Downfall

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing."
--Adolf Hitler (April 11, 1942)

Questions II

"It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer."
--Albert Einstein

Self-Correcting

"On some dimension or other, every event in life can be causing only one of two things: either it is good for you, or it is bringing up what you need to look at in order to create good for you.

Evolution is win-win--life is self-correcting."

--Deepak Chopra,
"The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life"

Nothing VIII

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
--Charles Bukowski

Establish

"The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts."
--William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
American Unitarian preacher
Source: Spiritual Freedom, 1830

Autonomous

"There are occasions when a worthless, insignificant book acquires significance as a scrap of litmus paper exposing a culture's intellectual state. Such a book is Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner…. The book itself is like Boris Karloff's embodiment of Frankenstein's monster: a corpse patched with nuts, bolts and screws from the junkyard of philosophy (Pragmatism, Social Darwinism, Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, with some nails by Hume, threads by Russell, and glue by the New York Post). The book's voice, like Karloff's, is an emission of inarticulate, moaning growls — directed at a special enemy: 'Autonomous Man.'"
--Ayn Rand,
"The Ayn Rand Lette"r, Vol. 1, No. 8 (January 17, 1972).

Worst II

"One of the worst elements of Obama's career, which no one talks about, is that he voted twice for a bill that said, if there is a botched abortion, if the child emerges from the womb alive, it should be okay to kill the baby.  We have elected a president - twice! - who agrees with infanticide."
--Nat Hentoff

Universe

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
"Hocus Pocus" (1990)

Miseries

"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."
--Friedrich August von Hayek
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972)

Purposes

"The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead--he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him--should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.

That, he reasoned, is the law of life.

And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so.

The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can't understand: they are our camera."

--Philip K. Dick,
"A Scanner Darkly" (1977)

Speech III

"There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
--Idi Amin

Compulsory II

"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
--Isabel Paterson (1886-1961)
Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, literary critic

Cat II

"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it."
--H.L. Mencken

Marbles

"Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important."
--Sara Gruen,
"Water for Elephants"

Ways

"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community--they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
--Chuck Schumer

Simple II

"My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
--Stephen Hawking',
"Stephen Hawking's Universe" by John Boslough (1985)

Interests II

"People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises."
--Vladamir Lenin

Essential

"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life."
--Huey P. Newton,
"Revolutionary Suicide" (1973)

Cleverness

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment"
--Rumi

Seed

"The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest, where all human things...have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower."
--Edith Hamilton,
"The Greek Way" (1930)

Infect

"Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams--Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword."
--E.B. White,
"Truth in Advertising," The New Yorker (July 11, 1936)

Sunlight II

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
--William O. Douglas

Value III

"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"
--Alexis de Tocqueville,
Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831, "Tocqueville Reader"

Habit II

"I would like to remind the black ministry and indeed all black people that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people's problems on earth."
--Steven Biko

Cactus

"I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside."
--Mo Udall

Afraid III

"They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."
--Ray Bradbury,
"The Martian Chronicles" (1950)

Bed

"Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their...skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"
--Bill Hicks

Conscripted

"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."
--John F. Kennedy

Principle

"Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."
--Richard B. Cheney,
Remarks during the 1976 US Presidential Campaign

Bells II

"The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that no longer offer important work to do.

Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with significance."

--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Farming

Farming animals is like being a Vaccine Doctor...you pretend to be friends with the victim, lure them into a false sense of security, then kill them so you can make a little chump change.
--TLC