There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. –Bertrand Russell
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. –Franklin Roosevelt, in a letter to Edward Mandell House, November 21, 1933
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. –Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.– George Kennan head of U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, 1948
In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; / And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; / And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew; / And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up. –Martin Niemoeller
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. –Aldous Huxley
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. –Frederick Douglass
Good prose is like a window pane. –George Orwell
What luck for rulers, that men do not think. –Adolf Hitler
Gradually, by selective breeding the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organised insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton. –Bertrand Russell
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. –Friedrich Hayek
At this point we are essentially the animal version of a midwinter strawberry that is the size of an apricot and tastes like sour cardboard. –J. Cain
Men cannot be forced to be free, nor can they even be forced to be virtuous. To a certain extent, it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue – or of vice. –Frank S. Meyer
A self-governing republic cannot be equated with industrial society; an industrial society may be ruled by tyrants, and obviously so: the Soviet regime rules an industrial society. There is no requirement of industrial society which bears the slightest resemblance to the requirements of liberty. This is because a citizen is not a worker and the virtues of citizens are not the virtues of employees. For the most part, their virtues are diametrically opposite–independence as opposed to conformity, equality as opposed to subordination, the habit of self-rule as opposed to the habits of obedience. –Walter Karp