Notable Quotable 46

Jan 07, 2023

Any society that entails the strengthening of the state apparatus by giving it unchecked control over the economy, and re-unites the polity and the economy, is an historical regression. In it there is no more future for the public, or for the freedoms it supported, than there was under feudalism.

- Robert Higgs

The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.

~ Peter Kropotkin

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

- Frederick Douglass

... man's capacity to forget is unlimited.

- Jacques Ellul

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...

- Thomas Paine

Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible.

- A. Philip Randolph

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerors

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture...

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away...

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

-Marcus Aurelius

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital’ interests.

- Albert Camus (1978). “Notebooks, 1935-1942”, Harcourt

Democracies become dictatorships if governments do not listen to the voice of the people.

- Tom Van Meurs

Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.

- Arundhati Roy

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves.

- Albert Camus