Libertarians From The United States

"The Democrats are the party of slavery; the Republicans are the party of freedom."

"Attack, attack, attack—never defend."

"Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack."

"I went to the cafeteria, and as each kid would go through the cafeteria line [in my elementary school] with their tray, I would tell them, "You know, Nixon has proposed having school on Saturdays." ...[T]he mock election [in my elementary school] was held and to the surprise of the local newspaper, Democrat John Kennedy swept this mock election. For the first time ever I understood the value of disinformation."

"The point that the Democrats missed was that the people who weren’t rich wanted to be rich."

"I am so ready. Let's get it on. Prepare to die cocksucker."

"Let's go find Swalwell. It's time to do it. Then we'll see how brave the rest of them are. It's time to do it. It's either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let's go find Swalwell and get this over with. I'm just not putting up with this shit any more."

"I'm going to take that dog away from you. Not a fucking thing you can do about it either, because you are a weak, broke, piece of shit."

"We could only give a Senate campaign, in a direct financial transfer of $5,000. But the loophole was, we could advertise on behalf of a candidate, without their cooperation or coordination, an unlimited amount. And that's why NCPAC [which Stone helped found in 1975] was successful."

"I strongly support Donald Trump for President. I think only Trump has the financial independence to take on the special interests. Trump doesn't need the lobbyists or the special interest money with the strings attached. He is the only one who can fix a broken system. Trump's pro-growth tax reform plan will supercharge the economy. Trump can actually cut waste because he is not beholden to the special pleaders. Trump will get in Hillary's face and confront her with her lies. Jeb gave Hillary a medal. The Bush and Clinton families profiteer off public service together. Is it civility or shared criminality? Only Trump can make America great again!"

"I launched the idea of Donald J. Trump for President."

"I met Donald in 1979 when I was sent to New York to organize Ronald Reagan's campaign for President. He and his father were members of the Reagan for President finance committee. We became good friends. I was invited to two of his weddings. He attended my wedding in Washington DC. He is very smart, very tough and can be very very funny. He is also very tall."

"He who speaks first, loses."

"The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, as Dick Nixon would say."

"Well, my attitude regarding those who criticize me for being friends with or Richard Nixon is, "F—'em.""

"Hillary [Clinton] must be brought to justice — arrested, tried, and executed for murder."

"Black, Manafort & Stone, in their brazeness, really created the modern sleazeball lobbyist."

"I had a lawyer who was a very good lawyer, a tough lawyer, named . He introduced me, at one point, to Roger Stone. Roy thought Roger was a very tough guy. Roy knew some very tough guys, I will tell you that. But Roy always felt that Roger was not only tough, but a smart guy, and very political."

"He's one of the great all-time frauds of American politics... His reputation vastly exceeds his ability. ...His personal effects... rival those of Imelda Marcos. ...In my view, the man's word is no good... Every meeting I've had with the guy, I wanted to wash my hands three times afterwards."

"As a political firm, Black, Manafort represents Democrats and Republicans alike--and sometimes candidates running for the same seat. ...Stone and Atwater's offices are right across the hall from each other, prompting one congressional aide to ask facetiously, "Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort & Stone and argue it out?" Stone and Atwater present a contrast in styles. Stone, who practices the hardball politics he first learned as an aide to convicted Watergate Co-Conspirator ..."

"When people think of Washington corruption, they think of organizations like Black, Manafort & Stone, that shook down dictators, took all their money, and then tried to take America's government and make them serve the dictator's interest. You know, it is the swamp."

"Stone likes to think of himself as a fixer -- "the next generation's ," in the words of one friend -- and identifies with the modern consultant-as-slick-salesman..."

"After the Reform Party cost the Republicans the White House in '92, again in '96... Yeah, I may have played some role in derailing them as a party."

"He has nicknames within the Republican party: "The Godfather," "The Prince of Darkness." The latter is a name Stone himself likes to repeat. It is, he has told more than one friend, good for his "aura.""

"A lobbyist can perform no greater favor for a lawmaker than to help get him elected. It is the ultimate political IOU, and it can be cashed in again and again. No other firm holds more of this precious currency than the Washington shop known as Black, Manafort. Legally, there are two firms. Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, a lobbying operation... Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater, a political-consulting firm, has helped elect... powerful... politicians... The partners... say that the lobbying and political-consulting functions are kept separate. ...Charges , president of the public-interest lobbying group : "It's institutionalized conflict of interest." ...The partners charge six-figure fees to lobby and six-figure fees to manage election campaigns. As a result, they take home six-figure salaries. ...They unabashedly peddle their access to the Reagan Administration."

"They [Black, Manafort & Stone] elected people. As soon as those people were in office, they turned around and lobbied them. And so they crossed a line that hadn't been crossed. Washington's been worse for it ever since."

"What Roger Stone says and what the truth are, are two factually different things."

"Roger's the first one who introduced us to Donald, and Donald was one of our clients at Black, Manafort, Stone in the early 80s and was a client of ours for a long time."

"He is an expert in stabbing people in the back. That guy's got an incredible capacity for treachery."

"Roger Stone has been Donald Trump's chief political advisor. He planned and ran his presidential campaign. ...His entire business has been dirty tricks, has been lies, has been personal smears."

"You can parlay your short-term connections into making money, but administrations change. That's where Roger is going to end up short, because he doesn't have any real talent. He doesn't have any character. That's why questions have come up about his ethics and his way of doing business. He has to parlay connections to give himself credibility because he has no credibility on his own."

"Kenya and Nigeria have widely criticized human rights records. Last year, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Co.. which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991."

"I wrote a lot about . I started hearing about Roger from people who were close to Roy. ...Roy Cohn is the single most evil person I have ever covered. If that's a magnet for you as a young man, it says you're soulless before you start."

"The partners have been criticized by some fellow consultants for their brand of influence-peddling: first electing clients to office, then lobbying them. The political arm of the organization, formerly Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater, is now known as Campaign Consultants Inc. ...Corporate clients are willing to pay six-figure fees to ensure the kind of access to top government officials Stone and his partners... like to flaunt."

"Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and I had worked together through the Reagan campaign. When the Reagan campaign got short of cash, [we] decided to start a political consulting firm. Paul Manafort came in one day and said, "You know we ought to start a lobbying firm, because I'm getting a lot of calls from people who all know we work for Reagan and [that we] know the people who are going to be in the Reagan administration, and they want lobbying." So we did."

"Lobbying had been considered kind of a sleazy business, but Roger Stone unabashedly came out and said, "I'm going to make a pile of money off of this and no apologies.""

"[H]e's been everywhere dark and ugly in our politics for many, many years. In 2004, he's blamed for forging the documents that destroyed Dan Rather's career and also helped to re-elect President Bush. ...That same year, Stone consulted for Al Sharpton's presidential run that helped disrupt the Democratic primary process. ...A few years later, he took credit for bringing down his nemesis, New York governor Eliot Spitzer. He says he got a tip from a hooker in a sex club. ...Stone's so desperate to stay in the public eye, that he peddles garbage conspiracy theories."

"We're going to have protests, demonstrations. We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal."

"My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. ... In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable."

"... the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance."

"Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficulty because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."

"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. .... Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, American companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today. What happens when we've gained everything to be had from fine-tuning the old lines of businesses that we've inherited? Unlikely as it sounds, the answer threatens to be far worse than the crisis of 2008. Today's "best practices" lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried."

"Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I've learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. But while I have noticed many patterns, and I relate them here, this book offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places ..."

"The university system in 2014, it's like the Catholic Church circa 1514... You have this priestly class of professors that doesn't do very much work; people are buying indulgences in the form of amassing enormous debt for the sort of the secular salvation that a diploma represents. And what I think is also similar to the 16th century is that the Reformation will come largely from the outside."

"Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates's dominance, Steve Jobs's return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match."

"Gay marriage can’t be a partisan issue because as long as there are partisan issues or cultural issues in this country, you’ll have trench warfare like on the western front in World War I. You’ll have lots of carnage and no progress."

"I think the future is something that always has to be thought of in relatively concrete terms — and it has to be different from the present ... Only something that's different from the present and very concrete can have any sort of charismatic force. Looking at Western Europe, I would say, there are ... basically three plausible futures on offer. Number one is Islamic sharia law, and if you're a woman you get to wear a burqa. Number two is totalitarian AI à la China, where the computers track you in everything you do — all the time — and that's kind of creepy. So the Eye of Sauron, to use the Lord of the Rings reference, is watching you at all times. And then the third one is hyper-environmentalism, where you drive an e-scooter and you recycle. And even though I'm not a radical environmentalist ... if those are the three choices, I think you can understand why the Green Movement is winning — because those are the three visions of the future we have. And the challenge on the conservative or libertarian side is to offer something that is a picture of the future that's different from these two dystopian and one somewhat stagnant one."

"Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. ... Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse."

"It’s good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work."

"[The media] never takes [Trump] seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally."