Freakish

"As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny."
--Otto Hermann Kahn (1867-1934)
German-born American investment banker, collector, philanthropist

Differently

"I'm not mad at all! I'm just differently sane!!"
--The Joker,
Batman and Robin # 13

Stripped

"When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling"

Happy III

"Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you."
--Deepak Chopra

Place

"Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it."
--H.G. Wells,
"The First Men In The Moon" (1901),
Ch. 24: "The Natural History Of The Selenites"

Choosing

"I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning."
--John Holt (1923-1985),
 "How Children Learn" (1967)

Dangerous VII

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
--Albert Einstein

Successful III

"But I think that the Democrats have been very successful in portraying themselves as the caring people, when if you look at the effects of the Democratic Party on Black people I think it’s horrible, it’s horrendous. For example, if you ask the question, 'In what cities do Blacks live under the worst conditions'--in terms of crime, rotten education, poor services,--these are the very cities that have been run for decades by Democrats. I don’t care whether you are talking about Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, or Detroit, it’s all been Democrats. And then on top of it, it’s been Black Democrats! That is, again, if you look at where Blacks live under the most horrible conditions, its in cities where a Black is the mayor, a Black is the chief of police and a Black is the superintendent of schools."
--Walter E. Williams,
"An Interview with Dr. Walter E. Williams" in Free Market Mojo (November 20, 2009)

Master

"Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people."
--Jeffrey R. Snyder
American attorney, author
"A Nation of Cowards", 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)

Cigarettes

"One--about cigarettes--I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life--and I think that's an important difference."
--Paul Krassner, April 9, 1932 - July 21, 2019
"Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture"

Light II

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
--Plato

Mist

"Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located--so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation--there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man."
--Isaac Asimov,
"Second Foundation" (1953)

Subsistence

"In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level--I mean the wages of decent living."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (June 16, 1933)

Paranoia II

"Paranoia is just another mask for ignorance. The truth, when you finally chase it down is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears."
--Hunter S. Thompson

Convenience

"Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should."
--Ronald Reagan (1981)

Screamed

"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
--Jack Handey,
"Deep Thoughts" segment, Saturday Night Live (October 12, 1991)

Policeman

"A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls . . . Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity."
--H.L. Mencken,
"Notes on Democracy" (1926)

Infinite III

"'Ford!' he said, 'there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.'"
--Douglas Adams,
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Imaginary

"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary--it's always imaginary--world in which I would like to live."
--William S. Burroughs,
Interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965)

Comfortable IV

"It is not decided by votes what is true; otherwise we could never come to any truth, ever. People will vote for what is comfortable--and lies are very comfortable because you don't have to do anything about them, you just have to believe. Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and it needs you to walk alone on a path that nobody has traveled before."
--Osho,
"Your Answers Questioned"

Wise IV

"Angry people are not always wise."
--Jane Austen,
"Pride and Prejudice"

Trappings

"It is when the politician loves neither the public good nor himself, or when his love for himself is limited and is satisfied by the trappings of office, that the public interest is badly served."
--John F. Kennedy,
"Profiles in Courage" (Deluxe Modern Classic)

Giant

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,...have no health care--that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south...when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
--Ross Perot (June 27, 1930 - July 9, 2019),
1992 Presidential Debate, regarding the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Gobbles

"Peace is a very complicated concept. When the lion gobbles up the lamb and wipes his lips, then there's peace. Well, I ain't for that peace at all."
--Abbie Hoffman

Dance III

"When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step along the way."
--Wayne Dyer

Embedded

"When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery."
--Gerry Spence,
"Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century" (1999)

Ostensible

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
--Theodore Roosevelt
April 19, 1906

Debt III

"I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."
--Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to James Madison (September 6, 1789)

Steering

"We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.' Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic."
--Lee Iacocca (October 15, 1924 - July 2, 2019),
"Where Have All the Leaders Gone?" (2007)

200 II

"In 200 years will people remember us as traitors or heros? That is the question we must ask."
--Benjamin Franklin,
Letter to Thomas Jefferson (March 16th, 1775).

Position

"Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in."
--Ashly Lorenzana