Posts tagged Quotes
Mike Billy
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“Under Democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right…” - H. L. Mencken
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I am afraid that the only lessons that have been truly learned In the whole Watergate business are to avoid such idiocies as tapes and illegal, unwarranted break-ins, and to restrict the operation of the fortuitous and the random to the smallest possible area. I would be astonished if the real lesson of Watergate - the Actonian principle that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - were other than forgotten utterly once a crowd-pleasing President with the kind of luster a John F. Kennedy had for academy, press, and the world of intellectuals generally comes back into the White House.
I’ve been reading Robert Nisbet’s Twilight of Authority and this quote really stood out for me.
In this section he was talking about what he called the “transpolitical” or, as he puts it, a political tool that “goes beyond what law or morality authorizes…”
Nisbet was using Watergate as an example because he wrote the book during the Watergate scandal. But, he also cites other examples that go back at least to the 1970s.
If this book were written today I think he might include George Bush’s extrajudicial wiretapping of American citizens and Barack Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal to his list. And these more recent abuses of power, particularly Fast and Furious, are perfect examples of what Nisbet was trying to say and that is that government is not good at policing itself. It is only through accident that these scandals are ever discovered.
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The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.
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When great political parties begin to cool in their attachments without softening their hatreds, and at last reach the point of wishing less to succeed than to prevent the success of their opponents, one should prepare for servitude—the master is near.
The ever-prescient Alexis de Tocqueville predicting one way that party politics in America might crumble.
In other words, when political parties start arguing for their supremacy based on the opposing parties faults trouble is near. Oh wait, we are already there. How many times have you heard someone say, “Yeah, Obama isn’t great, but I really don’t like Romney. Obama is the lesser of two evils!”?
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We had thought, or our forefathers had, that modern liberal democracy would be spared the kind of erosion and decay that both Plato and Aristotle declared endemic in all forms of state. Now we are not so sure.
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The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
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To be free is better than to be unfree – always. Any politician who suggests the opposite should be treated as suspect.
(Source: twitter.com)
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You may have been taught to believe… that he eats little children; but I assure you he is a man of humanity and candor as well as integrity.
