Collecting quotes is a recent thing for me. It started about 6 years ago when I started paying a lot more attention to politics. People like to draw attention to a situation by using words that have been used before. And why not? If a situation has been described perfectly once before, use it. No point reinventing the wheel. I started collecting the best quotes I encountered. Here are 57 of them with some – occasional – added context from me. They are mostly in the order that I encountered them. However, I have grouped quotes by author and, in a couple of instances, by sub-theme. The main theme that unites these quotes is that Governments accrue too much power and that only a minority of people appreciate the dangers of powerful governments:
1) ‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.’
— Friedrich Hayek
2) ‘The skillful propagandist has power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.’ — Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
3) ‘In Britain, everything is policed except crime.’ – Mark Steyn
A couple from Mencken:
4) ‘The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing
superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest,
insane, intolerable.’ – H. L. Mencken
5) ‘The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.’ -H. L. Mencken
6) ‘There are two types of people in the world: people who think the government is looking out for their best interests and people who think.’ – Nathan Fraser
7) ‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.’
J.R.R.Tolkien The Letters of J. R R. Tolkien
Atticus: Hard to disagree with Tolkien’s sentiments
8) ‘To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.’
Bsock Chishelm, 1st director-general of the World Health Organization.
9) ‘Feminists want the power of men, the privileges of women and the responsibilities of neither.’ – source unknown
Some quotes on ‘tolerance’:
10) ‘Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.’ – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
11) ‘When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. … Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.’
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance
Atticus: isn’t this what we are seeing. There is no such thing as ‘Far Left’ whilst we witness ‘Far Right’ levelled at anyone who wonders whether the government’s immigration policies are correct.
12) ‘Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.’
G. K. Chesterton
13) ‘I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
14) ‘It is not the evil itself which is horrifying about our times – it is the way we not only tolerate evil, but have made a cult of positively worshiping weakness, depravity, rottenness and evil itself.’ – George Lincoln Rockwell
15) ‘Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.’
G.K. Chesterton
Atticus: Having studied Spengler, I do not think civilisations ‘forget’, I think that they become embarrassed by policies that were the source of their success and seek to distance themselves from such policies. An example in the contemporary West would be ‘ethnic homogeneity’ which is now viewed as unacceptable yet drove the success of Western culture.
16) ‘The state did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake , as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.’ -G. K. Chesterton
Atticus: Chesterton is great. Here’s another one:
‘A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend
what is good.’
– G. K. Chesterton
Here is a set from Schopenauer who, for a long time, I was only aware of due to a reference to him in Monty Python’s ‘Meaning Of Life’:
17) ‘What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.’ – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
18) ‘All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’ – Arthur Schopenhauer
19) ‘Because women in truth exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends here, they live more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual’. – Arthur Schopenhauer
20) ‘Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces
and putting them together
again in new shapes of
your own choosing.’ – George Orwell, 1984
Here is a set on ‘Propaganda’:
21) ‘The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking to annihilate the truth.’ – Gary Kasparov
22) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.’ —Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
23) ‘Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.’
– Michael Rivero
24) ‘A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information, And, stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.’
Carl Sagan
25) ‘At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats’. -P.J. O’Rourke
26) ‘Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.’
– Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: Philosophy of History & Politics
27) ‘Fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it.’
– Samuel Johnson
28) ‘We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be
free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.’
-J Robert Oppenheimer
29) ‘All things are subject to
interpretation whichever
interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.’
– Friedrich Nietzsche
30) ‘The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the Iaws.’ – Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
31) ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’
– Upton Sinclair
32) ‘Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.’ – Plato
33) ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
– Henry David Thoreau
I think I found this next quote in a ‘below the line’ comment section, online, and thought it worth keeping. I do not have a link to the article that prompted it:
34) ‘Pathetic, empty and unproductive people don’t care about losing their freedom, because they weren’t doing anything meaningful with it anyways. Many of these same people rejoice at the loss of freedom for others because it makes them feel better about their miserable existence.’ – Murray @Rothbard1776
Here is a brace from Solzhenitsyn:
35) ‘Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.’ – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
36) ‘A Marxist system is recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes political opponents.’ – Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
And a brace from Spengler:
37) ‘What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.’ – Oswald Spengler
38) ‘Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.’ – Oswald Spengler
39) ‘The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.’ – Samuel Adams. Natural Law.
40) ‘Post-totalitarianism arises when a system loses confidence in its own principles. It compensates not with overt tyranny but with coercive sentimentality: policing speech, narrowing debate and enforcing ritualised gestures of virtue in place of persuasion. It is a soft authoritarianism that no longer trusts its citizens and no longer quite trusts itself’ – Michael Rainsborough
A set from John Locke:
41) ‘Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.’ John Locke
42) ‘Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.’
John Locke,
43) ‘New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.’
John Locke
44) ‘Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’ – Albert Einstein
A brace from Belloc:
45) ‘It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.’
– Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property
46) ‘In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.’ – Hilaire Belloc
And a brace from Alexander Hamilton:
47) ‘Those who stand for nothing fall for everything.’ – Alexander Hamilton
48) ‘Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.’
Alexander Hamilton
49) ‘This is a declaration: We will not reform their system, we will destroy it. We will not beg for freedom, we will seize it. We will not wait for saviors, we will be our own salvation.
– Joseph Keel
50) ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’
Sigmund Freud
51) ‘Scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the unpardonable sin’ – Thomas Huxley
52) ‘If you want to change society, you don’t start with the men – you start with the women, because women influence everything downstream: the home, the children, the social expectations, and yes, even the behavior of men.’ – Source unknown
53) ‘People who value social conformity… support the government when it wants to increase its control over social behavior and punish nonconformity…valuing social conformity increases the motivation for placing restrictions on behavior.’ – Stanley Feldman
54) ‘A nation of people who just do what they are told by the ‘experts’ without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny’ – Ron Paul
55) ‘You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words
control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.’ – Warren Buffett
56) ‘My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.’ – Julius Evola, when on trial after World War II.
57) ‘The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies
one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost
identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method
Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising and vigorless
Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other
party, which will be none of these things but will still persue, with new vigor
approximately the same basic policies’ – Carroll Quigley Tragedy And Hope (1966)
Atticus Fox 