Journalists From Virginia

"We have to remember Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on the planet. It's sitting in Venezuelan territory. On top of that, it's a country very rich in other minerals and resources like gold, natural gas, I mean there's all kinds of strategic resources in Venezuela. It's a very geo-strategically located country. So, of course there are many powerful interests around the world — economic and political — that would like control of Venezuela. There's competing interests and now the doors have been opened over the past decade or so to Russia and China and Iran and, of course, that has not made the United States very happy. The United States considers this their sphere of influence and they want to keep it that way."

"The more that democracy is assumed to be inevitable, the more likely it will self-destruct."

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

"A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect."

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy. We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government."

"Government cannot make trade more fair by making it less free."

"“Fair trade” is a moral delusion that could be leading to an economic catastrophe."

"The U.S. government has created a trade lynch law that can convict foreign companies almost regardless of how they operate."

"It should not be a federal crime to charge low prices to American consumers."

"A law is simply a reflection of the momentary perception of self-interest by a majority of a legislative body."

"The federal tax system is turning individuals into sharecroppers of their own lives."

"Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power."

"The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians."

"So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians’ cages."

"The surest effect of exalting government is to make it easier for some people to drag others down."

"The growth of government is like the spread of a dense jungle, and the average citizen can hack through less of it every year."

"Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives."

"Clinton exploited and expanded the dictatorial potential of the U.S. presidency."

"For scores of millions of Americans, Clinton's "caring" was more important than his lying."

"The principle of government supremacy is Clinton's clearest legacy."

"The better that people understand what Clinton did in office, the greater the nation's chances for political recovery."

"Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy."

"The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel."

"The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve."

"There is no technological magic bullet that will make the government as smart as it is powerful."

"Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans."

"It is impossible to destroy all alleged enemies of freedom everywhere without also destroying freedom in the United States."

"A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth."

"Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom."

"In the long run, people have more to fear from governments than from terrorists. Terrorists come and go, but power-hungry politicians will always be with us."

"Truth is a lagging indicator in politics."

"The arrogance of power is the best hope for the survival of freedom."

"We need a constitutional amendment to make the federal government obey the Constitution."

"There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more such lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they will get."

"People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom."

"Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. People are merely permitted to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution."

"Instead of revealing the “will of the people,” election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions."

"Bogus fears can produce real servitude."

"As long as rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them."

"Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people."

"Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance and arrogance that pave the way to political collapse."

"He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past."

"Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong."

"Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used."

"President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures. A network reporter who thought her report on shortcomings in Reaganland would anger the President's cadres was amazed when the man in charge of propaganda thanked her for doing them a good turn. But, she said, that was a tough piece of reporting. Oh, the words may have been, said the gentleman, but on television words didn't matter. What mattered were pictures. And the pictures had been wonderful."

"In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it. We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped. And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know. There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance. As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual? This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog. We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration. Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"? It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line."

"The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality."

"You talk a great deal about building a better world for your children, but when you are young you can no more envision a world inherited by your children than you can conceive of dying. The society you mold, you mold for yourself. It was this way with my generation. We were unhappy with what we inherited and we tried to reshape it in ways that would make it more tolerable to us. You were not uppermost in our thoughts. Now, in middle age, some of us are trying to rewrite history. Some of us tell you, "We labored and dared and sacrificed — all for you — yet we hear no thanks." You will not be unduly moved, I hope, by these laments. They are sentimental cries from persons so attached to the society they have rebuilt that they cannot bear the thought of seeing it overhauled by new proprietors."

"Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat."

"At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke."