Libertarians From The United States

"The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history."

"The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can."

"One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass."

"Organization kills."

"Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play."

"When I was a young man working 14 hour days, I traded using outrageous and terrifying leverage. I was either very lucky, very smart or very dumb. That’s what terrifies people about commodities. Commodities themselves are no riskier than stocks. A stock on margin has more risk than a commodity fully paid for. It’s all about the degree of leverage."

"I did very little marketing. The key is to make your clients money. If you have a good track record, people will find you and knock on your door. Just make your clients money."

"I started out with $600, a second hand Volkswagen, and a wife. One was an asset and one was a liability. I will let you figure out which was which. I liquidated both, and still had the $600. I worked long hours, and spent weekends reading about markets. I simply love it. You have to love what you do, whether it be gardening, hairdressing, etc. When you love it, then the money follows. Even if it doesn’t, you will still be happy. Being happy and poor is better than being unhappy and poor."

"The bottom line is this is not a war we want to get into. We can win the battle of Iraq, but that is not the war. It's not a war that can be won in the traditional sense. If we succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein, what then? Who is going to run Iraq afterwards? We cannot do it. The country is a mish mash of factions who hate each other."

"When President Bush goes on television and says certain cultures hate us for our democracy and freedom, he's just wrong. Everywhere I went in the Middle East, everyone told me how much they loved America and Americans; the hatred is directed at American policy."

"Attacking Iraq would be madness."

"Unfortunately politicians are not very sound people or they wouldn't be politicians."

"I am dying to find a way to invest in both North Korea and Myanmar. The major changes in these two countries are among the most exciting things I see right now, looking to the future."

"Sometimes I think our central bank will keep printing money till we run out of trees."

"Teach your children or your grandchildren Chinese. It is going to be the most important language of their lifetimes."

"If you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism for the rich."

"Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic."

"People are reading news for free on the web, that's got to change."

"While it's impossible to be completely prepared for a downturn of this magnitude, we began priming ourselves for a weakening economy earlier last year. We have implemented strict cost cutting measures across all our operations. We have reduced headcount in individual businesses where appropriate and we've scaled back on capital expenditures. Even in plush times, we have never been a company that tolerates fat. So in times like these, we are better positioned to weather this cycle than our competitors."

"They’ve started it. We’ve had bitter, personal attack on some of our people. They tried to destroy our credibility as a network. But it is only natural that the people can stand who were personally attacked and their children were personally attacked should fight back and I support them. I support my people completely."

"Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O'Reilly. He's done certain things to Bill O'Reilly that I believe were way over the line. I think that's bad behavior. But it's okay for him to criticize Bill. And Bill shouldn't be so sensitive. He should ignore that."

"Well, except for ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, the Washington Post, and about another 100 newspapers, I find little evidence of liberal bias in the media."

"The greatest thing to come out of this [the war in Iraq] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

"I have to admit that until recently I was somewhat wary of the [global] warming debate. But I believe it is now our responsibility to take the lead on this issue."

"In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. … It has taken a long boot time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them — they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced."

"Can we change the world? No, but hell, we can all try."

"News — communicating news and ideas, I guess — is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read (and) alternative television channels."

"Fuck Dacre. Publish."

"After all, we are in the entertainment business."

"Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump's rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems."

"Rupert Murdoch, a right-wing billionaire, is one of the most powerful people on the planet. His News Corporation owns enormous amounts of media throughout the world, including the major newspapers on three continents-North America, Europe, and Australia. In the United States, Murdoch's major holdings include Fox television, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, TV Guide, and Barron's. At a time when scientists speak in an increasingly urgent tone about the planetary crisis of climate change, Murdoch works in tandem with the fossil fuel industry in rejecting science."

"It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States...in 2007, Rupert Murdoch-whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial movement-launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees to buy hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself). Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over."

"I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. "That's easy", he replied. "When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.""

"Murdoch runs his media empire in the US as an unvarnished political operation."

"Media conglomerates like Murdoch’s News Corp. are among the most powerful corporations on the planet. His papers beat the drums for war while distracting with gossip and glitz."

"We're both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together"

"I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I'm happy"

"The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity. It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future."

"What a fucking idiot."

"How thoroughly have you studied compulsory insurance in Germany? And why do you believe that it will work here otherwise than it worked there? I would really like to know. My own opinions haven’t ripened yet. So far, I am opposed to so-called ‘Social Security’ principally because I am opposed to tyranny; I think it is tyranny to take my money, money earned by my labor, and to spend it for me—in any way whatever—instead of allowing me to send it for myself. But so far as I have learned, and thought, about this use of tyranny in Germany since Bismarck established it, I’m inclined to believe that it can’t work otherwise than as disastrously as it worked there."

"I am not a prophet. But I do not believe that anything like a majority of Americans are looking for security; I do not believe that the groups of young radicals in the colleges and all over this country are in a ‘flight’ from socialization. I think they are furiously rebelling against it and determined to abolish it. I believe that their revolt is founded solidly on reality, as the similar socialist revolt of our youth was not; and I believe that they will succeed in overturning the status quo (as the socialist did) and end this century as Americans ended the 18th, in a great surge of liberalism, this time world-wide. I mean genuine liberalism. Since the socialists have stolen that good word, true liberals flounder all over the place, calling themselves ‘ libertarians’ and even ‘conservatives,’ but the accurate word, individualists, seems to be gaining ground lately."

"A ‘civilization’ is not an organism, it is not biological, it is not an entity at all. ‘Civilization does not exist; what exists is living individual persons, each one endowed by his Creator with life energy and with liberty, which is his own control of his own actions (kinetic life energy). There is no inevitability whatever in history. Certainly, a collectivist ‘system’ will break down, as socialized Rome did, as all ‘governments’ antique and ancient and modern have broken down, when a majority of living persons believed the socialist fallacy: that there is a Human whole of which persons compose the cellular mass."

"When a free person buys insurance from a private company, the company has a profit-motive in remaining solvent, and the government uses it police power properly to enforce the carrying-out of the terms of the contract freely entered into. But when government uses police power to compel a person to buy government insurance, there is no profit motive, and there is no third party existing, to enforce the terms of the contract. It seems to be a most precarious venture, at best."

"This rejection of one's self as an individual was, I knew, the spirit animating the members of the Communist Party. I heard that it was the spirit beginning to animate Russia. It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy. Scores, hundreds of the smallest incidents revealed it."

"Resisting step by step, I was finally compelled to admit to my Italian friends that I had seen the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini. And it seemed to me that this revival was based on a separation of individual liberty from the industrial revolution whose cause and source is individual liberty. I said that in Italy, as in Russia, an essentially medieval, planned and controlled economic order was taking over the fruits of the industrial revolution while destroying its root, the freedom of the individual."

"The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as ‘war,’ ‘glory,’ ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘home,’ mean the same in two languages, is an error."

"I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom. Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived."

"The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill."

"The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not…To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience."

"A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim. Economic power differs from political power."