Political Activists

"Students today don’t debate whether the state should have any control over their lives, they only debate how much control it should have."

"The difficult decisions first began in December 1964, when I refused to join a Progress Labor Party group preparing to go ‘underground.’ They ended with the most difficult choice—to leave the movement silently, quietly, as so many other had done before, or to risk the censure of those who had once been my friends and tell of the personal experience, political truths, and illegal activities that forced me to ‘split.’ The friends who were no longer friendly, the attempts at personal slander, the chorus that now sang out my name as the most dangerous enemy of all, the attempts to isolate me—all were expected. But the contemptuous and defamatory quality of the attacks were not, and the only thing one can say is that the Old and New Left have this something in common—they have no scruples when it comes to one who sways from their prescribed faith."

"I discovered that I had deluded myself into believing that this world held the answer to the future and that Communism was basically humanitarian in its approach to politics. No one duped me into joining, and the struggle to see through my folly has been a great personal struggle. You don’t discover some morning that everything you believe in, and perhaps have staked your life on, is a myth. The act of breaking with Communism was the most difficult one of my life."

"Borrowing a chapter from the Nazis, they believe that the more often a lie is repeated, the more people are prone to accept it as truth. Nothing is too scandalous for them, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that at one time I was a close associate of people capable of such deceitful behavior."

"[About Aleksandr Dugin:] There are so many people who call him a fascist and it triggers me so much because that just tells me they're talking about Dugin when they haven't even read the first three pages of his book. He hates fascism."

"[About the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022:] It's a more complex issue that just 'Russian big baddie', 'West big good guy'. Do I think invading Ukraine is a good thing? No, of course not. I hate having to always put these stipulations before everything I say when I have a conversation. Of course what they are doing is bad but we still need to consider the good parts of their ideology and the good critiques they have, because if we have no self-criticizm as the West as a liberal society, we're going to become exactly what they expect us to do: Some culture that just becomes Unicron and tries to eat the rest of the world and never self-reflects."

"I think it's terrifying that we're banning all of this Russian media, because we're gonna get one story and it's going to be completely different from what the other half of the world hears. You're going to have the Western story and view of reality, and the [Eastern-Eurasian] story and view of reality. And we're going to have completely different world views to a terrifying extent. [...] We cannot operate in a world with only 50 percent of the story. We're gonna all become little North Koreas [...]."

"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."

"The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us. The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle-age is perspective, the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 ..."

"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."

"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."

"Confirm [the age of Apple is over]. We know what a smartphone looks like and does. It's not the fault of Tim Cook, but it's not an area where there will be any more innovation."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

"We're definitely onto something big. The need PayPal answers is monumental. Everyone in the world needs money – to get paid, to trade, to live. Paper money is an ancient technology and an inconvenient means of payment. You can run out of it. It wears out. It can get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that's more convenient and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere with a PDA or an Internet connection. Of course, what we're calling 'convenient' for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries' governments play fast and loose with their currencies. They use inflation and sometimes wholesale currency devaluations, like we saw in Russia and several Southeast Asian countries last year [referring to the 1998 Russian and wikipedia:1997 Asian financial crisis, to take wealth away from their citizens. Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars. Eventually PayPal will be able to change this. In the future, when we make our service available outside the U.S. and as Internet penetration continues to expand to all economic tiers of people, PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure."

"I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself "libertarian." ... But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron."

"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."

"How can you say you love us? You don't love us! You don't even love yourself. You just love your money."

"I chased this story for a year and he just...tweeted it out."

"I guess you'd call me hyper-rational, stoic."

"I’d love for John Fetterman to have, like, good gainful employment. Maybe he could be, like, a bag guy at a grocery store. But, like, is it unreasonable for me to expect, as a citizen of the United States of America, to have a United States senator have basic cognitive function?"

"[can’t recall using GAAP except] probably in Accounting 101 at Wharton"

"What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???"

"If Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, like the Democrats/Media have so desperately portrayed him, why’d he only shoot white people in self defense? Why do the vast majority of people not know that minor detail?"

"Sorry @ivankatrump but what kind of big brother would I really be if I showed restraint and didn’t post this???"

"Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready."

"I’m pretty sure they’re not chanting “Let’s go Brandon” as the NBC reporter is telling us. What do you hear? #fjb Great to see real America representing loud and proud @TALLADEGA today.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 “Let’s go, Brandon!” 🤣🤣🤣"

"Pennsylvania managed to elect a vegetable."

"These people are truly morons. I went through the CDC data cause I kept hearing about new infections. But I was like, 'Why aren’t they talking about deaths?' Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing"

"70 million pissed off republicans and not one city burned to the ground."

"He's got to condemn this sh*t ASAP."

"Amazing. I thought this was some sort of joke quote taken out of context but no... it’s just Don Lemon being a moron. Unfortunately this is how so many leftists actually think. Disgusting! Imagine the outrage if you changed “white men” with any other demographic?"

"Liberals love the first amendment until you say something they don't agree with."

"If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you that just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem."

"We need an Oval office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand."

"If it's what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer."

"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets … We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

"This gathering [at the Ellipse] should send a message to them. This isn't their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican Party. You can be a hero, or you can be a zero. And the choice is yours. But we are all watching. The whole world is watching, folks. Choose wisely."

"Free Speech Is Under Attack! Censorship is happening like NEVER before! Don’t let them silence us. Sign up at http:// DONJR.COM to stay connected! If I get thrown off my social platforms I’ll let you know my thoughts and where I end up!"

"The hypocrisy of those trying to cancel Ted Cruz who have been totally silent on their Democrat Governor’s incompetence is telling"

"Ah here, O mother is thy task, Thy sacred duty to thy land: Endow thy sons with spirits strong, With strength of heart and honor bright; Inspire them with fraternal love, To strive for freedom and for right."

"O mother! hear thy country's plea: Nurture thy sons with spirits strong Led by the torch of truth whose flame Will banish ignorance and wrong."