“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books” — 16th Century French philosopher and judge, Étienne de La Boétie, in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).
Read MoreThoreau on Do-Gooders
"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life" — Henry David Thoreau, 19th Century American philosopher and author of Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Read MoreWatson on Conformity
"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost" -- Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM (1952-1971) and U.S. Ambassador to the USSR (1979-1981). He also wrote, “If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.”
Read MoreHayek on Equality
“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, 'a new form of servitude’" — Nobel laureate and Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek in Individualism and the Economic Order, University of Chicago Press (1948).
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Reagan on Marx and Lenin
“How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin” — 40th U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Read MoreKirk on Civilization
“Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle” — Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and many other books.
Read MoreGibson on Winners and Losers
“The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program. The loser says it may be possible, but it’s difficult; the winner says it may be difficult, but it’s possible” — tennis champion and professional golfer Althea Gibson (see https://bit.ly/2J444eE).
Read MoreSowell on Intellectuals
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it” — economist Thomas Sowell in “The Survival of the Left,” Forbes magazine (Sept. 8, 1997).
Read MoreAdams on Virtue
“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man….The sum of it all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people” — Samuel Adams, American patriot and organizer of the Boston Tea Party in an essay published in The Advertiser (1748).
Read MoreHumphrey on Gun Control
“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible” — former U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Vice President of the U.S. and 1968 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey in Guns magazine, February 1960. No kidding.
Read MoreSolzhenitsyn on Socialism
“In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as ‘we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology’. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion” — Nobel laureate and author of The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in St. Austin Review interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr., February 2003.
Read MoreDisney on Forefathers
“To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we still embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual” — cartoonist, film maker and theme park pioneer Walt Disney. See https://bit.ly/2pX7K9z.
Read MoreYeltsin on Freedom
“We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it” — Boris Yeltsin, first president of post-Soviet Russia.
Read MoreLivy on History
“The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid” — Roman history Livy.
Read MoreHurston on Discrimination
“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me” — Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston in How It Feels to be Colored Me (1928).
Read MoreWatts on Character
“Character does count. For too long we have gotten by in a society that says the only thing right is to get by and the only thing wrong is to get caught. Character is doing what's right when nobody is looking” — former college and professional football player and U.S. Congressman J. C. Watts at the 1996 GOP National Convention.
Read MoreChydenius on Welfare
"The more opportunities there are in a society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent" -- 18th Century Finnish economist and Swedish parliamentarian Anders Chydenius in The National Gain, 1765. He also wrote, in Thoughts on the Natural Rights of Servants and Peasants (1778) that “The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.”
Read MoreHolt on Education
“The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners” — education innovator John Holt in Growing Without Schooling magazine, no. 40 (1984). He also wrote, “No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors” in Escape from Childhood (1974).
Read MoreHerbert on Power
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted” — science fiction writer Frank Herbert in Chapterhouse Dune (1985). He also said, “The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind” in The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert, in Mother Earth News No. 69 (May/June 1981).
Read MoreHeinlein on Life
"At least once, every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that 'news' is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch, his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness" -- science fiction writer Robert Heinlein.
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