SOUND FAMILIAR?

… After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannise, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, ‘til each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1837)


Suspicion must always fall on those who attempt to silence their opponents.

~Ian Buckley

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

H. L. Mencken


We will not recognize it as it rises. It will wear no black shirts here. It will probably have no marching songs. It will rise out of a congealing of a group of elements that exist here and that are the essential components of Fascism....

It will be at first decorous, humane, glowing with homely American sentiment. But a dictatorship cannot remain benevolent. To continue, it must become ruthless. When this stage is reached we shall see that appeal by radio, movies, and government-controlled newspapers to all the worst instincts and emotions of our people. The rough, the violent, the lawless men will come to the surface and into power. This is the terrifying prospect as we move along our present course.

John T. Flynn, American Mercury,
February 1941


This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. – Plato


The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

~Ron Paul

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

--Hayek

"Sending in good people to reform the state is like sending in virgins to reform the whorehouse." --

Albert Jay Nock


In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson asked how, "one generation of men has a right to bind another." He concluded by saying, "No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."

But contracting debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence is precisely what Americans are doing. In fact, they are contracting debts that increase over the course of their own lifetimes.

Why, the Government is merely...a temporary servant...Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

~Mark Twain

-flynn