"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
-Ayn Rand "An armed society is a polite society."
-Robert A. Heinlein "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-Winston Churchill "If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States:

1900 - 47.3 years
1920 - 53 years
1940 - 60 years
1968 - 70.2 years
(the latest figures compiled [as of January 1971])
[Life expectancy is 76.9 years as of 2000 - ed. webmaster]

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent 'Thank you' to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find."
-Ayn Rand "It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
-Douglas Adams "Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries."
-Ayn Rand "Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss."
-Robert A. Heinlein "If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!"
-Robert A. Heinlein "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
-Robert A. Heinlein "Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor."
-Robert A. Heinlein "A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain."
-Robert A. Heinlein "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-Robert A. Heinlein "Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?"
-Robert A. Heinlein "Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death."
-Ayn Rand "Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."
-Ayn Rand "So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"
-Ayn Rand "The government was set to protect man from criminals - and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government - as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."
-Ayn Rand "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-Robert A. Heinlein "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
-Winston Churchill "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
-Douglas Adams "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-Pericles "Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
-Nikita Khrushchev "Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own laws."
-Douglas Adams "It is not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end."
-Douglas Adams "In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move."
-Douglas Adams "Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his."
-John Locke "A man should be upright, not be kept upright."
-Marcus Aurelius "Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun."
-Tom Clancy "Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children."
-Mary Ruwart "We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years ... And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?"
-P.J. O'Rourke "According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output - and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?"
-Daniel Mitchell "It's illegal to say to a voter 'here's $100, vote for me.' So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs."
-Don Farrar "The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy."
Fred L. Smith "I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics."
-Ayn Rand "A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence."
-Ayn Rand "America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes."
-Ayn Rand "The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence."
-Ayn Rand "If 50 million people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing."
-David Severn "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
-Albert Einstein "Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut."
-Daniel Greenberg "A caged canary is safe but not free."
-Walter Williams "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
-Martin Luther King Jr. "A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today."
-Robert E. Lee "I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass."
-Lao Tsu "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
-Douglas Adams "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
-Douglas Adams "One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed."
-Douglas Adams "Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister."
-Douglas Adams "If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?"
-Scott Adams "The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers."
-Scott Adams "I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it."
-Douglas Adams "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
-Albert Einstein "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
-Ayn Rand "I find war repugnant. All wars. I know war's monstrous aspects: blood and corpses everywhere, hungry refugees, devastated cities, orphans in tears and houses in ruins. I find no beauty in it. But it is with a heavy heart I ask this: what is to be done? Do we have the right not to intervene, when we know what passivity and appeasement will make possible?"
-Elie Wiesel "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmund Burke

"Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience."
-Scott Adams Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.