MDOTD 311

Aug 02, 2024

The way people speak of those in power, calling their commands “laws,” referring to disobedience to them as a “crime,” and so on, implies the right of “government” to rule, and a corresponding obligation on the part of its subjects to obey. Without the right to “rule,” (“authority”) there is no need to call the entity “government,” and all the politicians and their mercenaries become utterly indistinguishable from a giant organized crime syndicate, their “laws” no more valid than the threats of muggers and carjackers.

- Larken Rose, “The Most Dangerous Superstition”

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

- Hannah Arendt, On Violence

These so-called governments are in reality only great bands of robbers and murderers, organized, disciplined, and constantly on the alert.”

~ Lysander Spooner

The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror.

- Claude Le Petit

Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

- Thornton Wilder

Strike.Me

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To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

- H. L. Mencken

The biggest mistake I see is people waiting for A Big Sign that’ll tell them that things have gone too far. One Big Thing that police or lawmakers or the president/leaders will do that will cross the line. It’ll never come because they won’t cross it. They’ll move the line. That line you think you stand behind is shifting everyday with little actions, bills, legislations… That line will stop moving one day, & it’ll be too late... Every day, your sensitivity is being eroded by these willful atrocities. The envelope for what you’ll accept is being pushed. One day, all of these things will be your new normal.

- Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

- Oswald Spengler

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

- Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)

The two ‘sides’ of mainstream politics are not fighting against one another, they’re only fighting against you. Their only job is to keep you clapping along with the two-handed puppet show as they rob you blind and tighten your chains while your gaze is fixed on the performance.

- Caitlin Johnstone