Why are we hated?

  how did we get to be so hated?

Well, there are many odious traits that Americans have that the rest of the world doesn't like.  Constant boasting, with not much to boast about.  That gets on other people's nerves.  The idea that somehow or other the whole world belongs to us. Everybody should do what we tell them to do, they don't really like that.

Gore Vidal (May 14th, 2008)

Root of Tyrants

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurture into greatness...
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Plato (The Republic, book 8, 400BC)

Two Faced

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.

Maureen Murphy

Boisterous Sea of Liberty

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson, April 24, 1796

Debt

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt as only an inconvenience.  You will find it a calamity.  

Samuel Johnson (1758)

Origin of Rights

we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach, or gather berries from the hedge-no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments-no right to improve and adorn their habitations-nay, no right to have habitations-no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place-till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them.  If the principle be true in one case it must be universally true; and, according to it, parents had no right to love and respect their offspring, and infants no right to draw nourishment from the breast of their mothers, until the legislator-foreseeing, fore calculating the immense advantages to the human race of establishing the long list of rights and duties which grow out of our affections, and constitute our happiness-had established them by his decree.

Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, 1832

One Government over Cheese

How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?

French President Chales deGaulle (1962)

Conscience and State

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Albert Einstein

Debt

Any government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns.  But you and I know that a continuance of that habit means the poorhouse.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932)

Questions

Yet, dumbfounded or not by the smoke and mirrors, why do we suffer so much at the hands of those ruler-governors, if we are many and they are few? Why do we become enchanted with the belief that our ruler-governors are just and benevolent, when we experience evidence otherwise every day, everywhere? Why do we allow so many abuses of liberty and property, if the power the rulers possess is only that which we bestow onto them? Why do we let them treat us like beasts?

 Helio Beltrão (XXIII Forum da Liberdade, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 12, 2010)

Define Fascism

Fascism: "The retention of private ownership of the means of production under centralized governmental control"

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed 1983

Inflation as tax

Inflation is an immoral tax that leads to immoral values

South American Bank Officer (~1990)

Violence

As they say, violence begets violence.
Just make sure that you are the "begets violence" part. 

John Jolly (04/16/2010)

Inherent?

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. 

Winston Churchill

License and Right

no state can convert a liberty into a privilege by demanding a license or charging a fee

Paraphrase of U.S. Supreme Court Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105; made by Steven Miller (2009)

Consequence of Sloth

The hand of the diligent shall bear rule:
but the slothful shall be under tribute

Solomon, Son of David (reign: 971 - 931 BC)

Monopoly on Violence

what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence.

Senator Barak Obama, (July 2nd, 2008 in an interview with the Military Times Editorial Board)

Wishes and Action

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Old Proverb

State of Conscience

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Albert Einstien

China's Private Enterprises

The diversity of production, commodity economy, and all sorts of small enterprises boomed in the countryside, as if a strange army had appeared suddenly from nowhere. This is not the achievement of our central government.

Deng Xiaoping, People's Daily, 13 June 1987

Tendency of force

Force always attracts men of low morality.

Albert Einstein

Patriotism

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein

Totalitarian and Keynes

The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire

John Maynard Keynes (in his foreword to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory)

Democracy is

Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie.

Doug Casey (4/2/2010)

Anarchy is

Anarchy is simply a form of political organization that does not put one ruler, or ruling body, over everyone in a society

Doug Casey (4/2/2010)

Polictics

Politics is a means of preventing people from taking part in what properly concerns them.

Paul Valery

Of Men and Clocks

To think that I attempted to force the reason and conscience of thousands of men into one mould and I cannot make two clocks agree?

Emperor Charles V (1550's)

Change

nothing endures but change.

Heraclitus(a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher)

Einstien and Prevention of War

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein