Notable Quotable #12

Aug 29, 2022

The problem with political decisions isn’t that most of us don’t get our own way. It’s also that these decisions are usually imposed on us against our will, by threats of violence…Democracy, as we practice it, is unjust. We expose innocent people to high degrees of risk because we put their fate in the hands of ignorant, misinformed, irrational, biased, and sometimes immoral decision makers.

– Jason Brennan, Ph.D., Against Democracy (2016, Princeton University Press), pp. 230, 240.

“What is morality, she asked.

Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.”

- Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

-James Madison

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”

- Eugene Victor Debs

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

- Mahatma Gandhi

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

- Noam Chomsky

“The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.”

- Adam Michnik

“A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.”

- James Allen, As a Man Thinkith

“It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole.”

- Rupi Kaur