Quotations

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

Edward W. Said. Not true of Hitler's short lived empire and some others, but true of most.

Years ago, someone told me: 'They’re going to end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker—you personally—you, Chávez. Not just that the government supports it, or permits it—no, no, no. They’re going to try to apply the Noriega formula to you.'

Hugo Chavez

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling loneliness.

Russell Kirk

IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.

G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy.

To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still.

Nietzsche

Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.

Alice Miller

You very cheeky man!

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin replying to Monty Modlyn, much to Modlyn's delight. Modlyn had asked him how many people he had murdered. Modlyn was a portly British television journalist who cultivated a South London working-class, irreverent persona.