"With a concession of responsibility unmatched by generations before ours, we have entrusted our lives and futures to professionals and experts who convince us that we have too little knowledge or wit to make any decisions of importance about the management of society."
Dean Koontz
"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know."
William Saroyan
"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now... and do it."
William Durant
"It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see."
Flannery O'Connor
"You can fool all the people all the time - if the advertising budget is big enough."
Ed Rollins
"Encouragement of consumption is no benefit to commerce, for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of good government to stimulate production, of bad government to encourage consumption."
Jean-Baptiste Say,
"A Treatise on Political Economy", 1803
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
Thomas Jefferson
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."
Robert Heinlein
"America, true patriots recognize, is a nation and a system of laws and institutions designed to ensure individual liberty. The UN - a few charitable enterprises notwithstanding - is an expense-account boondoggle largely designed to fill the wallets of kleptocrats and assuage the egos of runner-up nations. And yet, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, many [Leftists] seem to think that the UN is somehow a democratic institution because its members vote. Never mind that many of these votes are cast by people who don't represent their constituents in any democratic sense. The same people who despise the federal and republican aspects of the United States - states' rights, the electoral college, indirect elections, etc. - will swoon over the moral authority of UN 'votes' criticizing the United States. This is like having a gang of criminals 'vote' on which old lady they're going rob and kill and then, looking at the corpse, say, 'Well, it was a democratic decision'."
Jonah Goldberg
"Everyone likes to say 'Hitler did this' and 'Hitler did that'. But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to WWII, was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster."
Michael Rivero
"History by apprising [citizens] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
Thomas Jefferson
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
H.L. Mencken
"Parties are ... censors of the conduct of each other, and useful watchmen for the public. Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests.
In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, ... Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object."
Thomas Jefferson
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
Aldous Huxley