Friday Quotes Rodeo/ Tag
"All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
"Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods."
"Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us..."
"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions."
"The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it."
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
Got some good ones? Add them to the comments and I'm going to start a quotes tag among the blogging Tories to see how they fair on providing quotes on the same subject.
posted by W.L. Mackenzie Redux | 12:41 PM
8 Comments:
"The only time Government is tolerable is when you have checks and balances in place to check the abuse of power. Take these away and you an elected dictatorship that has free reign to control and dupe the public".
An honest politican is one who, once bought, stays bought!
O lIke your axiom anonymous but would add that the only owner of a politician ( those who "bought him") are his constituents. Loyalty sold to anyone else is a crime.
I go by the belief that in most cases, it's the selfish narcissistic nature of constituence who make the politician corrupt; in the sense that only the political whore gets elected in many ridings. The politician, in essence, is a mirror image of those who elected him.
Debris Trail is absolutely right.
Wasn't it Andre Malraux, who was a minister in one of De Gaulle's
Governments (whether it was the 1946 provisional government or post 1959 i'm not sure) who said people must be fed their illusions, they couldn't handle the truth, or words to that effect.
The current Liberal Government feeds people's illusions, but the day will come when truth intervenes and the edifice starts
to fall apart. You can only cheat the truth for so long.
Fog/DT: here's an Alexander tyler quote that sums up your reflections ...interestingly, your observations were known to classic liberal statesmen and philosophers in the 18th centuy who saw dangers in constituent greed and mixing democracy with collectivism:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." [Alexander Tyler]
What stage are Canada's nanny state, largess addicted sheep at now?
I think Canada's reached the point between apathy and dependency. I think bondage is not to far off.
The UK is not far behind.
LOL ... your quote Tag is really getting around, and it wasn't till after that Candice said there was rules. hehe.
uh ... it's kind of branched out from just being politics.. makes for some interesting reading .. LOL
Post a Comment
<< Home