My fellow libertarians, I have a shameful secret to share. I have not, nor do I intend to, read Ayn Rand. I have no idea of the value of her work, but I have a lot more I would rather read. This will inevitably lead to me being stripped of my libertarian decoder ring, as any fool knows libertarians are all Rand worshipers and the libertarian thought definitely does not go back hundreds of years. Or thousands, if you believe a certain Murry R. who claims Taoism was sort of a precursor to libertarianism.
In fact, were I to recommend something to read to a person who want to get started on the politics of liberty, it would be Bastiat. It is short, clear and very relevant. Not the meandering obscurantist crap that passes for intellectualism on the left.
Which brings me to the idea of this post, although it is basically a lazy non-post, because I did not write much. While I know quotes and aphorisms are mostly meaningless nonsense in most context, one can agree that some people have a way with words others do not, and it is no shame to sometimes use someone else words to express ideas in a more poetic fashion than you could yourself (no, not you SugarFree, but for the others it applies).
So what are the quotes that I like and best express my view of liberty? I can give a few and leave more as an exercise to the class. In no particular order, here is a random quote dump.
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” – Bastiat
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” -Lord Acton
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” -T. S. Eliot
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” – Thomas Sowell
“Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills. ” – Rose Wilder Lane
“The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.” —P.J. O’Rourke
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.” -Frederic Bastiat
P.J. O’Rourke
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” -P.J. O’Rourke
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” -Johnathan Swift
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” -Robert A. Heinlein
“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” -H. L. Mencken
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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.” -C. S. Lewis
Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?
The Dude: You’re not wrong Walter. You’re just an asshole.
“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” -Thomas Paine
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” –H. L. Mencken
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” – Mark Twain
Mongol General: Conan! What is best in life
Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.”
“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” – Johnathan Swift
“Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbours than the other sort.” -Robert Heinlein
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” -H. L. Mencken
“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.” -Robert Frost
“Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do? The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.” – Thomas Sowell
“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
“Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
“Laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt,” – Tacitus
“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Daniel Webster
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” – G.K. Chesterton
“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that,’ as if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.” – Stephen Fry
“When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people’s aims and volitions.” – Ludwig von Mises
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of finer clay than the rest of mankind?” – Frédéric Bastiat
“Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them! The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply does not give a fuck about you! It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.” – George Carlin
“First, given the existence of a powerful government, the people who are most likely to wind up in control of that government are those who (a) have the greatest drive for power, (b) have the skills needed for seizing it (for example, the ability to intimidate or manipulate others), and (c) are unperturbed by moral compunctions about doing what is required to seize power. These individuals are not in the game for the money. They are in it for the pleasure of exercising power. “- The Problem of Political Authority.
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson.” – Henry Hazlitt
“The Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.” – Robert Heinlein
“If you require force to promote your ideal, there is something wrong with your ideal.” – JSB Morse
“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as “caring” and “sensitive” because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.” – PJ O’Rourke
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.” – Frank Herbert
“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners” –George Carlin
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos” – Homer Simpson
And finally
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.
“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
Comments
263 responses to “Favorite Quotes on Liberty and Associated Ideas”
Just answer “If you like, go ahead and pay for it, set up a GoFundMe or Kickstarter”
Lachowsky
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
It fell on you and left you with crippling pain from the impact?
kbolino
We read Anthem in high school. My English teacher at the time was a flaming lefty but she wasn’t closed-minded. I picked up The Fountainhead in college from a discount book bin, and I’ve read maybe 15 pages of it in the 10 years since.
Summary of “The Fountainhead”: It’s A-Okay to dynamite the property of a third party who was not a party to your private agreement because ‘artistic integrity’.
Yusef drives a Kia
Propaganda? Beta males? rough sex? Architecture?
did I read the same book?
I was part of a once-weekly “enrichment” program for elementary kids in which kids were bussed in on fridays from other elementary schools to ours to have extra learning and challenging, thought provoking days together.
We read Harrison Bergeron in 4th grade. That was DEFINITELY the first chink into my made up world in which Benign Parent Gov’t would always do the right thing.
I made my husband read it when we were “just friends” years ago, and he hasn’t forgotten a word of it. He in turn passed it onto his sons (my stepsons now) who can occasionally be heard referring to the Handicapper General or to tying sandbags on talent to create “equality”.
I am a proud stepmom.
Tundra
Anthem is good and concise.
Yusef drives a Kia
2112 for the short version, that’s an Audiobook
bacon-magic
^^^
The Last American Hero
Or dig out Fly By Night and listen to Anthem if you’re pressed for time.
Lachowsky
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge (our last decent president)
Caput Lupinum
Of course our school life was not free from pranks. The property of the townspeople was moved to strange places in the night. One morning as the janitor was starting the furnace he heard a loud bray from one of the class rooms. His investigation disclosed the presence there of a domestic animal noted for his long ears and discordant voice. In some way during the night he had been stabled on the second floor. About as far as I deem it prudent to discuss my own connection with these escapades is to record that I was never convicted of any of them and so must be presumed innocent.
Also Coolidge.
Caput Lupinum
More Coolidge:
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.
Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.
The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.
Mainer
Industry, thrift and character ?! Pretty sure that’s racist.
Caput Lupinum
America is a large country. It is a tolerant country. It has room within its borders for many races and many creeds.
I know that there is no better American spirit than that which is exhibited by many of those who have recently come to our shores.
All the races, religions, and nationalities of the world were represented in the armed forces of this nation, as they were in the body of our population. No man’s patriotism was impugned or service questioned because of his racial origin, his political opinion, or his religious convictions. Immigrants and sons of immigrants from the central European countries fought side by side with those who descended from the countries which were our allies; with the sons of equatorial Africa; and with the red men of our own aboriginal population, all of them equally proud of the name Americans.
If we are to have that harmony and tranquility, that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language.
We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed. Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character. The same principle that it is necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among our own people it is also necessary to apply to the attitude of mind among the different nations.
Numbered among our population are some 12,000,000 colored people. Under our Constitution their rights are just as sacred as those of any other citizen. It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights.
Yeah, Coolidge was totally racist. He was a Republican, after all.
wdalasio
Thanks, CL, for the entire line of quotes.
Reading all the Coolidge quotes you can’t help but wonder, why can’t we have anyone in office like that today?
Tundra
Who got fat off Silent Cal?
wdalasio
Who got fat off Silent Cal?
Most of the country. But, I get your point.
Lachowsky
Because the slogan –
Make American Government an Afterthought
just doesn’t resonate as well with voters as MAGA
commodious spittoon
the world is full of educated derelicts.
On that note: “The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazis liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” Viktor Frankl
commodious spittoon
I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe.
The flatulent thwumping you hear all around you is the sound of college freshmen feinting in terror at the thought.
Drake
That’s why, even though I don’t believe in conscription – I find the idea very tempting. Being trained to use deadly weapons, deal with dangerous situations, and often to face your worst fears – that can make people less likely to be afraid of an idea like freedom.
Also finding their lives dependent on those unlike them.
Lachowsky
Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.
Attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but was probably made up by somebody on a gun blog. I like it anyway.
Drake
Yep – I think I can afford a plow and a gun. No need to recycle either.
CPRM
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
hayeksplosives
— F.A. Hayek
Juvenile Bluster
“That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.” – F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Lachowsky
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote”
I dunno who said this one first.
kinnath
Ben Franklin
Juvenile Bluster
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kinds of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.” – Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
Lachowsky
You beat me to that one. That’s one of my favorites.
Juvenile Bluster
Random OT: In searching Wikiquote for the exact wording on this, I accidentally clicked on their “Libertarians” category. They’ve got some weird entries on here as to who they think are libertarians. Noam Chomsky is on the list for fuck’s sake. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Libertarians
kbolino
I think Chomsky’s use of the word libertarian goes back to its “original” French usage, as a synonym for anarchism/communism pre-Russian Revolution. However, this use of the word never gained much traction in English. The modern connotation came from the 1950s when “liberal” had drifted away from its Enlightenment-era meaning (although, that is a bit of muddy picture, too).
That having been said, anyone claiming to be libertarian socialist/communist post-Russian Revolution is just a liar/idiot, and Chomsky’s defense of authoritarian regimes is a prime example of that.
John Titor
This is also why Amsoc used to have constant hissy fits on TOS about how we ‘stole his word and ruined the intellectualism of libertarianism’ by not being economically illiterate utopian morons.
kbolino
ruined the intellectualism of libertarianism
Coming from the guy who once demonstrated that he had no clue how income taxes work, that is pretty funny right there.
John Titor
Or the fact that Amsoc was very pro-welfare state, universal healthcare blah blah, while actual libertarian socialist doctrine sees state policies like that as the economic equivalent of enslaving someone and hooking them on meth.
kbolino
As far as I can tell, and this applies to people of every political bent, the only actual intellectual justification for the welfare state is, “if we don’t do it, people will riot”. Some of them are even honest enough to admit it.
Lachowsky
If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one.
Robert Lefevre
Mainer
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.
H. L. Mencken
Lachowsky
Cannibalism is actually a sort of dietetic socialism. Here is the ultimate sacrifice. A human life is taken for the purpose of maximizing the ‘public welfare.’
Robert Lefevre
Juvenile Bluster
“The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. ” – Leonard Reed, from “I, Pencil”
Mainer
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
H. L. Mencken
Juvenile Bluster
Alice: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret: He’s bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God’s law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.
wdalasio
A Man for All Seasons really should be part of any young person’s education. Utterly brilliant material.
invisible finger
Much the reason I took Thomas as my confirmation name.
Charlie Suet
Real shame that such a noble sentiment was put in the mouth of a catholic bigot.
wdalasio
Well, you’re not citing Rand doesn’t mean I can’t:
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.
wdalasio
Gah! Should have read “your…”
MikeS
“My idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke. The man is chosen based on some kind of IQ test, and maybe also a physical tournament, like a decathlon. And women are brought to him, maybe … when he desires them.”
– Ron Swanson
Lachowsky
One great big festering neon distraction, I have a suggestion to keep you all occupied –
Learn to swim
Maynard Keenan
AlmightyJB
Better dead than Red
commodious spittoon
Rafal Ganowicz, a Polish mercenary, was asked what it’s like to take a human life. Supposedly, he replied: “I wouldn’t know, I’ve only ever killed communists.”
AlmightyJB
I like that:)
Lachowsky
Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft “taxation.” We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it “conscription.” In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.
Murray N. Rothbard
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.
– Eric Hoffer
juris imprudent
Yep, The True Believer should pretty much prove that republican governance is swimming against the tide of basic human behavior. Not saying it isn’t worth the effort – but it is never the easy way.
Vhyrus
“My fellow libertarians, I have a shameful secret to share. I have not, nor do I intend to, read Ayn Rand.”
I played bioshock. Same thing.
AlmightyJB
In read The Virtue of Selfishness. I bought Atlas Shrugged probably 15 years ago but it disappeared before I got around to reading it.
AlmightyJB
I read
Dr. Fronkensteen
You are not free unless you’re free to be wrong.
RC Dean’s Iron laws
RAHeinlein
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that over again, too. Who decides?
– Lazarus Long (RAH)
Drake
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
– Henrik Ibsen
commodious spittoon
Barack Obama, with sneering condescension: “[Americans have] a continuing normative commitment to the ideals of individual freedom and mobility, values that extend far beyond the issue of race in the American mind. The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American—I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don’t make it, my children will.”
You can’t take away people’s right to be assholes – Simon Phoenix
Gordilocks
“All governments are lying cocksuckers.”
William Melvin Hicks
trshmnstr
Good quotes! I’ll add my comments about government “charity”
I’ve had the occasion to meet honest to God philanthropic missionaries more than a few times in my life. You know, the kinds who go to scary and destitute places to build schools, provide clean water, and proselytize. They’re very interesting people, especially in contrast to the do-gooders of the statist “charity” persuasion. For the do-gooder, the focus is always on the veneration of their intentions and the application of guilt to their audience. The missionary has a different focus. Even when they’re asking for a donation, they do so from a place of thanks giving and humility. They tend to be focused on the humanity of the people they serve, and they genuinely care about the welfare and growth of the communities they visit. A charitable heart is distinguishable from a selfish heart from a many miles away.
Tundra
The Party denied the free will of the individual – and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
choose between two alternatives – and at the same time it demanded that he
should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish
good and evil – and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and
treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a
wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could
not be stopped or influenced – and the Party demanded that the wheel
should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was
somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.
– Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
trshmnstr
Pie, as another non-reader of Rand, I share your fear of being murdered by the mob.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.
Lachowsky
Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it. This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should. If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question.
They had a strong supply restricting monopoly long before anyone gave a damn if there was blood on the rocks.
Vhyrus
That’s easy. They created the demand by getting it into our collective memory that you had to buy a diamond in order to marry a girl or to show her you love her. Then they artificially limited the supply.
Only mooks buy diamonds.
Scruffy Nerfherder
The diamond is the cheap part of the whole endeavor. Trust me.
“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.”
– (You guessed it) Mencken
Rhywun
“If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
Pithy. I like.
Nephilium
All from the late, great, Terry Pratchett:
“But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”
Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.
“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.”
–Night Watch
The phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”
“Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet… and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some… some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.”
–Hogfather
“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
–Wee Free Men
Tundra
Some good ones in his work. I keep this one handy:
“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.”
-Guards! Guards!
commodious spittoon
*college freshman falls to floor convulsing and frothing*
thrakkorzog
I don’t have a copy handy, but there is a nice bit in Night Watch where Vimes recommends that the revolutionaries add a boiled egg to their list of demands. When the revolutionaries ask why they should add something so prosaic to demands about peace and justice, he points out that the morning after the revolution, there probably won’t be much peace or justice, but a boiled egg seems like an achievable goal.
RegicidalManiac
“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
-Snuff
Derpetologist
A long Emerson quote I like:
***
Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.
***
kbolino
This part, though, is perfect:
“The law is only a memorandum.”
John Titor
“The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects. The lesser are loved and praised. The even lesser are feared. The least are despised.” -Laozi
A leader is best
When people barely know he exists
Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, “We did this ourselves.”
Derpetologist
“Govern a nation as you would fry a small fish- lightly.”- Lao Tzu
“Do little and do it slowly.”- advice to Spanish colonial governor
wdalasio
It’s funny. Much the same thought has occurred to me. It’s why I’m always dismissive of the historian polls of who were the best presidents. They inevitably point to presidents during wars or times of national crisis. But, that’s kind of stupid. A war or a national crisis should be more likely seen as a sign of failure. The perfect president would be a person the historians would look to and say never had their presidential leadership tested. Yeah, they never had their leadership tested because they never let a situation get to the point that it tested their leadership.
That attitude gives too much creedance to the presidents having the ability to actually influence events to the extent of being able to stop all wars. Especially in times prior to the atom bomb.
wdalasio
I’m talking about a hypothetical “perfect” president. I don’t think there is such a thing. But, I think my point still stands. The standard presidential greatness model used by historians tends to celebrate the president in the shitstorm more than the president who quietly does his job and manages the government. But, I can’t see a reason to inherently think the former has necessarily done a better job. Why should Kennedy get credit for the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it was largely a problem of his own making?
John Titor
Historian polls of best Presidents are also utter horseshit because there’s two kinds of historians:
1. Ideologues who exist to justify their theories, beliefs and/or pre-determined conclusions, often through the lens of some form of TOP MAN-ism.
2. Cynical assholes who don’t believe in anything and basically treat everything with suspicion.
Guess who they poll.
wdalasio
But, the TOP MAN-ism is almost the dominant trait. I mean, one common thing that I always hear these guys talking about is how much various presidents expanded the power of the presidency. Why is that a good thing?! What if you have a president who thinks the presidency already has too much power? Are you going to say he’s a lesser president for acting in accordance with his principles?
Raven Nation
Hey! I’m a cynical asshole who believes in a few things and treats most things with suspicion.
Derpetologist
My favorite Bastiat quote, paraphrased:
If the natural tendencies of people are so bad that they cannot be trusted with freedom, how is it that the natural tendencies of the rulers are always good? Aren’t they people too?
hayeksplosives
Excellent. I missed that on my first read through.
Lachowsky
Many times when I use the term ‘government’, people think that I mean law and order. And so, if they hear me say: ‘We don’t need government’, they think I mean we don’t need law and order. Well, this is probably what makes me an ‘autarchist’ rather than an anarchist. I think we need law and order. You see, I am dedicated to the idea of lawful and orderly procedures. And because of that I have to stand against government. Because government doesn’t provide either law or order.
antisthenes
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another.” – Malcolm Reynolds
“A government is a body of people; usually, notably ungoverned.” – Shepherd Book, quoting Malcolm Reynolds
trshmnstr
The tyrant threatens not only the bodies of his subjects, but also their spiritual welfare, since those who seek to use rather than to be of use to their subjects oppose any progress by their subjects since they suspect that any excellence among their subjects is a threat to their unjust rule. Tyrants always suspect the good rather than the evil and are always afraid of virtue. They seek to prevent their subjects from becoming virtuous and developing a public spiritedness which would not tolerate their unjust domination.
-Aquinas
The Late P Brooks
“As my dear old grandfather Litvak said, just before they sprung the trap, ‘You can’t cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump.’”
Lachowsky
“Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can … He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”
Derpetologist
Groucho Marx, paraphrased: politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong solution.
He forgot to add “with money stolen from everyone.”
Derpetologist
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Adam Smith
MikeS
The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd… and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds.
“since this is an Era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’, what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”
-T. Sowell
hayeksplosives
Right on, Sowell!
“I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”
–F.A. Hayek
The Late P Brooks
The perfect president would be a person the historians would look to and say never had their presidential leadership tested.
Mencken, when Coolidge died, said (more or less) “He wasn’t a particularly great nuisance.”
Mad Scientist
Sometimes I wish we could just hit ’em over the head, rob ’em, and throw their bodies in the creek. – Al Swearengen
John Titor
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Til then you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man…and give some back.”
invisible finger
That’s a nice fuckin’ letter.
Gustave Lytton
Last day before vacation. 5.5 hours to go. It’s going to be a looooong day.
I can empathize, but I have shorter time periods to work with. Find something interesting to get invested in and the time will drain away.
Gustave Lytton
Glibs and a longer lunch (sadly not liquid) along with webinar replays.
Scruffy Nerfherder
Who’s that from?
AlmightyJB
I had today off. Woke up pretty hungover. Made bacon and egg and have pretty much done nothing but browse the internet and watch youtube videos all day on my phone.
trshmnstr
I’ve been sick since Saturday. I worked from home yesterday, and went into the office for a half day today. The fever broke last night , but I still feel like I was hit by a bus. Doesn’t help that I spent 3.5 days straddling joists in the attic last weekend. I’m hoping this is a normal illness and not related to the 50lbs of desiccated squirrel shit we shop vacced out of the attic.
Damn. Yeah, that is about the best you can do. Unless it comes out that he got violent or forceful, or exposed himself to children, issuing what seems to be a sincere apology and getting punished by ostracism seems like the best way for this to go.
What I don’t get about Louie CK’s situation is that he asked permission and didn’t even touch them. They were free to leave at any time. I fail to see how that’s even close to a crime.
Vhyrus
OH MY FUCKING GOD
Goodman and Wolov said Louis CK stripped naked and masturbated after inviting them to his hotel room during the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, in 2002.
I WAS AT THAT VERY SHOW!!
bacon-magic
You watched too? #vhryustoo
bacon-magic
#vhyrustoo
John Titor
You wouldn’t happen to look like CK right?
bacon-magic
^^^ there it is. Magnum P.I. isn’t dead, Higgins maybe, but not the ‘stache.
Vhyrus
If I could pass as CKs doppleganger he would have been in a shallow grave a decade ago.
KSuellington
Right on Pie, some great classic quotes and a few I hadn’t seen. That is one of my favorite Sowell quotes. Reading his books turned me from a mere civil libertarian fully over to the Dark Side.
bacon-magic
Then one day I met a man
He came to me and said
“Hard work good and hard work fine
But first take care of head”
Sublime
KSuellington
That is originally from The Toys. They used to play that song every Friday at 5pm for decades on a local rock station here in SF.
bacon-magic
Imagine that. The more you delve into music the more you see that someone has been copied.
I would have been disappointed if you quoted anyone else.
hayeksplosives
😉
Although von Mises has some goodies too. I am amazed at reading very early Mises observations on how “feminism” was a pretext to bring about socialism. Some of those writings translate to today as if 100 years had not passed.
Nobody should really be surprised.
John Titor
That Sowell/Feminist-I-Forget-The-Name-Of debate on Buckley’s show is basically the exact same argument we have today but with less social justice buzzwords.
“There can be no test by which we can discover what is ‘socially unjust’ because there is no subject by which such an injustice can be committed, and there are no rules of individual conduct the observance of which in the market order would secure to the individuals and groups the position which as such (as distinguished from the procedure by which it is determined) would appear just to us. [Social justice] does not belong to the category of error but to that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone’.”
hayeksplosives
He was always so polite in calling bullshit when he saw it.
He tried to explain gently and rationally all of what he wanted to say, but when the opposition says “RHEEEEEE!!” in return, do you think they would read that paragraph twice to try and understand it?
Charlie Suet
On the same lines:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
– Pitt the Younger, paraphrasing Milton. On the subject of the latter:
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Neither Milton nor Pitt were libertarians, but I can imagine Areopagitica causing the modern academy to reach for its fainting couch and comfort crayons.
robc
To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death — these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness.
— CS Lewis
robc
What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny’. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
— CS Lewis
KSuellington
“But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?”
Walter Williams
robc
[I]n adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.
— CS Lewis
Gustave Lytton
I know this has been posted in the comments, but I don’t believe it’s been in the morning/afternoon links yet
This is not my day for commenting. My head isn’t even in screwing off work.
robc
I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.
— CS Lewis
hayeksplosives
“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”
–Cardinal Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict XVI
Disclaimer: IANAC
hayeksplosives
Essay question: Contrast and compare with Commie Pope Francis.
Gustave Lytton
Someone should hook dead JPII to a generator. The amount of rolling over in his grave could power a small town at this point.
hayeksplosives
No doubt. As a Protestant, I am not all that invested in the Catholic leadership and all that it entails, but I do acknowledge that the pope has a great influence on many people. No doubt JPII was a factor in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe! He was a great man.
I am a fan of Benedict, too, or as I like to call him, Papa Ratzi. He was unfortunately dealt a face that many found creepy to look at, but his writings were insightful, intellectual, and highly satisfying to read.
Francis can take a flying leap as far as I care.
The Late P Brooks
Well, I’m ready to go buy some guns!
It’s never a bad time to go buy guns.
Sean
I’m planning on picking something up on Black Friday.
What? No idea yet.
All the Lewis quotes are from the same essay: Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.
trshmnstr
“it is significant that while there is a word ‘profiteer’ to stigmatize those who make allegedly excessive profits, there is no such word as ‘wageer’ or ‘losseer.’”
-H. Hazlitt
trshmnstr
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite threads ever! ?✂️?
hayeksplosives
“I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be much worse if life *were* fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
–Marcus Cole (fictional character)
John Titor
Great. Now that you’ve alerted the universe to another Babylon 5 actor who isn’t dead he’s going to have a mysterious heart attack.
hayeksplosives
I admit it’s pretty depressing to look at those group cast photos and tick off the ones who have passed. Esp Jerry Doyle, may he RIP. And that moon-faced assassin of joy, Stephen Furst.
“Very sad life. Probably have very sad death. But, at least there is symmetry.” –Zathras
Gustave Lytton
Grim Reaper missed Walter Koenig and got his son instead.
hayeksplosives
Geez, I missed that about his son. Depression sucks hard. RIP, Andrew.
NOT a Naked Intruder
And that moon-faced assassin of joy, Stephen Furst
Huh…..[checks Google] SONOFABITCH! I did not know that, and I don’t know why I didn’t.
Well….shit.
RAHeinlein
I introduced my husband to Babylon 5 last month – we just watched the episode where Marcus is introduced.
The Michael O’Hare story is quite sad – I didn’t know until recently why he left after Season 1.
“Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?”
– Robert Nozick
A tidy explanation of why alt-lite memes drive the Institutional Left into such frothing madness.
“The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? … They are laughing at Nietzsche yet… ”
-Mencken
(If you can’t tell, he’s one of my all time favorites)
“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Gilmore
please stop before Winston shows up
Gilmore
“Damn, niggas wanna stick me for my papers”
– David Koch
KSuellington
“And the forest was all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw. “
Rush
The Late P Brooks
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The Late P Brooks
Too soon, I clicked.
I love that Mencken quote. I suspect he would have considered himself proven right at least one President ago.
Gilmore
he would have considered himself proven right at least one President ago.
i’m pretty sure he’d have called it by Gerald Ford, at least.
DOOMco
“Cash rules everything around me” -method man.
“Money isn’t real since we went of the gold standard.” -Dwight K Shrute.
“Oh I don’t want to do heroin, I need the government to take care of me.” Ish- Ron Paul.
DOOMco
Really, all of your quotes are great
Whiskeyjack
“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
—William Adama
Gadianton
I teach my people correct principles, and they govern themselves.
Joseph Smith, Jr.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet
Taxman!
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
Don’t ask me what I want it for (Aahh Mr. Wilson)
If you don’t want to pay some more (Aahh Mr. Heath)
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me
Taxman!
antisthenes
Guns don’t kill people; the government does. – Dale Gribble
TK
“Fuck you, cut spending” – All Libertarians
mindyourbusiness
TANSTAAFL!
-Attributed to Robert A. Heinlein
Festus
Not lapping assholes but articles like this. This is why you Glibs have become my personal time-spiral. Merci buckets!
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” – Bastiat
“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” – Johnathan Swift
“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as “caring” and “sensitive” because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.” – PJ O’Rourke
Comments
263 responses to “Favorite Quotes on Liberty and Associated Ideas”
Slacking on the alt-text?
?
My mistake. Alt text wasn’t showing up for me when I first loaded the page. I see it now.
No worries – I was afraid something was going wrong with the site.
…
…
OK, I am bullshitting you. I added 3 of the 4 after reading your remark. There was one there already.
I feel like I should get the dancing 1 after your subterfuge…
LOL!
Thanks Swiss.
Nüt z’dangge
The first quote perfectly describes my lib in-laws.
“Shouldn’t we do X?”
We is always turns out to be the federal government.
Just answer “If you like, go ahead and pay for it, set up a GoFundMe or Kickstarter”
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Too much Italics.
You have blockquotes, you don’t need to make it hard to read by italicing huge chunks of text.
Will you please stop editing my comments?
*REQUEST DENIED. YOU’LL GET NOTHING AND LIKE IT!*
Will you stop telling us how to run our stories?
I have to say that I agree with him, though. It is hard to read.
This you say after putting up the links you do?!?
MY EYES MIGHT NEVER BE THE SAME!
(p.S. thanks for brining back Thicc Thursday)
Fight?
I reserve the right to critique work product. I have no expectation anyone will even read said critique, let alone act upon it.
I iterated through several snarky responses before remembering I had a half-finished submission to write up.
WRITE HARDER! PROVIDE US CONTENT!!!!
Merci vilmal.
That reminds me.
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
Lysander Spooner
Never read Rand and probably never will.
I’ll add my name to that list
Never read Rand either…I listened to audiobooks.
Atlas Shrugged changed my life.
It fell on you and left you with crippling pain from the impact?
We read Anthem in high school. My English teacher at the time was a flaming lefty but she wasn’t closed-minded. I picked up The Fountainhead in college from a discount book bin, and I’ve read maybe 15 pages of it in the 10 years since.
Summary of “The Fountainhead”: It’s A-Okay to dynamite the property of a third party who was not a party to your private agreement because ‘artistic integrity’.
Propaganda? Beta males? rough sex? Architecture?
did I read the same book?
I can’t get over the fact that the architect wasn’t jailed for blowing up the building.
Most people’s summary is: “It is okay to rape a woman if she really wants it.”
Confession – I never read the book.
I was part of a once-weekly “enrichment” program for elementary kids in which kids were bussed in on fridays from other elementary schools to ours to have extra learning and challenging, thought provoking days together.
We read Harrison Bergeron in 4th grade. That was DEFINITELY the first chink into my made up world in which Benign Parent Gov’t would always do the right thing.
I made my husband read it when we were “just friends” years ago, and he hasn’t forgotten a word of it. He in turn passed it onto his sons (my stepsons now) who can occasionally be heard referring to the Handicapper General or to tying sandbags on talent to create “equality”.
I am a proud stepmom.
Anthem is good and concise.
2112 for the short version, that’s an Audiobook
^^^
Or dig out Fly By Night and listen to Anthem if you’re pressed for time.
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge (our last decent president)
Of course our school life was not free from pranks. The property of the townspeople was moved to strange places in the night. One morning as the janitor was starting the furnace he heard a loud bray from one of the class rooms. His investigation disclosed the presence there of a domestic animal noted for his long ears and discordant voice. In some way during the night he had been stabled on the second floor. About as far as I deem it prudent to discuss my own connection with these escapades is to record that I was never convicted of any of them and so must be presumed innocent.
Also Coolidge.
More Coolidge:
Industry, thrift and character ?! Pretty sure that’s racist.
Yeah, Coolidge was totally racist. He was a Republican, after all.
Thanks, CL, for the entire line of quotes.
Reading all the Coolidge quotes you can’t help but wonder, why can’t we have anyone in office like that today?
Who got fat off Silent Cal?
Who got fat off Silent Cal?
Most of the country. But, I get your point.
Because the slogan –
Make American Government an Afterthought
just doesn’t resonate as well with voters as MAGA
the world is full of educated derelicts.
On that note: “The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazis liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” Viktor Frankl
I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe.
The flatulent thwumping you hear all around you is the sound of college freshmen feinting in terror at the thought.
That’s why, even though I don’t believe in conscription – I find the idea very tempting. Being trained to use deadly weapons, deal with dangerous situations, and often to face your worst fears – that can make people less likely to be afraid of an idea like freedom.
Or of using force to impose their will on others.
Also finding their lives dependent on those unlike them.
Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.
Attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but was probably made up by somebody on a gun blog. I like it anyway.
Yep – I think I can afford a plow and a gun. No need to recycle either.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
— F.A. Hayek
“That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.” – F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote”
I dunno who said this one first.
Ben Franklin
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kinds of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.” – Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
You beat me to that one. That’s one of my favorites.
Random OT: In searching Wikiquote for the exact wording on this, I accidentally clicked on their “Libertarians” category. They’ve got some weird entries on here as to who they think are libertarians. Noam Chomsky is on the list for fuck’s sake. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Libertarians
I think Chomsky’s use of the word libertarian goes back to its “original” French usage, as a synonym for anarchism/communism pre-Russian Revolution. However, this use of the word never gained much traction in English. The modern connotation came from the 1950s when “liberal” had drifted away from its Enlightenment-era meaning (although, that is a bit of muddy picture, too).
That having been said, anyone claiming to be libertarian socialist/communist post-Russian Revolution is just a liar/idiot, and Chomsky’s defense of authoritarian regimes is a prime example of that.
This is also why Amsoc used to have constant hissy fits on TOS about how we ‘stole his word and ruined the intellectualism of libertarianism’ by not being economically illiterate utopian morons.
ruined the intellectualism of libertarianism
Coming from the guy who once demonstrated that he had no clue how income taxes work, that is pretty funny right there.
Or the fact that Amsoc was very pro-welfare state, universal healthcare blah blah, while actual libertarian socialist doctrine sees state policies like that as the economic equivalent of enslaving someone and hooking them on meth.
As far as I can tell, and this applies to people of every political bent, the only actual intellectual justification for the welfare state is, “if we don’t do it, people will riot”. Some of them are even honest enough to admit it.
If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one.
Robert Lefevre
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.
H. L. Mencken
Cannibalism is actually a sort of dietetic socialism. Here is the ultimate sacrifice. A human life is taken for the purpose of maximizing the ‘public welfare.’
Robert Lefevre
“The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. ” – Leonard Reed, from “I, Pencil”
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
H. L. Mencken
Alice: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret: He’s bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God’s law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.
A Man for All Seasons really should be part of any young person’s education. Utterly brilliant material.
Much the reason I took Thomas as my confirmation name.
Real shame that such a noble sentiment was put in the mouth of a catholic bigot.
Well, you’re not citing Rand doesn’t mean I can’t:
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.
Gah! Should have read “your…”
– Ron Swanson
One great big festering neon distraction, I have a suggestion to keep you all occupied –
Learn to swim
Maynard Keenan
Better dead than Red
Rafal Ganowicz, a Polish mercenary, was asked what it’s like to take a human life. Supposedly, he replied: “I wouldn’t know, I’ve only ever killed communists.”
I like that:)
Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft “taxation.” We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it “conscription.” In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.
Murray N. Rothbard
–Ice Cube
I’m more partial to this
https://youtu.be/51t1OsPSdBc
“I can do it, put your ass into it.”
-Ice Cube
Let’s do it.
-Tone Lōc
“Yo homies, le’s do this.” – Ice-T
– Eric Hoffer
Yep, The True Believer should pretty much prove that republican governance is swimming against the tide of basic human behavior. Not saying it isn’t worth the effort – but it is never the easy way.
“My fellow libertarians, I have a shameful secret to share. I have not, nor do I intend to, read Ayn Rand.”
I played bioshock. Same thing.
In read The Virtue of Selfishness. I bought Atlas Shrugged probably 15 years ago but it disappeared before I got around to reading it.
I read
You are not free unless you’re free to be wrong.
RC Dean’s Iron laws
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that over again, too. Who decides?
– Lazarus Long (RAH)
The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.
– Henrik Ibsen
Barack Obama, with sneering condescension: “[Americans have] a continuing normative commitment to the ideals of individual freedom and mobility, values that extend far beyond the issue of race in the American mind. The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American—I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don’t make it, my children will.”
PT Barnum didn’t hold a candle to that man.
Christ, what an asshole!
*applause*
“Nigger is an Attitude, NOT a Race”
Greg Gonzales
And he did everything he could to make his statement true.
Fuck off, slaver!
*pours one out for JsubD*
*salute*
You can’t take away people’s right to be assholes – Simon Phoenix
“All governments are lying cocksuckers.”
William Melvin Hicks
Good quotes! I’ll add my comments about government “charity”
I’ve had the occasion to meet honest to God philanthropic missionaries more than a few times in my life. You know, the kinds who go to scary and destitute places to build schools, provide clean water, and proselytize. They’re very interesting people, especially in contrast to the do-gooders of the statist “charity” persuasion. For the do-gooder, the focus is always on the veneration of their intentions and the application of guilt to their audience. The missionary has a different focus. Even when they’re asking for a donation, they do so from a place of thanks giving and humility. They tend to be focused on the humanity of the people they serve, and they genuinely care about the welfare and growth of the communities they visit. A charitable heart is distinguishable from a selfish heart from a many miles away.
– Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Pie, as another non-reader of Rand, I share your fear of being murdered by the mob.
KILL THEM
*stabs Q in the back*
No, instead we just make you watch the horrible recent Atlas Shrugged movies.
*stabs self in neck*
I like his movies, but damn Kubrick was a sadist.
Me neither – I did read a lot of Heinlein.
I read every SciFi book the high school library and public library had by time I graduated from high school. Heinlein was a big influence.
My response to Heinlein was to chuck “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls” at the far wall.
I never did. I got more out of the economists.
I can’t believe I’m doing this #MeToo.
My new favorite liberty quote:
“Incels are FINISHED on Hit n’ Run”
-HM
Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it. This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should. If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question.
That makes me want to cajole someone into finding the state aid to De Beers to justify the price of carbon.
“Certified Conflict Free Diamonds”
That’s only recent.
They had a strong supply restricting monopoly long before anyone gave a damn if there was blood on the rocks.
That’s easy. They created the demand by getting it into our collective memory that you had to buy a diamond in order to marry a girl or to show her you love her. Then they artificially limited the supply.
Only mooks buy diamonds.
The diamond is the cheap part of the whole endeavor. Trust me.
Cue Karl Jenkins’ Palladio.
“Diamonds. That’ll shut ‘er up.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/01/diamonds-epsteins-short-course.php
“If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
-HL Mencken
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
-Mencken
“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.”
– (You guessed it) Mencken
Pithy. I like.
All from the late, great, Terry Pratchett:
–Night Watch
–Hogfather
–Wee Free Men
Some good ones in his work. I keep this one handy:
“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.”
-Guards! Guards!
*college freshman falls to floor convulsing and frothing*
I don’t have a copy handy, but there is a nice bit in Night Watch where Vimes recommends that the revolutionaries add a boiled egg to their list of demands. When the revolutionaries ask why they should add something so prosaic to demands about peace and justice, he points out that the morning after the revolution, there probably won’t be much peace or justice, but a boiled egg seems like an achievable goal.
“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
-Snuff
A long Emerson quote I like:
***
Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.
***
This part, though, is perfect:
“The law is only a memorandum.”
“The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects. The lesser are loved and praised. The even lesser are feared. The least are despised.” -Laozi
A leader is best
When people barely know he exists
Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, “We did this ourselves.”
“Govern a nation as you would fry a small fish- lightly.”- Lao Tzu
“Do little and do it slowly.”- advice to Spanish colonial governor
It’s funny. Much the same thought has occurred to me. It’s why I’m always dismissive of the historian polls of who were the best presidents. They inevitably point to presidents during wars or times of national crisis. But, that’s kind of stupid. A war or a national crisis should be more likely seen as a sign of failure. The perfect president would be a person the historians would look to and say never had their presidential leadership tested. Yeah, they never had their leadership tested because they never let a situation get to the point that it tested their leadership.
That attitude gives too much creedance to the presidents having the ability to actually influence events to the extent of being able to stop all wars. Especially in times prior to the atom bomb.
I’m talking about a hypothetical “perfect” president. I don’t think there is such a thing. But, I think my point still stands. The standard presidential greatness model used by historians tends to celebrate the president in the shitstorm more than the president who quietly does his job and manages the government. But, I can’t see a reason to inherently think the former has necessarily done a better job. Why should Kennedy get credit for the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it was largely a problem of his own making?
Historian polls of best Presidents are also utter horseshit because there’s two kinds of historians:
1. Ideologues who exist to justify their theories, beliefs and/or pre-determined conclusions, often through the lens of some form of TOP MAN-ism.
2. Cynical assholes who don’t believe in anything and basically treat everything with suspicion.
Guess who they poll.
But, the TOP MAN-ism is almost the dominant trait. I mean, one common thing that I always hear these guys talking about is how much various presidents expanded the power of the presidency. Why is that a good thing?! What if you have a president who thinks the presidency already has too much power? Are you going to say he’s a lesser president for acting in accordance with his principles?
Hey! I’m a cynical asshole who believes in a few things and treats most things with suspicion.
My favorite Bastiat quote, paraphrased:
If the natural tendencies of people are so bad that they cannot be trusted with freedom, how is it that the natural tendencies of the rulers are always good? Aren’t they people too?
Excellent. I missed that on my first read through.
Many times when I use the term ‘government’, people think that I mean law and order. And so, if they hear me say: ‘We don’t need government’, they think I mean we don’t need law and order. Well, this is probably what makes me an ‘autarchist’ rather than an anarchist. I think we need law and order. You see, I am dedicated to the idea of lawful and orderly procedures. And because of that I have to stand against government. Because government doesn’t provide either law or order.
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another.” – Malcolm Reynolds
“A government is a body of people; usually, notably ungoverned.” – Shepherd Book, quoting Malcolm Reynolds
-Aquinas
“As my dear old grandfather Litvak said, just before they sprung the trap, ‘You can’t cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump.’”
“Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can … He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”
Groucho Marx, paraphrased: politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong solution.
He forgot to add “with money stolen from everyone.”
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Adam Smith
–Rand Paul
I like that guy.
BODY SLAM!
“since this is an Era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’, what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”
-T. Sowell
Right on, Sowell!
“I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”
–F.A. Hayek
The perfect president would be a person the historians would look to and say never had their presidential leadership tested.
Mencken, when Coolidge died, said (more or less) “He wasn’t a particularly great nuisance.”
Sometimes I wish we could just hit ’em over the head, rob ’em, and throw their bodies in the creek. – Al Swearengen
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Til then you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man…and give some back.”
That’s a nice fuckin’ letter.
Last day before vacation. 5.5 hours to go. It’s going to be a looooong day.
40 minutes before a 3 day weekend.
I can empathize, but I have shorter time periods to work with. Find something interesting to get invested in and the time will drain away.
Glibs and a longer lunch (sadly not liquid) along with webinar replays.
Who’s that from?
I had today off. Woke up pretty hungover. Made bacon and egg and have pretty much done nothing but browse the internet and watch youtube videos all day on my phone.
I’ve been sick since Saturday. I worked from home yesterday, and went into the office for a half day today. The fever broke last night , but I still feel like I was hit by a bus. Doesn’t help that I spent 3.5 days straddling joists in the attic last weekend. I’m hoping this is a normal illness and not related to the 50lbs of desiccated squirrel shit we shop vacced out of the attic.
That’s no fun. Feel better soon.
Well, I’m ready to go buy some guns!
I think about it, review my finances and end up going “Not enough money.”
No one wants to give Fedora-Americans guns anyway.
I’ve only been given one gun. I bought the rest.
Glibs and a longer lunch (sadly not liquid) along with webinar replays.
WTF? Was supposed to be above.
(ghostly image of me cackling and rubbing my hands together)
I’m working on a trade for a walther Q5 match. Hopefully the guy doesn’t back out of the deal.
I’d like the new ppq slide with the rmr cut. They have a 4inch one. Trying to see if I can just get the slide from Walther.
Which ones?
All of them! After this morning with the dad defending his house and then all these quotes about liberty!
Good for you! Go get yourself a fully automatic AR-47 assault weaponized child murder device with optional shoulder fired rocket launcher.
And the chainsaw attachment.
“There I saw them, yearning for freedom. And I vowed my hands would never be idle again.”
https://imgur.com/a/NUBwL
Very nice
Her boyfriend (another friend of mine) dumped her, so she’s been on a flaunt it kick lately. Nice gal.
If she’s nice, and she looks like that, why did he dump her again?
Something sometjing always some guy who’s sick of her shit.
He’s got commitment issues.
No matter how good she looks, someone somewhere is tired of her shit.
– unknown
I got a 404.
Probably the best way to handle it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41950043
Wrong move. You hire PI’s to dig up dirt on them and destroy their credibility.
-Hil-Dawg
and/or kill them if necessary.
-Also Hil-Dawg
Damn. Yeah, that is about the best you can do. Unless it comes out that he got violent or forceful, or exposed himself to children, issuing what seems to be a sincere apology and getting punished by ostracism seems like the best way for this to go.
What I don’t get about Louie CK’s situation is that he asked permission and didn’t even touch them. They were free to leave at any time. I fail to see how that’s even close to a crime.
OH MY FUCKING GOD
I WAS AT THAT VERY SHOW!!
You watched too? #vhryustoo
#vhyrustoo
You wouldn’t happen to look like CK right?
^^^ there it is. Magnum P.I. isn’t dead, Higgins maybe, but not the ‘stache.
If I could pass as CKs doppleganger he would have been in a shallow grave a decade ago.
Right on Pie, some great classic quotes and a few I hadn’t seen. That is one of my favorite Sowell quotes. Reading his books turned me from a mere civil libertarian fully over to the Dark Side.
Sublime
That is originally from The Toys. They used to play that song every Friday at 5pm for decades on a local rock station here in SF.
Imagine that. The more you delve into music the more you see that someone has been copied.
Also from The Toys
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
–F.A. Hayek
I would have been disappointed if you quoted anyone else.
😉
Although von Mises has some goodies too. I am amazed at reading very early Mises observations on how “feminism” was a pretext to bring about socialism. Some of those writings translate to today as if 100 years had not passed.
Nobody should really be surprised.
That Sowell/Feminist-I-Forget-The-Name-Of debate on Buckley’s show is basically the exact same argument we have today but with less social justice buzzwords.
Here’s some Hayek for you:
“There can be no test by which we can discover what is ‘socially unjust’ because there is no subject by which such an injustice can be committed, and there are no rules of individual conduct the observance of which in the market order would secure to the individuals and groups the position which as such (as distinguished from the procedure by which it is determined) would appear just to us. [Social justice] does not belong to the category of error but to that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone’.”
He was always so polite in calling bullshit when he saw it.
He tried to explain gently and rationally all of what he wanted to say, but when the opposition says “RHEEEEEE!!” in return, do you think they would read that paragraph twice to try and understand it?
On the same lines:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
– Pitt the Younger, paraphrasing Milton. On the subject of the latter:
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Neither Milton nor Pitt were libertarians, but I can imagine Areopagitica causing the modern academy to reach for its fainting couch and comfort crayons.
— CS Lewis
— CS Lewis
“But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?”
Walter Williams
— CS Lewis
I know this has been posted in the comments, but I don’t believe it’s been in the morning/afternoon links yet
<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41940675"RIP Higgins
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41940675
This is not my day for commenting. My head isn’t even in screwing off work.
— CS Lewis
“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”
–Cardinal Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict XVI
Disclaimer: IANAC
Essay question: Contrast and compare with Commie Pope Francis.
Someone should hook dead JPII to a generator. The amount of rolling over in his grave could power a small town at this point.
No doubt. As a Protestant, I am not all that invested in the Catholic leadership and all that it entails, but I do acknowledge that the pope has a great influence on many people. No doubt JPII was a factor in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe! He was a great man.
I am a fan of Benedict, too, or as I like to call him, Papa Ratzi. He was unfortunately dealt a face that many found creepy to look at, but his writings were insightful, intellectual, and highly satisfying to read.
Francis can take a flying leap as far as I care.
Well, I’m ready to go buy some guns!
It’s never a bad time to go buy guns.
I’m planning on picking something up on Black Friday.
What? No idea yet.
Rifle or handgun?
Probably a handgun, but not entirely sure.
I think I will do a black friday FF next week.
All the Lewis quotes are from the same essay: Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.
“it is significant that while there is a word ‘profiteer’ to stigmatize those who make allegedly excessive profits, there is no such word as ‘wageer’ or ‘losseer.’”
-H. Hazlitt
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite threads ever! ?✂️?
“I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be much worse if life *were* fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
–Marcus Cole (fictional character)
Great. Now that you’ve alerted the universe to another Babylon 5 actor who isn’t dead he’s going to have a mysterious heart attack.
I admit it’s pretty depressing to look at those group cast photos and tick off the ones who have passed. Esp Jerry Doyle, may he RIP. And that moon-faced assassin of joy, Stephen Furst.
“Very sad life. Probably have very sad death. But, at least there is symmetry.” –Zathras
Grim Reaper missed Walter Koenig and got his son instead.
Geez, I missed that about his son. Depression sucks hard. RIP, Andrew.
Huh…..[checks Google] SONOFABITCH! I did not know that, and I don’t know why I didn’t.
Well….shit.
I introduced my husband to Babylon 5 last month – we just watched the episode where Marcus is introduced.
The Michael O’Hare story is quite sad – I didn’t know until recently why he left after Season 1.
“Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?”
– Robert Nozick
A tidy explanation of why alt-lite memes drive the Institutional Left into such frothing madness.
“The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin? … They are laughing at Nietzsche yet… ”
-Mencken
(If you can’t tell, he’s one of my all time favorites)
Yet more Mencken.
“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
please stop before Winston shows up
“Damn, niggas wanna stick me for my papers”
– David Koch
“And the forest was all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw. “
Rush
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Too soon, I clicked.
I love that Mencken quote. I suspect he would have considered himself proven right at least one President ago.
i’m pretty sure he’d have called it by Gerald Ford, at least.
“Cash rules everything around me” -method man.
“Money isn’t real since we went of the gold standard.” -Dwight K Shrute.
“Oh I don’t want to do heroin, I need the government to take care of me.” Ish- Ron Paul.
Really, all of your quotes are great
“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
—William Adama
I teach my people correct principles, and they govern themselves.
Joseph Smith, Jr.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet
Taxman!
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
Don’t ask me what I want it for (Aahh Mr. Wilson)
If you don’t want to pay some more (Aahh Mr. Heath)
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me
Taxman!
Guns don’t kill people; the government does. – Dale Gribble
“Fuck you, cut spending” – All Libertarians
TANSTAAFL!
-Attributed to Robert A. Heinlein
Not lapping assholes but articles like this. This is why you Glibs have become my personal time-spiral. Merci buckets!