured for the last decade, the ACLU would be screaming."

—Federalist Digest, 16 February 2001

"Tyranny is of three kinds, viz., that which enslaves the person, that which seizes the property, and that which prescribes and dictates to the mind."

—John Foxe

"They called it the Planned Economy. But it was and is fascism by whatever name it is known. And though it may be launched under a free republic, it will wither and die because of the feebleness of the government which tries to enforce it by helpless appeals to the people. Little by little the government must be made stronger, the rights of the citizens before the government must be reduced. Little by little, if the Planned Economy is to be made to work, the free republic must wither. These two ideas � the idea of a free republic and the idea of a Planned Economy � cannot live together."

"One of the eminent Harvard economists delivered a speech in which he assured his hearers that over the course of years the government might create a debt of a thousand billion dollars without being unduly worried. Of course a more crack�brained proposition was never promulgated in the name of higher learning."

"The welfare state cannot operate without the police state."

—John T. Flynn

"There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them [as in England]... [Yet] there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent."

—Ben Franklin

The citizen of the United States who is compelled by law to devote something like 10 per cent of his income to the purchase of a particular kind of retirement contract, administrered by the government, is being deprived of a corresponding part of his personal freedom."

"Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program."

"I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal."

"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."

"And the reason good intentions go awry is because you're spending somebody else's money."

"There is a sure-fire way to predict the consequences of a government social program adopted to achieve worthy ends. Find out what the well-meaning, public-interested persons who advocated its adoption expected it to accomplish. Then reverse those expectations. You will have an accurate prediction of the actual results."

"I support a government that stays out of my wallet and out of my bedroom."

—Milton Friedman

"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place."

—Mahatma Gandhi

"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants, I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

—William Lloyd Garrison

"The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive."

—Ilbert Geis

"A government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

—Barry Goldwater

"That is the paradox of dogmatic liberalism: Though it loudly declares itself a champion of the weak; it is actually an unrelenting truncheon of the strong."

—George Grant

"Once again the United States has a president who's not afraid to call evil evil. It's refreshing. Almost as refreshing as the realization that Jimmy Carter isn't president anymore."

—Paul Greenberg

"[N]othing that al Qaeda can do can cause the collapse of America and the capitalist system. The worse eventuality in the long run would be that America would be forced to break its hallowed ideal of universal tolerance, in order to make an exception of those who fit the racial profile of an al Qaeda terrorist. It is ridiculous to think that if al Qaeda continued to attack us such measures would not be taken. They would be forced upon the government by the people (and anyone who thinks that the supposed cultural hegemony of the left might stop this populist fury is deluded)."

"A society of 300 million individuals whose bumper stickers say "United We Stand" is not a breeding ground for revolutionary activity."

"America-bashing has sadly come to be "the opium of the intellectual," to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the 20th century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams."

"To argue that the great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral."

—Lee Harris

"A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy."

—F. A. Hayek

"Most self-described pacifists are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger."

The nation that needs conscript soldiers to survive does not deserve to survive at all. (Paraphrase)

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."

"[Pacifists] are the biggest mouths with the smallest brains of any of the primates."

"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?"

"The greatest productive force is human selfishness."

"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors—and miss."

"The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."

"An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes."

—Robert A Heinlein

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

—Patrick Henry

"As is always the case when peace takes precedence over liberty, neither is achieved."

—Bruce Herschensohn

"Unions are suited for occupations that are vulnerable to job market flooding. To wit: jobs that trained monkeys could do."

—Pete at pete.holidian.com

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

—Victor Hugo

"There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people."

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."

—Hubert H. Humphrey

"The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority all the wide world over."

—Henrik Ibsen

"If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling, and indeed ridiculous, to suppose that a man has less right to himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged."

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

"It is every Americans' right and obligation to read and interpret the Constitution for himself."

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

—Thomas Jefferson

"Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects."

—Andrew Johnson

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:-
'We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.'

And that is called asking for Dane-geld
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-
'Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.'

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:-

'We never pay anyone Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!'

—Rudyard Kipling

"The educational bureaucracy expects the state to accommodate every possible bizarre cultural mutation and lifestyle, but finds prayer at graduation an intolerable and fatal compromise of state neutrality toward religion."

—Daniel Lapin

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms..."

—Richard Henry Lee, Member of the First U.S. Senate.

"The existential root of Libertarianism is the experience of being very bad at taking orders from morons."

—Leopold Leider.

"Prohibition will always occupy a place of great honor in the American pantheon of political idiocy."

—Dan Levine

"You do not have to accept that there is an organized conspiracy to keep our kids ignorant to get the picture. As long as you realize that things are exactly as they would be if there were such a conspiracy, that will suffice."

—Charles R. Lewis

"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark."

—Walter Lippmann

"[F]or although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself."

"We, the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts—not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution."

—Abraham Lincoln

"In public controversies, the side that is always giving you reasons why something can�t be done, and is endlessly telling you that the popular view isn�t sufficiently 'sophisticated' or 'nuanced'—that is the side that doesn�t want you to know what it is doing, and it is not to be trusted. If politicians have honest intentions, they will tell you straight up what they plan to do. If it�s a good idea, you will like it as soon as they explain the whole package."

—Walter Russell Mead

"Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much."

—Juan de Mariana (1535-1624)

"Aborting 'unwanted' children hasn't helped. Instead, it's taught us that an unwanted person has no right to live."

"We both assumed that abortion concerned a conflict between the rights of a woman and a fetus. But in no sane culture are women and their own unborn children presumed to be mortal enemies. If continuing a pregnancy has become that unbearable, the problem is not inside the woman's body, but in a culture that is placing overwhelming burdens on her. The love between mother and baby is the icon of human connectedness, and when we complacently assume that one may want to kill the other, something has gone seriously wrong."

—Frederica Mathewes-Green

If you want proof of the Supreme Court's fallibility, look no further than the Dred Scott decision.

—paraphrase of Peter McWilliams

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume... that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

—H. L. Mencken

�War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.�

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant"

—John Stuart Mill

"Congress wants to require television manufacturers to install a V-Chip which would keep children from viewing violent or explicit programming. The chip would cost about $500 and would replace the current device known as the on-off switch."

—comedian Dennis Miller

"The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs."

—Ludwig von Mises

"There is no snobbishness like that of professional equalitarians."

—Malcolm Muggeridge

"Let government policy start from the premise that to bring a baby into the world when one is not emotionally or financially equipped to be a parent is not just ill-advised, not just inimical to the long-term interests of the mother; it is profoundly irresponsible. It is wrong."

"The Left talks mournfully about the atomization of society and its alienation, the end of community. It's all the fault of capitalism and multinational corporations, they say. Nonsense. The problem is that the government destroys community. We have community-in-hiding all over the country, wherever people do not have large bureaucracies getting in the way of it."

—Charles Murray

"The American Civil Liberties Union recently took out a four-page advertisement in The New Republic. Each page addresses a contentious issue and asserts that the American public agrees with the ACLU that organized school prayer is impolitic, that gays should have special legal recognition, that marijuana use should be legal, and that women should have the right to an abortion. At the bottom of the first three ad pages is the logo The American Civil Liberties Union, underlined by the phrase Live and Let Live, picked out in white on a bold black bar. However, on the final page—the one that defends abortion rights—the phrase Live and Let Live is somehow missing. Aborted, you might say."

—From the National Review

"[T]he only agreeable country is one where no man is afraid of tax collectors.'"

—Pedro Fernandez Navarrete

"People who can force the taxpayer to fund their activities are generally mega-rotten at understanding the point of view of people who make a living offering goods and services to a public that actually has a choice in the matter."

—Denyse O'Leary

"FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it."

"Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. 'Oh, no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.' "

"Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine."

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

"The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there's nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you."

—P. J. O'Rourke

"It has been my experience that whenever a leader—whether elected, anointed or media-appointed—does not want you to see something, that's probably the time when you should go out of your way to see it."

—Clarence Page

"In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was, there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throw mankind into confusion."

"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion."

"The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind."

"However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right; if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion."

"Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions."

"If we inquire into the business of a king, we shall find that in some countries they have none; and after sauntering away their lives without pleasure to themselves or advantage to the nation, withdraw from the scene, and leave their successors to tread the same idle ground."

"Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."

"Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us?"

"For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other."

—Thomas Paine

"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities."

—Seymour Papert

"And as far as sins go, strippers do considerably less harm to our society than many trial lawyers and television producers."

"Ever since the 1960s, liberalism has been largely a movement dominated by children (of every age)."

—Dennis Prager

Bush has no problem making the United Nations out to be what they really are—the Wile E. Coyote of international organizations.

"If Karl Marx's Fry-Daddy could talk, it would sound like Michael Moore.... Moore is Phil Donohue after a glue-sniffing binge and a summer at 'Noam Chomsky's Kommie Kidz Kamp.' "

—Doug Powers

"I can't be the only person who finds it peculiar that the very same people who break out in a cold sweat over the slightest overlap of church and state in the United States—who despise evangelical Christians and distrust orthodox Jews—have no problem arguing on the side of people who speak of jihads and who treat their women like chattel."

—Burt Prelutsky

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive."

"The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own."

—Ayn Rand

"Here's a hint: Harriet Tubman didn't work for Amtrak."

—John C. Randolph

"Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

—Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address

"Before God I swear this is my creed: my rifle and myself are the defenders of our country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace!!

—From "My Rifle", by Major General W.H. Rupertus, USMC.

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship."

—Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence

"People are not the killers of the world. It is the organized and rigid belief systems of the world which convince us that their righteous cause is greater than the value of our individual lives. The greatest tragedies of human history have been wreaked upon us by priests, leaders, politicians and nation states, not from the odd murderer arising out of ordinary society and killing a few people - or even a lot of people - before being caught. And it is likely that the majority of those killers who do arise in society received their initial training in a government uniform."

"How many examples do we have of these bodies [of the state] set up to eliminate a problem, actually eliminating it, shutting down their operations and going home?"

"Once we accept the flawed view that being cared for by an all-powerful state is the natural order of things, we accept a severe restriction of our freedom. We end up with a hugely expensive structure that is supposed to stop people from sleeping on the streets, being mugged, being unemployed or taking dangerous drugs, while itself exacerbating–if not causing–these problems."

—Gregory Sams

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

—Sydney Schanberg

"Those public works met the most stringent official specifications and, like all proper government projects, those specs ignored the coquetries of physical reality."

"The process by which garbage is transformed into public debt is called 'recycling.' "

"When America metamorphosed from a competitive plutocracy to a welfare state, it underwent economic collapse and may well have died. If that is the price of gifting my inferiors with the wealth and privilege of a productive life, then the price is too high."

"I have seen districts which post 'Neighborhood Watch' signs on their lampposts, complete with a cartoon dog wearing a trench coat. Their criminal elements undoubtedly tremble upon seeing this courageous assertion of personal defense."

"The NEA is a typical government procurement agency. It buys expensive, mostly unwanted garbage."

"I do not regret the purposeful suicide of a parasitic subpopulation, and seriously question the wisdom and practicality of any investment aimed to bar the lemmings from the sea cliff."

"We can inhabit the moon or the Welfare office, but not both."

"If, after accumulating a twenty-five year's tax-exempt stipend of $500,000 to $800,000, a family still wallows beneath the Federal poverty line, then the arguments for eugenics take on a new immediacy."

"Nothing is better for America than less Washington."

"People who think the State is disposed to deliver them from civil disorder will pay for their ignorance with their lives, and those of their loved ones."

" 'Cultural diversity' is the Federally-mandated process by which people with no qualifications other than apocryphal tales of atrocities levied against their presumed ancestors Officially displace persons with demonstrable abilities, lest the educational or industrial milieu become efficient and productive."

"Objective reality is the sworn enemy of Liberal cant."

"The irrational craving for 'simpler times' is like the Society for Creative Anachronism: Everybody is a lord, lady or knight; all with full bellies, a recent shower, and a competent dentist. The richest of Medieval nobility, a fractional percentage of the population, lived like pigs. The common man in his wildest flights of fancy didn't imagine living as well as a pig."

"Liberalism fails when it can no longer steal productive people's wealth."

—"Uncle Al" Schwartz

"Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it."

—George Bernard Shaw

"[Prince] Charles proved single-handedly that an unbroken monarchical bloodline eventually will produce at least one generation of imbeciles."

"Politicians love to offer up grand orations on July Fourth, and nobody listens because no self-respecting nation would celebrate its independence by paying attention to freedom-grabbing tax suckers."

"The glory of America comes from such people... who have worked hard, played by the rules and shown what good people can do in a land that leaves them free to follow their instincts."

—Tony Snow

"Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them."

"In one century, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college."

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money—only for wanting to keep your own money."

—Joseph Sobran

"Education of the sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, or school teacher, jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run—tend to increase intergroup strife."

"Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve..."

"Political 'solutions' are often long on immediate symbolism and short on lasting results."

"There is something obscene about people holding protest rallies in order to try to keep getting money that someone else worked for."

"Less successful ethnic groups are often richly endowed with leaders. Any well-informed American can readily name half a dozen black leaders, current or from U.S. history, but would probably have difficulty naming a similar number of Jewish or Japanese American ethnic leaders. Similarly, it is doubtful if they could name as many prominent Italian American ethnic leaders as prominent American Indian chiefs."

"Exaggerated group 'identity' makes copying from others akin to treason."

"As Professor Lott discovered, gun ownership deters crime. But what will deter liberals? Certainly not the facts. They have too much invested in their vision of themselves as the saviors of us all."

"People grossly ignorant of history—and that includes graduates of our leading colleges and universities—have no idea that slavery was not even a controversial issue before the 18th century, and only in Western societies beginning then. Everywhere else in the world, it was as widely accepted as it was widely practiced—and it had been for thousands of years."

"Politicians are seldom willing to solve any problem by simply stopping what they have been doing to create the problem. Instead, they come up with new programs that ignore the real cause."

"Kids who have yet to master spelling or basic math are in no position to dogmatize about scientific questions like global warming or nuclear power."

—Thomas Sowell

"The ultimate consequence of protecting men from the results of their own folly is to fill the world with fools."

—Herbert Spencer

"This preposterous doctrine, that 'ignorance of the law excuses no one,' is asserted by courts because it is an indispensible one to the maintenance of absolute power in government. It is indispensible for this purpose, because, if it be once admitted that the people have any rights and liberties which the government cannot lawfully take from them, then the question arises in regard to every statute of the government, whether it be a law or not; that is, whether it infringe, or not, on the rights and liberties of the people."

"The will, or the pretended will, of the majority, is the last lurking place of tyranny at the present day."

"Obviously there is nothing in the nature of majorities that insures justice at their hands."

"The relative numbers of the opposing parties have nothing to do with the question of right."

—Lysander Spooner

"Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming."

"A society whose political class elevates "a woman's right to choose" above "go forth and multiply" is a society with a death wish."

"If we have to have an incoherent, anti-Western 'peace' movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it's gonna get."

"To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate."

"The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected."

—Mark Steyn

"If you have a thorn bush and you'd rather have an apple tree, the cosmetic approach is to get some string and tie a bunch of ripe apples on the thorn bush, so it looks like an apple tree. Of course, a week later all the rotted apples will fall off. But that only shows you haven't hired enough trained specialists, and given them a large enough budget, to keep hanging apples on the thorn bush. Today, such a scheme would be described as 'sensible moderate reform, by working within the existing system.' If I propose to simply dig up the thorn bush by the roots, throw it away and plant a real apple tree where it stood, that is judged radical."

—Vin Suprynowicz

"And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."

—Jonathan Swift

"The greatest obstacle to peace in our time, or in any time, has been people who misdiagnose evil people and evil regimes. Such people believe evil can be appeased."

—Cal Thomas

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor."

—Henry David Thoreau

"Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class."

"I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim is to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will dry up the sources of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, and will benumb human industry."

—Alexis de Tocqueville

"Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure or even diminish it."

"It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not."

—Mark Twain

"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

—US Supreme Court

"When a politician says that he feels your pain, it is either a big lie or an instance of poetic justice."

—John VanSickle

"No American of courage and conviction will fail to resist what he or she opposes."

—Washington Times editorial, 11 Sept 2002

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

—Daniel Webster

"The history of liberty is a history of the limitations of government power, not the increase of it."

—Woodrow Wilson

"Some so-called progressives, it seems, would rather whitewash theocratic fascism than acknowledge that the West holds the moral high ground in any conflict."

—Cathy Young

"Liberals apparently are tolerant enough to respect a dictator's right to fill mass graves with children. They just can't countenance anyone with contrary political views."

—Steven Zak

"The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words."

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