"The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable."

"Law is impartial by definition. If it's not impartial, it's not law."

"Fairness is unachievable. Any distribution of rights will be perceived by someone as unfair. If it starts as equal, it will not long remain so. If you try to set it back, you can only do so by breaking the law."

"Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not."

"The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology."

"Technical advances have masked, and continue to mask, the signs of decay that would otherwise be obvious."

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

"You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape."

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

"Replacing your own ideology is a lot like do-it-yourself brain surgery."

"It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish."

"[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement."

"[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared."

"An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today."

"There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant."

"The genius of New Deal "liberal democracy" is that while it's somewhat liberal, it's not at all democratic. It is in fact designed specifically to resist democracy. The combination of this design with a civic creed that assigns unlimited positive connotations to the word democracy is simply brilliant. We may despise it, but we have to admire it."

"I can't imagine counting the number of times I've heard someone say "we should…" when what they really mean is "the government should…"."

"[T]axation is not theft. Taxation is rent."

"Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty."

"In fact, rationalism is to reason as scientism is to science."

"[T]he modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles."

"In fact, the word racism is applied in almost exactly the same way, by almost exactly the same authorities, as atheism in 1811. It is an omnibus epithet for a tremendous variety of ideas and opinions which responsible authorities find dangerous or displeasing."

"[R]evenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable."

"For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful."

"Most people in the West don't think their entire system of government is fundamentally, irreparably corrupt. Nor did most people in the Soviet Union."

"Journalism […] looks like an unfree market because it is tied so closely to the unfree market of higher education."

"[P]ower in a democracy is held by those who manage public opinion."

"The system will be defeated when most intelligent people realize that The New York Times is a government gazette and Harvard is a government seminary, and when they form alternate institutions that fulfill the same role in a way that is genuinely independent."

"The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power."

"The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars."

"Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself."

"[A]s long as the actions of two parties advance each others' interests, they can be considered allies, even if their philosophies of the world are so utterly opposed that they cannot afford the luxury of any such favorable reference."

"[T]yranny is best seen as a sort of static civil war. The tyrant's office differs from the monarch's in that the latter's legitimacy is assured by law, whereas the former's is a matter of personal power and prestige."

"The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people."

"Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different."

"Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner."

"Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought."

""Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

"When you create a category called "religion" which lumps together all the delusional traditions that people who are not like you have inherited unquestioned from their intellectual ancestors, you are making it harder, not easier, to question your own assumptions."

""The main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal [of formalism] is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

""Moderation is not an ideology." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

"[T]he ruling caste are the people who say "we" when they mean "the government". The ruled castes always say "they"."

"The problem today is that the people who think they are the most daring are in fact the most obsequious."

"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."

"Tyranny […] is essentially informal and unstable. At least in the modern era, they tend to evolve into juntas, which tend to evolve into oligarchies, which tend to evolve into democracies. […] With each of these steps, legitimacy and internal security increase, and the state becomes stronger and harder to overthrow. Unless Gaza is your idea of fun, a strong and secure state is a good thing."

"In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve."

"In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear."

"Conservatives cannot admit that conservatism is futile, because then they'd have nothing to do. No man will willingly abolish his own occupation."

"All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press. None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government."