Quotes
Selected quotes on government, politics, and the future of Western Civilization:
Politics
John Adams
"Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
"A government of laws, and not of men."
"When annual elections end, there slavery begins."
"You will never know how much it cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
"Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property... a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever."
"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it."
Samuel Adams
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty."
"If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security."
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Omar Ahmed, director of Council on American Islamic Relations
"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any faith, but to become dominant. The Qur'an should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
Aristotle
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotism."
"It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition."
Isaac Asimov
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
Julian Assange
"Nearly every war that had started in the past 50 years, has been a result of media lies."
Stephen K. Bannon
"Ask yourself, 'What is my task and what is my purpose?' If your answer is 'to save my country,' this country will be saved."
John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza
"When you mix politics and science, you get politics."
Frédéric Bastiat
"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."
Joe Biden
"We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
Otto von Bismark
"What we learn from History is that no one learns from History."
"Politics is the art of the possible."
Pat Buchanan
"It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no 'proposition nation' can erase... Race matters. Ethnicity matters. History matters"
"The custodians of 'our democracy' are failing in the most fundamental of duties of any political system - to protect and defend the people. No failed regime can justify its permanence by claiming some inherent superiority."
George Carlin
"Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners."
"The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly."
Tucker Carlson
"Demographic change is the key to the Democratic party's political ambitions. Let's say that again for emphasis because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate. Demographic change is the key to the Democratic party’s political initiative. In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country...
Mass immigration increases the power of the Democratic Party. Period. That's the reason Democrats support it. It's the only reason.
Winston Churchill
"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."
"There can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state. Liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism."
"You can always count on America to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other options."
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Martin Van Crevald
"Immigration is a form of war in which violence is delayed."
Nicolas Gomez Davila
"Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it."
Theodore Douglas
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
Theodore Dalrymple
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, the lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey
"Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off."
Declaration of Independence
"A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and moral, then it is not a political party. It is a conspiracy to seize power."
Sam Francis
"'Democracy,' as the neocons and the President and most others who are enthusiastic about it use the word, means the centralized leviathan state under the firm and unqualified control of the managerial bureaucracy and those political forces able to influence it."
"If the only problem with illegal immigration is that it's illegal, if you're not willing to say mass immigration by itself is a problem, then why should we have any laws against it at all?"
Benjamin Franklin
"A republic, if you can keep it."
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
"Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins."
"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature."
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Milton Friedman
"You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."
"Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money... What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
"The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance, and produce the effects, of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Antonio Gramsci
"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
Alexander Hamilton
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
"If it be asked, 'What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a republic?', the answer would be, 'An inviolable respect for the Constitution and laws.'"
"When a government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense - to fight the government."
"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything."
Victor Davis Hanson
"The old politics of right versus left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization - or its destroyers."
F.A. Hayek
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not."
What social justice amounts to [is] a demand that the state should treat people differently in order to place them in the same position... to make people equal... would force government to treat people very unequally indeed."
David Horowitz
"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution."
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
"The principal responsibility of Western leaders is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization."
John Jay
"Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."
Thomas Jefferson
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
"The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them."
"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny."
"Any government powerful enough to give the people all that they want is also powerful enough to take from the people all that they have."
"The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much."
"The government will one day be corrupt and filled with liars, and the people will flock to the one that tells the truth."
"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"Nothing is so unequal as the equal treatment of unequal people."
Barbara Jordan
"Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave."
"It is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest."
Henry Johnson, Jr.
"One thing we forget to know is that failed states once had civil, constitutional laws that were put in place. When these laws don't work for all that's when dictatorship arises and injustices hug the land, and prosperities becomes the luxury of the few, not the masses."
John Paul Jones
"I have not yet begun to fight!"
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
"There is no time in history where the people who were censoring speech were the good guys."
Henry Kissinger
"It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that."
Viclav Klaus
"You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state."
Kari Lake
"When a man flees war, he takes his family with him. When a man heads to war, he leaves his family behind. Our Nation is being infiltrated by Military-Aged Men from every corner of the globe."
Gov. Dick Lamm
"It is a Blessing for an Individual to be Bilingual; It is a Curse for a Society to be Bilingual."
Mark Levin
C.S. Lewis
"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
A.J. Liebling
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
Rush Limbaugh
"You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one."
Abraham Lincoln
"If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world... and I standing up boldly and alone... hurling defiance at [our] victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences... I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause... of the land of my life, my Liberty, and my love... But if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences... we never faltered."
James Madison
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."
"A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people."
Ludwig von Mises
"There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men."
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Insanity in individuals is rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule."
"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly."
George Orwell
"There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language."
"In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
"Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."
"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force."
"Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear."
P.J. O'Rourke
"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."
Thomas Paine
"These are the times that try men's souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
Enoch Powell
"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without 'fellow-feeling', especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist."
Ronald Reagan
"We dont have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well."
"Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."
"We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around."
"A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation."
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"As government expands, liberty contracts."
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
"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."
"Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives."
Theodore Roosevelt
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
"Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared."
"There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else."
Gad Saad
"Socialism / communism appeals to many people because on the surface it seems so 'fair, compassionate, and kind.' Of course, once you are able to think beyond that of a 5-year-old, you realize that it is the antithesis of fairness, compassion, and kindness. It is contrary to human nature, and hence it is always doomed to fail. But like the proverbial phoenix, it rises from the ashes to parasitize a new generation of imbeciles."
Carl Sagan
"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term."
Joseph Sobran
"Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It's Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don't grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn't conscious of it. And superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities."
Thomas Sowell
"Socialism has a record so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore it or evade it."
"Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other Whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks."
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'."
"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance."
"The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the party of the poor and the downtrodden."
"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal."
"Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them."
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive."
"Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in."
Joseph Stalin
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
Mary Steyn
"'Diversity' is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in 'multiculturalism' doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them."
"The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen."
Sun Tzu
"An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes."
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
Margaret Thatcher
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Alexis de Tocqueville
"I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself."
Arnold Toynbee
"The U.S. will set a record in the rate of rise - and fall of an empire. Between wide open borders and fall of the dollar and growing population against a declining resource base, the US will be defeated from within. Mobs will rule the streets in the nation that is now the third largest in the world and unable to support its population except by taking resources from other countries."
H.A. Scott Trask
"Multiculturalism is both a state religion and the ideology of the managerial class... How can the people rise up and overthrow their oppressors when there is no people, when the population is at one another's throats? Diversity is the ultimate guarantee against revolution"
Donald Trump
"This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost."
Harry S. Truman
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
Mark Twain
"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."
"If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you read a newspaper you are misinformed."
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
George Washington
"If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined."
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
"Truth will ultimately prevail where pains is taken to bring it to light."
Geert Wilders, Dutch politician
"Not all Muslims are terrorists but almost all terrorists are Muslims... I view Islam not as a religion, but as a dangerous, totalitarian ideology - equal to communism and fascism."
Walter Williams
"The founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III. Our founders intended for us to have a republican form of limited government... The word democracy appears in neither of our founding documents: our Declaration of Independence and Constitution."
Kevin Williamson, National Review
"Journalism is not a field marked by notably high intellectual standards, but the four-year journalism degree enables the pretense that it is a profession, like medicine, rather than a trade, like lard-rendering."
Edward O. Wilson
Regarding communism/socialism: "Great idea. Wrong species."
Growth
Al Bartlett
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
"Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?"
"Unlimited population growth cannot be sustained; you cannot sustain growth in the rates of consumption of resources. No species can overrun the carrying capacity of a finite land mass. This Law cannot be repealed and is not negotiable."
"Smart growth and dumb growth both destroy the environment. The only difference is that smart growth destroys the environment less rapidly than dumb growth, and smart growth destroys the environment with good taste. It's a little like buying a ticket on the Titanic. If you are smart, you go first class, and if you are dumb, or broke, you go steerage. But the end result is the same."
Norman Borlaug, winner of 1970 Nobel Peace Prize
"The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only."
Kenneth Boulding
"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
David Brower
"We feel you don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy."
"Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us and immigration is part of the problem it has to be addressed."
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer
"We must alert and organize the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Over-consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today."
Garrett Hardin
"A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero."
"'Sustainable growth' is an oxymoron."
"Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity."
"We are limited by the basic theorem of ecology, 'We can never do merely one thing'."
"Calling a ubiquitous problem a 'world problem' is useful only if there is a plausible worldwide solution."
"Overpopulation can be avoided only if borders are secure; otherwise poor and overpopulated nations will export their excess to richer and less populated nations."
"Never globalize a problem if it can possibly be dealt with locally."
"Every 'shortage' of supply is equally a 'longage' of demand."
"Of every well-meant proposal, ecologists ask a standard question: 'And then what?'"
Dr. Otis Graham
"Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all - ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet."
Dr. Henry W. Kendall, Nobel Laureate
"If we don't halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity - and will leave a ravaged world."
James Howard Kunstler
"The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime... so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it."
Gov. Dick Lamm
"Public policy and most of our institutions, as presently structured, assume boundless resources and no ecological limits. As a nation, we confidently proclaim that there are no limits that cannot be overcome, and around the world, endless growth also seems an assumption without challenge. It will be hard to change our thinking, but we must because we are bumping up against the reality of ecological limits. Nature has a different set of rules, and the larger ecosystem is totally indifferent to human moral codes."
Gaylord Nelson
"We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say 'I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration.'"
David Suzuki
"Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal."
Dr. John Tanton
"The stresses caused by population growth cannot be solved by international migration. They must be confronted by and within each individual nation. Fundamental to the concept of national rights and responsibilities is the duty of each nation to match its population with its political, social, and environmental resources, in both the short and the long term."
"No nation should exceed what the biologists call its 'carrying capacity'."
Edward O. Wilson
"The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic."
"It's not the Nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life-forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth."
Walter Youngquist
"As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do this century, will the "civil" part of civilization survive? As we both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian bargain - selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid."
Ethics
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Albert Einstein
"The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it."
Mahatma Gandhi
"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained."
Garrett Hardin
"It takes five years for a willing person's mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo."
"There is nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking compassionate person."
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
"A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil."
Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society."
Aldo Leopold
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
Peyton Conway March
"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life-happiness, freedom and peace of mind-are always attained by giving them to someone else."
Karl Marx
"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism."
John Muir
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
"Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt."
"I'd rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains."
Plato
"Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule."
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Daniel Quinn
"Upwards of one hundred species... mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety... are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth's carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence... thanks to technologies that most people, I'm afraid, think of as technologies of peace."
Ayn Rand
"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
Theodore Roosevelt
"To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by rights to hand down to them."
Salman Rushdie
"Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read."
Carl Sagan
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken..."
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep-seated need to believe."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Ideology - that is what gives evil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination..."
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."
Thomas Sowell
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."
C.H. Spurgeon
"Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right."
Jonathan Swift
"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."
Henry David Thoreau
"As to adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone."
"What's the use of a fine house if you don't have a planet to put it on?"