Unfit

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation."
--Eugene V. Debs

Antidote

"The best antidote for crime is justice. The irony we often fail to appreciate is that the more justice people enjoy, the fewer crimes they commit. Crime is the natural offspring of an unjust society."
--Gerry Spence

Absolutes

"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."
--Paul Johnson,
 Historian

Innoculated

"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
Source: The Age Of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330

Complete

"All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don’t think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it’s all marvelous fun."
--Molly Ivins,
Texas Observer, "Notes From A Rookie", March 26, 1971

Fetters

"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'."
--Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869-1948)
Source: M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, The Politics Of Nonviolent Action (1973), p. 59.

Framing II

"Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner."
--Jim Kuypers
Assistant Professor of Communications, Virginia Tech

Traveling

"My home is in Heaven. I'm just traveling through this world."
--Billy Graham
(November 7, 1918 - February 21, 2018)

Con

"Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game."
--Terence McKenna

Secular

"Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn....

No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names."

--Art Buchwald

Space II

Thirty spokes unite at the single hub;
It is the empty space which makes the wheel useful.
Mold clay to form a bowl;
It is the empty space which makes the bowl useful.
Cut out windows and doors;
It is the empty space which makes the room useful.

--Lao Tzu (Laozi)

Anything V

Howard Beale: [laughing to himself] But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...

[collapses in a prophetic swoon as the audience erupts in thunderous applause]

--"Network" (1976)

Drives

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
--Adolf Hitler

Eyes III

"It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous."
--Brené Brown

Molecules

"What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
"Bluebeard" (1987)

Insignificant

"What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism?  Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism.  The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure."
--Leonard E. Read
(1898-1983) founder of the Foundation for Economic Education

Infinite II

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
--Douglas Adams,
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

Unprovoked

"My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension. Flesh eating is unprovoked murder."
--Benjamin Franklin

Detatchment

"At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all."
--H.G. Wells,
"The War Of The Worlds"

License

"Where a license is legal permission from an authority (i.e. State government, medical board) to do something that would otherwise be deemed illegal to do, a vaccine is legal permission to inject toxins that would otherwise be deemed illegal to ingest."
--Rosanne Lindsay

Persistent III

"At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent."
--Joseph Sobran
(1946-2010) Columnist

Bully

Years ago, I had an experience with a playground bully. (...) This bully was after me and he was gonna do this, he was gonna do that, all the other kids were terrified of this bully. And he came to me one night, just before immediately the school was over, and he said to me "Icke, I'm beating you up tonight, you're gonna meet me here." And he expected me to run. And I said "alright", and I took him on. I never threw a punch! He was trying to hit me and trying to hit me, and I was just, you know, a bit like Neo in The Matrix, only at normal speed. Cause he was all front! He was all front! His power in that playground perception of his power. Look him in the eye, "come on then, let's have ya", gone. Finished! Over! And that night, his power of that playground disappeared, cause people realized he was a fraud as the word got out.
--David Icke

Morrow

"If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done."
--John Lubbock
(1834-1913) English naturalist, banker, statesman

Reform V

"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement

Planning IV

"When people were committed to the idea that in the field of religion only one plan must be adopted, bloody wars resulted. With the acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom these wars ceased. The market economy safeguards peaceful economic co-operation because it does not use force upon the economic plans of the citizens. If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms."
--Ludwig von Mises,
"Planned Chaos" (1947)

Powers

"The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence."
--John F. Kennedy

Freedom XI

"An individual should not have too much freedom.
A nation should have absolute freedom."
--Sun Yat-sen
(1866-1925) Chinese revolutionary, first president and founding father of the Republic of China ("Nationalist China")

Decision

"Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is 'Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,' but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory."
--Philip K. Dick,
"A Scanner Darkly" (1977)