"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."

"[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."

"A common error […] is to identify tyranny and monarchy, which in fact are quite unrelated political forms—all they share is the coincidence of personal rule. We may not all know it, but we'd almost all rather live under the "autocratic" and "absolutist" tsars than under Stalin."

"[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."

"[T]he problem with genius is not promoting it, but suppressing it. It takes a very large and intricate system to perform the latter task, but it works pretty well as you can see."

"[T]he continuity of tradition from Plymouth Rock to the United Nations is quite unmistakable."

"[I]n a free society, there is no such thing as official truth."

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

"In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007."

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

"The secret of power is that power and responsibility are the same thing."

"[L]eftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism."

"In a democracy with a free press, the press is the government. Public opinion on any subject will naturally shift toward the opinions of those who explain that subject to the public."

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

"The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one."

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

"In the twenty-first century, any writer whose work appears anywhere but his own blog is a shill. Or at least, he should be assumed to be compromised unless proven otherwise. The Internet has all the tools you need to write and be read without being beholden to anyone. If anyone rejects this independence, you have to wonder why."

"[T]he state is simply a real-estate business on a very large scale."

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

"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."

"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."

"Limited government is a recipe for corrupting the judiciary."

"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."

"[M]ost of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the state."

"[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."

"The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former."

"[T]he replacement of religion by idealism has allowed people who are essentially religious fanatics to achieve positions of unprecedented temporal supremacy, not only without arousing the alarm of reasonable, scientifically minded writers, but in fact enlisting their enthusiastic support."

"Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?"

"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."

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

"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…"."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"[U]niversal faith in progress is evidence for, not against, decline."

"In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal."

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

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

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

"That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is."

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

"The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government."

"Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the state, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates", and nor would anyone else."

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

"Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre."

"The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world."

"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."