Racism has been supported in this country not despite of, but thanks to, governmental power and politics. Reverse racism — thinking that government is competent to force people to integrate, just as it once forced them to segregate — is just as political and just as disastrous. It has not worked. Its product has been hatred rather than brotherhood. —Karl Hess
Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power—to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. When brute force is the only criterion of social conduct, and unresisting surrender to destruction is the only alternative, even the lowest of men, even an animal—even a cornered rat—will fight. There can be no peace within an enslaved nation. —Ayn Rand
The more power you give the government the less power you have to control your life. —Gloria Alvarez
“Planning” in political rhetoric is the government’s suppression of other people’s plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others. —Thomas Sowell
The faith that people unthinkingly place in government to accomplish goals is at the same time faith in the people who work in government. But people who work in government are no more knowledgeable, capable, motivated, or well-intentioned than their counterparts outside of government. Humans who work in government are the very same kinds of humans as those who don’t, and they are subject to all the same motivations like everyone else. So many people miss this fundamental point in so many ways that it is mind-boggling. —Antony Davies
By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would ‘walk on two legs’: the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.
In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism.
People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party’s every dictate.
Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.
—Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine
The chemotherapy almost killed Thomas. The Navarros refused further treatments, only to find that the FDA wouldn’t permit Thomas to receive the gentler experimental treatment unless he had radiation too. In frustration, the Navarros went to Congress, as other patients have done, to plead for permission to use new drugs not yet approved by the FDA. After a year and a half of fighting, when Thomas was expected to live for only two more weeks, the FDA finally permitted him to have a “compassionate use” exemption.
By that time, Thomas had developed new tumors, called leptomeningial-sarcoma, from his initial chemotherapy. Nevertheless, the experimental treatment kept Thomas going for several more months. How much longer might Thomas have lived if we had honored his parents’ choice in the earlier stages of his disease?
—Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, Healing Our World
At what exact point, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home?
How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Nobody in the drug industry is going to say anything because if they do the FDA could punish them by dragging their feet on their approvals, which could destroy a company, and it has destroyed many. So no one is going to speak out. —Dr. Mary J. Ruwart
Governments confiscate more than a third of all family income. Each year the average American taxpayer works 127 days, from January 1st until May 7th — just to pay taxes. —Thomas DiLorenzo