“National socialism and international socialism are in close competition… It’s a hard truth for Americans to face, that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.”
Category Archives: Quotes
Mark Twain On Newspapers
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” – Mark Twain
Hitchens On Then And Now In Gaza
“To read Benny Morris is to be quite able—and quite free—to doubt that there should ever have been an Israeli state to begin with. But to see Hamas at work is to resolve that whatever replaces or follows Zionism, it must not be the wasteland of Islamic theocracy.”
Christopher Hitchens in Slate.
Hitchens is always an interesting writer and the full article is worth reading….even if it is infuriating.
Erich Fromm On Reverence For Life
“Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: ‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19)”
Erich Fromm
Churchill on Fighting
“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
-Winston Churchill
Solzhenitsyn on the censorship of fashion…
“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people’s minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events….”
More from Solzhenitsyn’s commencement speech at Harvard in June 1978.
John le Carre on domestic fowl…
Ashe, the homosexual communist agent, approaching Alex Leamas, the ex- British intelligence officer, who is sitting on a bench:
“Do you like birds? The ones with the white collars are wild. The others are domesticated. With people it’s the other way around.”
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John le Carre (1965)
Mencken on slitting throats
” Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats” H.L. Mencken
Cicero on what the body politic needs…
“The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.”
-Cicero
Martin Luther on why some battles are more important than others….
“Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther