(as of 2021-09-30)
”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 an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them
imaginary.” ― H.L. Mencken
“A great civilization is
not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
--- Will Durant
“The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and will wander off into myths.” --- 2 Timothy 4:3-4
“People crushed by laws,
have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they
will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing
to lose will always be dangerous." -Edmund Burke, 1777
"All tyrannies rule through
fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely
exclusively on force." — George Orwell (1903-1950)
"Of all tyrannies, a
tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive." — C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
“Experience should teach us
to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s
purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert
to repel invasion of the liberty by evil-minded rulers. The
greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” --- Justice Louis
Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)
"In this present crisis,
government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the
problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that
they know so much that isn't so." — Ronald Reagan
"If we lose freedom here,
there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth." —
Ronald Reagan
"Government exists to
protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits
is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." — Ronald Reagan
"Remember that every
government service, every offer of government-financed security, is paid
for in the loss of personal freedom... In the days to come, whenever a
voice is raised telling you to let the government do it, analyze very
carefully to see whether the suggested service is worth the personal
freedom which you must forgo in return for such service." — Ronald
Reagan
"You can't go back and
change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the
ending" --- C.S. Lewis
"The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity." --- Longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer.
"Power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are
almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not
authority: still more when you super-add the tendency or the certainty
of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the
office sanctifies the holder of it." ---Lord Acton, 1887