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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Quote of the Day: H.L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.

~H. L. Mencken

9 comments:

  1. More communists at UC Berkeley than all of Czech Republic

    - Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus, when asked about who still believed in communism in the mid-’80s.

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  2. Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General
    Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right


    - Venezuelan “president”, Hugo Chavez

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  3. ... the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive

    - Paul Samuelson's textbook on economics, probably the most influential ever, 13th Edition, 1989, the year the Soviet eastern block collapsed

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  4. Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

    - Josef Stalin

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  5. Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. … Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the "new, wonderful good society" which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.

    - Marcus Tullius Cicero

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  6. The quote from the Samuelson textbook is one for the ages. I ran into similar passages in high school history and economics textbooks in this time frame -- while my son was attending a very posh private school. Sadly, even the private schools use the same statist, biased textbooks that we have come to expect in the public schools and colleges.

    When I complained to the teachers and the school AFTER the fall of the Soviet Union, I got little more than rolling eyes and/or blank stares. They continued to teach the same drivel without even adding the obviously needed verbal addendum.

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  7. "In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own needs. And the rivers will run uphill."

    David Friedman – The Machinery of Freedom

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  8. Sadly, even the private schools use the same statist, biased textbooks that we have come to expect in the public schools and colleges.
    State law probably requires them to. You didn't think the Marxists that run the teacher's unions would actually let you escape their indoctrination by going private, did you?

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  9. Mencken's quote is applicable to many who are pushing the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Climate change alarmists never want to simply change their own habits. They want to make you and everyone else do such and such whether you want to or not.

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