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Post by Michael Downing on Dec 26, 2013 11:08:45 GMT -5
"May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy." -- George Washington (1732-1799
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 21, 2014 9:09:12 GMT -5
"Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people." -- George Mason
"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship." -- Harry S. Truman
Yup...
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 22, 2014 9:58:24 GMT -5
"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true." -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 23, 2014 10:11:33 GMT -5
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran (1750-1814) Irish Orator, Statesman, Judge
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 24, 2014 8:55:12 GMT -5
"For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?" -- C. S. Lewis
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 30, 2014 10:17:24 GMT -5
"Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them." -- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873
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Post by Michael Downing on Jan 31, 2014 12:26:34 GMT -5
"Good men must not obey the laws too well." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 1, 2014 20:46:56 GMT -5
Death Before Dishonor
To the haters, the takers, the liars, all the vultures and the bottom feeding scum The FCC, the FBI and every tin god with a badge and a gun You talk and talk, you preach and bitch but your words don't mean a thing You get what you give, you give what you get Just the way it's always been
I choose death before dishonor I'd rather die than live down on my knees Bury me like a soldier, with my dignity!
You imitate the ostracized, put your head beneath the sand Your cup it runneth over, must be rough to live so grand You reap what you sow, you pay what you owe unless you bathe yourself in greed You rob and you take, your world is fake There's no honor amongst the thieves
I choose death before dishonor I'd rather die than live down on my knees Bury me like a soldier, with my dignity!
Five Finger Death Punch
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Post by brocktownsend on Feb 1, 2014 22:20:33 GMT -5
That's good.
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 6, 2014 11:20:25 GMT -5
"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic." -- Frederic Bastiat
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 12, 2014 10:36:16 GMT -5
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." -- Col. Jeff Cooper
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 12, 2014 10:39:58 GMT -5
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. Thomas Paine
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 13, 2014 21:40:29 GMT -5
westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/your-contemplation-fodder-for-the-weekend/ Your Contemplation Fodder For The Weekend "Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other." -- John Locke (1632-1704)
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 24, 2014 8:58:31 GMT -5
"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." -- Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. " -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
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Post by Michael Downing on Feb 28, 2014 9:16:56 GMT -5
"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism." -- Ayn Rand
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 1, 2014 10:45:04 GMT -5
From a WRSA reader...
War is when your government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution is when you figure bit out for yourself.
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 3, 2014 9:09:07 GMT -5
"People want government to do all manner of things, things that if done privately would lead to condemnation and jail sentences. Some want government to give money to farmers, poor folk, college students, senior citizens and businesses. There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. The only way government can give money to one person is to forcibly take it from another person. If I privately used the same method to raise money for a “deserving” college student, homeless person or businessman, I’d face theft charges. Others among us want government to protect wild wolves, bears and the Stephens kangaroo rat even if it results in gross violations of private property and loss of lives. The problem is that some people disagree with having their earnings taken to satisfy someone else’s wishes. They don’t want the Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service dictating to them what they can and cannot do with their property to ensure a habitat for the kangaroo rat. Force and threats must be used. Here’s the question: Could the average American kill a person who resolutely refuses to give up his earnings so Congress can give it to farmers? Could you kill a person who insists on using all of his property, even though some wolves have set up a den on it? You say, “What do you mean, Williams -- kill?” Here’s the scenario: The Corps of Engineers commands me not to remove debris from a drainage ditch on my property, placed there by beavers building a dam, because the debris creates a wetland. I remove it anyway. The Corps of Engineers fines me. I refuse to pay the unjust fine. The Corps of Engineers threatens to seize my land. I say no, you won’t: it’s my land, and I’ll protect it. A politician sends marshals to take it, and I get killed defending it." -- Walter E. Williams (1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 5, 2014 10:10:33 GMT -5
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. ... Something’s eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many. ... Maybe it’ll be one more round of “reasonable gun control” or one more episode of burning children to death to save them from “child abuse.” Whatever, something will snap." -- Claire Wolfe Source: "101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution"
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 8, 2014 7:51:33 GMT -5
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 10, 2014 18:05:02 GMT -5
I have more principled reasons for my stand on owning firearms, and I don't care one whit in the world for the Second Amendment. It means nothing to me. My rights have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, and when it dawns on people that it has finally been erased -- the principal danger of all political premises posed as "social contracts" -- my rights will still validly exist, even if I die defending them. I own firearms because I have a right to private property. That is the First Thing. Billy Beck www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P4584
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 11, 2014 20:59:55 GMT -5
Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 15, 2014 7:23:39 GMT -5
h/t WRSA
What am I, and people my age, supposed to feel other than raw contempt for pig-ignorant, self-righteous, utterly useless illiterates whom society will have to feed and house like barnyard animals for the next fifty years?
Fred
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 17, 2014 10:39:49 GMT -5
"Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and 'treat'? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?" -- Dr. Fred Oerther
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." -- C. S. Lewis
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 20, 2014 8:24:55 GMT -5
"Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way." -- C. S. Lewis
"What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?" -- C. S. Lewis
"The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?" -- C. S. Lewis
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Post by Michael Downing on Mar 21, 2014 21:46:12 GMT -5
“Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.” Ron Paul
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Post by Michael Downing on Apr 19, 2014 8:30:48 GMT -5
I believe this statement summarizes where we are today...
"The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution." John Adams
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Post by avordvet on Apr 19, 2014 12:29:29 GMT -5
I believe this statement summarizes where we are today... "The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution." John Adams I Concur, now Americans just need to have the courage to act on those duties and obligations in order to finally throw off the chains of servitude.
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Post by Michael Downing on Apr 26, 2014 20:28:40 GMT -5
knuckledraggin.com/2014/04/master-spoken/From the Master “It is interesting to hear certain kinds of people insist that the citizen cannot fight the government. This would have been news to the men of Lexington and Concord, as well as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The citizen most certainly can fight the government, and usually wins when he tries. Organized national armies are useful primarily for fighting against other organized national armies. When they try to fight against the people, they find themselves at a very serious disadvantage. If you will just look around at the state of the world today, you will see that the guerillero has the upper hand. Irregulars usually defeat regulars, providing they have the will. Such fighting is horrible to contemplate, but will continue to dominate brute strength.” - Col. Jeff Cooper
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Post by Michael Downing on Apr 27, 2014 21:33:21 GMT -5
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Post by Michael Downing on Apr 28, 2014 10:49:18 GMT -5
h/t N C Renegade
“At the establishment of our Constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions nevertheless become law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution and working its change by construction before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account.” –Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823.
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