Quote Only Thread

[Elihu]

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” – Ernest Hemingway

[Hammer of Los]

..

Essentially this is what must be developed: the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the universe.

..

[Gouda]

"There's something deeper than making money off stuff. Being a part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome."

~ Ilya Zhitomirskiy,
Co-founder of Facebook alternative Diaspora,
(12 October 1989 – 12 November 2011)

[Elihu]

Daniel Webster quotes:
Knowledge is the only fountain both of love and the principles of human liberty.

Daniel Webster quotes:
The man is free who is protected from injury.

Daniel Webster quotes:
There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today.

Daniel Webster quotes:
Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.

Daniel Webster quotes:
Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, not any government secure which is not supported by moral habits.... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

Daniel Webster quotes:
The States are nations.

Daniel Webster quotes:
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

Daniel Webster quotes:
If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name.

Daniel Webster quotes:
If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering.

Daniel Webster quotes:
We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land -- nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution.

Daniel Webster quotes:
I shall defer my visit to Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, until its doors shall fly open, on golden hinges, to lovers of Union as well as of Liberty.

Daniel Webster quotes:
On the light of Liberty you saw arise the light of Peace, like "another morn," "Risen on mid-noon;" and the sky on which you closed your eye was cloudless.

Daniel Webster quotes:
If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

[Elihu]

John C. Calhoun quotes:
The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised... [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern.

John C. Calhoun quotes:
To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ...

John C. Calhoun quotes:
Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.

John C. Calhoun quotes:
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.

John C. Calhoun quotes:
It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation.

John C. Calhoun quotes:
Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

[Elihu]

Lord Acton quotes:
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.

Lord Acton quotes:
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Lord Acton quotes:
Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Lord Acton quotes:
Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime...

Lord Acton quotes:
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Lord Acton quotes:
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities....

Lord Acton quotes:
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end.

Lord Acton quotes:
Government by idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, a future danger.

Lord Acton quotes:
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

Lord Acton quotes:
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Lord Acton quotes:
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord Acton quotes:
I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton quotes:
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Lord Acton quotes:
Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.

Lord Acton quotes:
Learn as much by writing as by reading.

[Elihu]

Ezra Pound quotes:
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Ezra Pound quotes:
Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.

Ezra Pound quotes:
The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.

Ezra Pound quotes:
That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

Ezra Pound quotes:
Liberty is not a right but a duty.

Ezra Pound quotes:
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

Ezra Pound quotes:
I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

[Allegro]

But communication is two-sided — vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it… demands in the sense of concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated. [REFER SESSIONS.]

[Jeff]

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

[MacCruiskeen]

My strongest tactic is to think back to when I was younger. As a child we jump, roll, hide and play all the time; it feels instinctive to move around in a creative way. Those instincts don't leave us, and now I know what I can use them for.

- Mostafa Bahgat, Egyptian video journalist.

[Simulist]

His stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

[Elihu]

George F. Kennan quotes:
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

George F. Kennan quotes:
Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age.

[justdrew]

The Quemadero (Quemadero De Tablada) was a place of execution built by the first inquisitors at Seville in 1481; it was decorated with four large statues representing prophets. The architect, as a follower of Judaism, was one of the first to fall victim to the Inquisition. The Quemadero was destroyed in 1809, whereas the material was used for fortifications during the French invasion of Andalusia.

The "trials" concluded when the prisoners were taken outside the city walls to a place called the quemadero or burning place.
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[Jeff]

What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with what's there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality.... We won't let ourselves be led astray by the ones who've brought about the catastrophe. Where the managers platonically discuss among themselves how they might decrease emissions "without breaking the bank," the only realistic option we can see is to "break the bank" as soon as possible and, in the meantime, take advantage of every collapse in the system to increase our own strength.

- The Coming Insurrection

[Elihu]

"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance."
-Walt Whitman