Jonathan Freed > Jonathan's Quotes

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you”
― Morris Berman

“America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.”
― James Howard Kunstler

“Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.”
― Stephen Potter

“It occurred to me that with all of today's technologies, there were now more ways than ever to know with abosolute certainty that no one wanted to get in touch with me”
― Linwood Barclay, Fear the Worst

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Occasionally, I’d notice I’d lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“Out of the seven billion people now living on the earth, there are about fifty thousands souls who agree with these settlers. Practically everybody else is certain that they are the greatest obstacle to peace. Personally, I have never understood why. Let’s say that the land is divided between Arabs and Jews, and let’s say that the Arabs get the whole of the West Bank. Why, I want to know, can’t the Jews still live there? There are millions of Arabs living in proper Israel, why can’t a few Jews with skullcaps live with the Arabs? In what book of law is it decreed that a land must be free of Jews? Anyway, I go to meet the”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

“The question to ask about an education is not 'What can I do with it?' but rather 'What is it doing to me – as a person?”
― Arthur F. Holmes

“Again and again the old groupings of left and right no longer seem helpful. Sloganeering and dogmatizing settle nothing, nor do emotional tirades and protests really help us sort things through in a thoughtful, biblical fashion.”
― Arthur F. Holmes, Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions

“The problem is academics are students afraid to graduate, so their grasp on reality is for shit.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Serpentine

“If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. ”
― Charles Willeford

“Folk wisdom has it that five Jews wrote the rules of society: Moses said, “The law is everything.” Jesus said, “Love is everything.” Marx said, “Money is everything.” Freud said, “Sex is everything.” Einstein said, “Everything is relative.”
― Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947

“When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich