Atheists From The United States

"Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art. You have yourself to begin with, and a time of uncertain duration to work on it. You do not have to be what you are, and even though you may be quite content with who you are, it will not be hard for you to think of something much greater that you might become. It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of."

"The reader is therefore exhorted...to suspend his judgement concerning the final truth of things, since probably neither he nor anyone else knows what these are, and to content himself with appreciating the problems of metaphysics. This is the first and always the most difficult step. The rest of the truth, if he is ever blessed to receive any of it, will come from within him, if it ever comes at all, and not from the reading of books."

"When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism."

"And while not all the crimes in this tragedy (crimes of the 20th century) were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same."

"A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare."

"The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former."

"As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash."

"The basic grim truth that Americans need to face up to is that American successes and victories in the 19th and 20th centuries did not happen because of America's unique political system. They happened despite America's unique political system. America became great not because American democracy was great, but because America was a great people in a great place. As such, it was uniquely resistant to the poison of democracy, and alone survived its own disease. Now that the bloom is off the continent's youth, we can see how well American democracy works in a normal country. Others have experienced this disappointment; now, it is our turn."

"Politics can be defined as limited warfare. For example, you can see a democratic election as a form of civil war, in which both sides agree to settle the conflict by simply counting soldiers. While this is a long way from a war in which tank battles are legitimate but poison gas is not, the principle is the same, and no qualitative line can be drawn between the two."

"It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence. It is useless to pretend that mob violence was not an essential aspect of the American Revolution, for instance."

"People think at least as much about breeding each other as they do about breeding animals."

"While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime."

"The fundamental historical problem of the current period is why, though we can buy our ideas from any stall in a huge open-air bazaar, they all seem to come from the same manufacturer—exactly as if made in some cathedral. Yet there is no such conspiracy—and certainly no such agency. No person or institution is coordinating the party line."

"One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing—yet reek of heinous brimstone. How is it possible to have democracy but not politics, or vice versa? What can the two be, but the same thing? Yet anything democratized is made good, and anything politicized is made bad. Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it."

"Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force—probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics."

"Objectively, an agency is official if it controls government decisions, or the government controls its decisions. A classic Orwellian state-controlled press is easy to recognize, even if the control path is informal—such as a financial subsidy. What about the other direction: a press-controlled state? ‘‘‘In the modern regime, government literally leaks power into journalism, by tolerating leaks: nominally unauthorized, but objectively permitted, disclosures of confidential information to the legitimate press. Leaking is both subsidy and control.’’’ … On Wall Street, selective disclosure of material nonpublic information is a crime… If the government enforced this standard on its own employees, journalism as we know it could not exist. … Putting these camouflaged agencies together, we see a Department of Reality which is unquestionably the center of power in our regime. No other agency can withstand it—certainly, no elected politician can withstand it. Sovereignty equals unaccountability, and our Reality Department is accountable to no one."

"The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss. Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity."

"It is very difficult for a modern American to construct the history of the last 250 years as a history of decay. Decay is especially concealed by the obvious history of technical and scientific progress. While this has no reason at all to correlate with political or cultural progress, the two are certainly not hard to confuse."

"The righteous ruler has nothing to hide."

"To debauch a people, debase their currency."

"To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent."

"The definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law. Its will is its own law."

"A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender."

"The free market isn't something that just happens. It needs to be designed and invented. The past is at best an inspiration."

"How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical."

"Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine."

"This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum."

"The root cause of terrorism is liberalism."

"[Y]ou don't want to be governed by a persistently unprofitable government any more than you want to eat in a persistently unprofitable restaurant."

"The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security."

"Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war (World War II), and its resulting terrors and destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit, or bite. It probably should have cringed."

"The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself."

"You are probably used to worrying about the crimes of your government overseas, but not in this way. You have an eagle eye for the crimes of the Defense Department. When it comes to the crimes of the State Department, you have the approximate visual acuity of the average snail."

"Today's American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order."

"Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home."

"Did you ever wonder why nationalism seemed so similar, right down to the names of the parties in, say, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? What did Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam have in common? Certainly nothing that could be described as Algerian, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. Oh, no. What they had in common was that they all had friends—or, more precisely, sponsors—at Harvard."

"Men fight because they expect to win. Period. When they know they'll lose, they surrender."

"Of course empire works. Conquest works. It has worked for the entire course of human history. It is not only effective, it is profitable."

"[F]ar from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture."

"The US military fails in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because it is operating under a doctrine designed to fail."

"If the US was a unified, effective actor which intended to conquer and civilize Iraq and Afghanistan, it would abolish the native puppet governments of Maliki and Karzai, place all lawless areas under martial law, create military formations with US officers and native troops, create civilian governments with US executives and native employees, and in general do what the British did in India, Egypt, Burma, etc., etc."

"Who knows more about human biology? You, or James Watson?"

"For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army."

"Restore the Belle Époque!"

"History is a branch of literature, not a field of science."

"The only problem with colonialism was that it got nationalized. Which was enough. Colonialism chartered company–style is profitable. Colonialism as a government department is a disaster."

"Progressives have created a vast set of puppet cultures which enable them to describe their monoculture as a multiculture."

"Of course, since the government is sovereign, it can break its own laws any time it likes. But it will not do this unless it has a good reason, because the value of a lawless state is much lower than that of a lawful one."

"A good test for whether or not anything should continue to exist: if it didn't exist, would anyone invent it?"

"In reality, progressives don't like actual Negroes any more than they like democracy. They have no love at all for the poor. What they love is to pick them up, turn them into feral barbarians, encourage them to devastate civilized society, and provide millions of jobs for themselves caring for the animalistic, burned-out shell of what was formerly one of North America's great cultures."