We Americans are the ultimate innocents, We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling the truth. - Sydney Schanberg, former NY Times reporter

"The individual may stand upon his constitutional rights as a citizen. He is entitled to carry on his private business in his own way. His power to contract is unlimited. He owes no duty to the state or to his neighbors to divulge his business, or to open his doors to an investigation, so far as it may tend to criminate him. He owes no such duty to the state, since he receives nothing therefrom, beyond the protection of his life and property. His rights are such as existed by the law of the land long antecedent to the organization of the state, and can only be taken from him by due process of law, and in accordance with the Constitution. Among his rights are a refusal to incriminate himself, and the immunity of himself and his property from arrest or seizure except under a warrant of the law. He owes nothing to the public so long as he does not trespass upon their rights. "
-- US Supreme Court in the Hale vs Heckel decision, 1906.

"Moderatio est figmentum"
-- Author Unknown (Latin - translation: "Control is an illusion").

"Paranoia is just knowing all the facts".
-- William S. Borroughs

"A socialist is merely a thief who's got the government to go along with him."
-- Darwin Branch

The desire to rule is the mother of heresies.
-- St. John Chrysostom

"The budget must be balanced, government indebtedness must be reduced, the arrogant authorities must be moderated and controlled, people should learn to work again instead of living of the public dole."
-- Cicero (106-43BC)

"...You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions."
-- Bill Clinton speaking in Ireland; August 1998

"To see the right and not to do it is cowardice."
-- Confucius

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
-- Richard Feynman

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."
-- David Friedman

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India , history will look upon the Act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
-- Mohandas Gandhi, from An Autobiography

"The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue."
-- Emma Goldman

"Poor Human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded person to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature."
-- Emma Goldman

"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
-- Siddhārtha Gautama (aka Buddha)

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
-- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

"A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life."
-- Robert Heinlein

Those who cling to the untrue doctrine that violence never settles anything would be advised to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
-- Robert A. Heinlein.

"When you put your faith in 'big government' for any reason, you end up an apologist for mass murder"
- Karl Hess

"When you dance with the devil, it's not the devil who changes."
-- Max Hollywood (Movie: 8mm)

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-- Aldous Huxley

"It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free - to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and act.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective."
-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"...no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
-- Thomas Jefferson 1816

"So lets make this clear, we're not saying that you'll be safer if you have a gun or that you might not get robbed, we're saying something much heavier, we're saying we need the government to be afraid of its citizens, we want our rulers to think carefully about what they try to take from us. And we need to remember they can only take from us what we give them. You see Mr Smug can call the police against a gang banger but who does he call against the police? We are discussing on a public TV show the idea of the violent overthrow of the country and its covered by free speech, how cool is that? And we can't trust the government to be OK with that. we need to trust the Americans around us.
-- Penn Jillette (From the TV show BullSh*t).

"Quis custodeit ipsos custodes?"
-- Juvenal (Roman Poet, translation: "Who shall watch the watchers themselves?")

"Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence. "
-- Juvenal

"Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing"
-- Miecyslay Kasprzyk

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live"
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-- Margaret Mead

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
-- H.L. 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.
-- H.L. Mencken

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.
-- H. L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
-- H.L. Mencken

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.
-- H.L. Mencken

"People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict."
-- Ludwig Von Mises

"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-- PJ O'Rourke

Dean: My dear fellow, who will let you?
Roark: That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
-- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"Typically, we think of CEOs as capitalists. A few aren't capitalists, but collectivists, or statists. They use government to achieve their ends with tariffs and taxes and by paying their favorite senators."
-- TJ Rodgers

"Most people who read The Communist Manifesto probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of 'the workers'."
-- Thomas Sowell

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
-- Lysander Spooner

"I have no fear, I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."
-- Dr. Wafa Sultan

"When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied."
-- Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Roman Historian

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Laws are rules, made by people who govern by means of organized violence, for non-compliance with which the non-complier is subjected to blows, to loss of liberty, or even to being murdered.
-- Leo Tolstoy

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
-- Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a louse fiscal responsibility, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”
-- Alexander Tyler, (in his 1770 book, Cycle of Democracy)

"Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito." -- Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI; ("Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.", motto of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute)

"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero."
-- Voltaire, 1694-1778

"Is it possible that God not only plays dice with the Devil, but does so with loaded dice?"
-- Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale)

"Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity."
-- Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale)

"When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice"
-- Lin Yutang