Notable Quotable 66

Mar 30, 2023

War is just a racket.

Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

- Smedley Butler

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

- Frederic Bastiat

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.

- Peter A. Levine

If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference.

They are the father, the mother and the teacher.

- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.

- John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Still further back in history, Benjamin Rush—one of the founding fathers of the United States and the man officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the “father of American psychiatry”—made early contributions to the weaponization of psychiatry by inventing a number of mental disorders to pathologize dissent. The most notable of these made-up disorders was “anarchia,” a type of madness Rush defined as “an excess of the passion for liberty,” which “could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” and “threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States.”

- James Corbett quoting Benjamin Rush in “Dissent Into Madness”

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

- H.L. Mencken

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

- Ray Bradbury

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

- E. E. Cummings