Chris Spangle > Chris's Quotes

“It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. On”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Its eventual goals include the abolition of all drug laws (not just those against currently illegal narcotics and hallucinogens, but an end to prescription laws and the Food and Drug Administration as well), the abolition of the income tax, the abolition of all regulation of private sexual relations (from marriage to prostitution and everything in between), an end to public ownership and regulation of the airwaves, an end to overseas military bases and all warmaking not in direct defense of the homeland, an end to the welfare state, and an end to any legal restrictions whatsoever on speech and expression. Libertarians’ policy prescriptions are based on a simple idea with very complicated repercussions: Government, if it has any purpose at all (and many libertarians doubt it does), should be restricted to the protection of its citizens’ persons and property against direct violence and theft. In their eyes, most modern government functions, if done by private individuals, would be seen as violence and theft. Libertarians’ economic reasoning leads them to the conclusion that, left to their own devices, a free people would spontaneously develop the institutions necessary for a healthy and wealthy culture. They think that state interference in the economy, whether through taxing or regulation, makes us all poorer rather than richer. Their ideas and policy prescriptions seem unbelievably radical in the current political context. But in many ways, libertarians argue, the United States was founded on libertarian principles. The Constitution defined a role for the federal government much smaller than what it practices today, and it restricted government to a limited set of mandated powers.”
― Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement

“Thus, the well-known theme of “separation of Church and State” was but one of many interrelated motifs that could be summed up as “separation of the economy from the State,” “separation of speech and press from the State,” “separation of land from the State,” “separation of war and military affairs from the State,” indeed, the separation of the State from virtually everything”
― Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

“Thus, America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire; against taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and against militarism and executive power.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

“In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

“As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.”
― Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

“We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“As a career college teacher, I want our coddling, authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a real crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and funding education in the classroom.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“The greatest enemy of liberty is fear. When people feel comfortable and well protected, they are naturally expansive and tolerant of one another’s opinions and rights. When they feel threatened, their tolerance shrinks.”
― Charles Slack, Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

“Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.”
― Charles Slack, Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

“On September 26, 1789, members debated a resolution introduced by Aedanus Burke of South Carolina, charging journalists with having “misrepresented these debates in the most glaring deviations from truth,” and with “throwing over the whole proceedings a thick veil of misrepresentation and error.”
― Charles Slack, Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

“Libertarians believe in the transcendent importance of the individual while traditional conservatives stress the importance of the community. Libertarians want the free market to be as unregulated as possible while traditional conservatives believe that big business, if unconstrained, can impoverish national life and threaten freedom. Libertarians believe a strong state threatens freedom while traditional conservatives believe that a strong state—properly constructed to ensure that too much power does not accumulate in any one branch—is necessary to ensure freedom.”
― Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism

“We are experiencing hyperpartisanship. Paradoxically, it is confusion within each camp—not certainty—that fuels the vehemence. It is because each side can’t see its own compass clearly that makes it so distrustful and defiant whenever the other side suggests a direction.”
― Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism

“When Jesus says the man’s soul will be required, he uses language from the business world; it’s a term that would describe a loan that had fallen due. Our souls are on loan to us. One day, God will review with us what our souls have become. That is what will matter from our lives.”
― John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

“The god of open options is a cruel and vindictive god. He will break your heart. He will not let anyone get too close. But at the same time, because he is so spiteful, he will not let anyone get too far away because that would mean they are no longer an option. On and on it continues, exhausting and frustrating and confusing and endless, pulling towards and then pushing away, like the tide on a beach, never finally committing one way or the other. We have been like the starving man sitting in front of an all-you-can-eat buffet, dying simply because he would not choose between the chicken and the shrimp. The god of open options is also a liar. He promises you that by keeping your options open, you can have everything and everyone. But in the end, you get nothing and no one.”
― Lydia Brownback, Finding God in My Loneliness

“As Lewis himself explained, “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. —JOHN DEWEY”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages. The eternal perspectives are being blotted out, and our judgment of immediate issues will go wrong unless we bring them back. We can do so only, Socrates said in the last talk before his death, “when we seek the region of purity and eternity and unchangeableness, where when the spirit enters, it is not hampered or hindered, but ceases to wander in error, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion.)”
― Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

“But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“Everything you’ve been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.”
― Robert A. Caro, Working

“A prudent man,” he had written, remembering that life is short, gives an hour or two, now and then, to a critical examination of his friendships. He weighs them, edits them, tests the metal of them. A few he retains, perhaps with radical changes in their terms. But the majority he expunges from his minutes and tries to forget, as he tries to forget the cold and clammy loves of year before last.”
― William Manchester, The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken

“The marriage of a first rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late… as a man grows older, the disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages to increase.”
― William Manchester, The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken

“In all matters of manners I am, and always have been, a strict conformist. My dissents are from ideas, not from decorums, and I do not favor wearing odd clothes, or living in an eccentric house, or making odd noises.”
― William Manchester, The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken