Some meaningful quotes....

The man of system... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.
He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
-- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-- H. L. Mencken

Those who criticize me for alleged visionary tendencies are, more often than not, themselves the defenders of the most pervasive of utopian schemes: constitutional democracy. Most Westerners have an unquestioning attachment to the belief that political power can be limited by the scribbling of words on parchment! Most of us have been conditioned in the myth that a so-called "separation of powers" among the various branches of government will generate a competition assuring that governmental authority will not be exceeded.
-- Butler Shaffer

Considering how often throughout history even intelligent people have been proved to be wrong, it is amazing that there are still people who are convinced that the only reason anyone could possibly say something different from what they believe is stupidity or dishonesty.
-- Thomas Sowell

Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
-- Patrick J. Buchanan

“[The American citizen]...lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves."
-- Daniel Boorstin, the 12th Librarian of Congress

There is approximately one lawyer in the US for every 300 people. In the UK there is one lawyer for every 650 people and in Japan there is only one lawyer for every 6,600 people. This is a clear sign of too much bureaucracy, too much red tape, too many regulations, and too many lawsuits.

"Patriotism cannot be a love of government. Patriotism rises above the government as a mountain towers above a blade of grass. When we think of our country and a feeling of love and devotion wells up within us, it should spring from the reality of what our country is and means, and not from the government, which is the least of all our blessings."
-- Robert LeFevre

"The proper objective of war is not military victory but a politically advantageous peace".
-- Maj.-Gen J.F.C. Fuller

"One more such victory and we are ruined."
-- King Pyrrhus of Epirus after the battle of Heraclea in 280 BC.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through 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 Fraser Tytler, Late 18th century historian and jurist.

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.
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

A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.
-- Thomas Sowell

"A Government big enough to provide everything you need is big enough to take everything you have."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"They quarrel over who will mold the human clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mold. The plans differ; the planners are all alike..."
-- Frédéric Bastiat

Socialism... 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.
-- F. Bastiat

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

"If any person is willing to enfranchise his slave, let him ... deliver him free arms, to wit, a lance and a sword; thereupon he is a free man."
-- Norman law code

"Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.”
-- Daniel P. Moynihan

“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take government off the backs of the people.”
-- William O. Douglas

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
-- H.L. Mencken

‘If ignorance paid dividends, most Americans could make a fortune out of what they don't know about economics”.
-- Luther H. Hodges

“The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow citizens. Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.”
-- Woodrow Wilson

“The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force.”
-- John James Ingalls

“Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.”
-- Aristotle

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
H.L. Mencken

“Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”
-- Nikita Krushchev



Terry