Quotable Quotes

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism.... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." --Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies? That's the argument that needs to be won. And, if you think I'm being frivolous in positing bureaucratic regulation of doughnuts and vacations, consider that under the all-purpose umbrellas of 'health' and 'the environment,' governments of supposedly free nations are increasingly comfortable straying into areas of diet and leisure. ... Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks -- drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Government health care would be wrong even if it 'controlled costs.' It's a liberty issue. I'd rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices." --columnist Mark Steyn

"After many a disappointment with someone, and especially after a disaster, we may be able to look back at numerous clues that should have warned us that the person we trusted did not deserve our trust. When that person is the President of the United States, the potential for disaster is virtually unlimited. Many people are rightly worried about what this administration's reckless spending will do to the economy in our time and to our children and grandchildren, to whom a staggering national debt will be passed on. But if the worst that Barack Obama does is ruin the economy, I will breathe a sigh of relief. He is heading this country toward disaster on many fronts.... This is a president on a mission to remake American society in every aspect, by whatever means are necessary and available. That requires taking all kinds of decisions out of the hands of ordinary Americans and transferring them to Washington elites -- and ultimately the number one elite, Barack Obama himself. Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities of what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power." --economist Thomas Sowell