Azriel > Azriel's Quotes

“America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore, give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions and determine to pay the price of a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths. Remain steadfast...and one day you will build something that endures: something worthy of your potential.”
― Epictetus

“Charles checked on his two snitches among the subversives. There were bascially two subversive groups in Blue Eye -Communists and Republicans, - and Charles confirmed quickly that neither had any revolutions planned”
― Stephen Hunter, G-Man

“National service sounds like a utopian concept for social leveling, and it might be, if it were applied fairly. Those who call for a renewal of the draft proclaim that the social and racial inequities of the Vietnam-era draft would not happen again. The realities of how wars are fought make such pronouncements nonsense.”
― Bob Scales, Scales on War: The Future of America's Military at Risk

“Like all who inherit the Lockean tradition, Mises believed that a strong but limited government, far from suffocating its citizens, allows them to be productive and free.”
― Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

“When the contentious questions are mainly economic (put aside such inflammatory but mainly noneconomic matters as capital punishment or abortion) they tend to fall into two grand classes: one relates to the maintenance of the essential character of the economic order (often, capitalism versus socialism); the other has to do with distributional conflicts within the economic order (often, the rich versus the poor). The two grand classes of issues share a common capacity to call forth moral, as opposed to instrumental, considerations. They involve not simply questions of what is technically better or worse; rather, they are seen to involve good and evil.32 Those who propose to deal “pragmatically” with such questions are doomed to fail—”
― Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

“Open your eyes. Your tears cut a trail. Your scars build a ladder that takes you to a place that you could not have gotten to any other way. Take a look around, remember every second, every breath, every choked scream. Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength. Move on.”
― Henry Rollins, The First Five: "High Adventure in the Great Outdoors", "Pissing in the Gene Pool", "Art to Choke Hearts", "Bang!", "One from None"

“If the man in the street remembers anything about Herbert Hoover it is that his middle name was Laissez-Faire and he did nothing while the American economy went to rack and ruin. As usual the knowledge of the man in the street leaves something to be desired. The popular remembrance of Hoover's quiescence in the face of the depression is a myth. The Great Engineer may have had his faults, but fiddling while the economy burned was not one of them. “Do nothing” was never his motto; his middle name was actually Clark.”
― Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

“The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”
― Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

“Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.”
― Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

“We have some great kebab and Arabic coffee, and when we’ve finished she takes me to the place where the 2.4 million euros are going to be spent. A hamam. A Turkish bath. Yes. Earlier I was told that the Israelis don’t allow Al-Quds University to paint over a little spot on the ceiling, yet they allow them to reconstruct a hamam for millions of euros. Either the Israelis are stupid or the Arabs are liars.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

“What is the truth? He shares it with me: the Israelis make sure that he, being a Palestinian, can’t own a house. I tell him that this is indeed horrible and I ask him to tell me more about himself. He takes a liking to me and he tells me. First and foremost, he proudly shares with me, he is not a man only of the mind but also a man of means: he owns a house in east Jerusalem, and he also owns another one in a place called Shuaffat.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

“In addition to her settler expertise, she tells me that she’s also an expert on Judaism, which she classifies as a “pagan religion.” I ask her if she has ever studied Judaism, a question that makes her raise her voice in anger. For years and years and years, she yells at this offender of her high stature, she has been studying Judaism over and over and over. I light up a cigarette, inhale and exhale, look at her and ask her: Could you tell me, please, what the “Vision of Isaiah” is? That’s the most basic question one could ask and any student of Bible 101 could have answered this question in his sleep, but this learned lady has no clue. What vision? What Isaiah? I am befuddled by her lack of knowledge but everybody at this table asserts beyond doubt that I lack the mental capacity to understand higher concepts.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

“Normally, when I arrive in a new place I try to taste the food its people eat, which is exactly what I want to do now, only here I encounter a big problem: no restaurants. The Haredi of Bet Shemesh don’t go to restaurants because they believe that restaurants are from the devil. In restaurants, after all, men and women can meet and then the men, God forbid, might get an erection when biting into a chicken’s leg while looking at a Taliban.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

“The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work. —FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK, The Road to Serfdom”
― Charles Murray, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

“The relative obscurity of Day’s autobiography and other books like it about Vietnam constitute a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren’t. They aren’t so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America’s greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Power,” he wrote, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.1.21–23a”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“the hegemony of America in the community of the free world creates some curious moral hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differences in standards of productivity. But they lend themselves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our “way of life” by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
― G K Chesterton

“The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“Since its appearance the view that prostitution is a product of capitalism has gained ground enormously. And as, in addition, preachers still complain that the good old morals have decayed, and accuse modern culture of having led to loose living, everyone is convinced that all sexual wrongs represent a symptom of decadence peculiar to our age.”
― Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“True, a socialistic society could see that 1000 litres of wine were better than 800 litres. It could decide whether or not 1000 litres of wine were to be preferred to 500 litres of oil. Such a decision would involve no calculation. The will of some man would decide. But the real business of economic administration, the adaptation of means to ends only begins when such a decision is taken. And only economic calculation makes this adaptation possible. Without such assistance, in the bewildering chaos of alternative materials and processes the human mind would be at a complete loss. Whenever we had to decide between different processes or different centres of production, we would be entirely at sea.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“My parents, like so many others in the darker nation, shared the family stories of achievement but omitted the details of racial slights and discrimination, as if the telling were subject to what the historian Jonathan Holloway describes as a “psychologically enduring editor’s pencil.” So for me, writing this book has been a journey of discovery,”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster

“It is not a good fancy,' said the llama. 'What profit to kill men?'
Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kim