QUOTES OF THE DAY 10-31-12

“Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.”  ―    Walter E. Williams

“The War between the States… produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today’s federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. … [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’.”  ―    Walter E. Williams

“Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else’s authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.”
― Cody Lundin, When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes

“There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.”
― Sowell

“Procrastination is the foundation of all disasters.”
― Pandora Poikilos

“How many times had those awful words – “I know what I’m doing” – been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster? ”
― Christopher Buckley

“Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios–the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about–was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.”
― Adam Gopnik

“I always hated it when TV reporters stuck a microphone in the faces of people who’d just lost a home or a loved one, wanting to know how they felt. They felt like shit. They hurt, and they didn’t know how they were going to get through the night. They wanted to scream and cry and hit the guy with the microphone.”
― Suzanne Johnson, Royal Street

“How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”
― William Dean Howells, A Sleep and a Forgetting

“Here’s a new ‘Blessing’ for our time –

‘May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!”
― Vera Nazarian