When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
-- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
--President Bush, talking about Social Security in N.Y.

"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing." (Thomas Paine -- The Rights of Man).

"The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal." --Mark Twain

"If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties"

"It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exsposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

"Now, I'm not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true."

As you get older, you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so."

"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is."

"Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

''These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.''

"I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour."

Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."

"Give me a lever long enough, and a place on which to rest it , and I will move the world."

"Now all these stories and others still more extraordinary have their source in one and the same event, at certain periods the universe has it's present circular motion, and after long intervals, this motion shifts such that during other periods it revolves in a contrary direction and inevitably at the time this reversal takes place, there is a great destruction of animals in general and only a small part of the human race survives."

"Dear Sir, you academics are always children, you are young in soul, every one of you. Your ancestors witnessed these extraordinary events and some made record of them but you possess none or few of these records, and what records you have managed to preserve or discover, you dismiss as mere children's fables. I do not imagine or invent these extraordinary events in order to explain common appearances. The extraordinary events actually occurred. There have been many and diverse destructions of mankind. We know this because we possess the records of those who witnessed the events and survived. Now the stories as they are told have the fashion of a legend, but the truth of them lies in the shifting of the bodies in the heavens that recurs at long intervals."

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
-- Timothy Leary

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all...