Caligula for President Quotes

“Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Trump revealed his powerful secret to conquering financial adversity once, in a meeting to promote another one of his signature, view-eating housing developments: “You know,” he said, “what New York really needs—besides this project—is to reduce its debt. And let me tell you—this is something I know—it’s easy! You just don’t pay!” America”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. —Alex Carey, social scientist”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Complain about your crumbling infrastructure and overzealous Homeland Security all you like, but as least you have a system that theoretically provides both, which is a damn sight better for national morale than knowing you don’t, and that at any moment some Aramis-drenched Visigoth could climb in the window of your bedroom, unzip your torso like a garment bag and eat out your liver with a crab fork.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“It is not an empire’s job to make anyone rich or happy or relieve their suffering. In fact, these things are usually most successfully achieved outside of, or in spite of, most organized social constructs. Some would argue that the best kinds of happiness happen outside acceptable limits imposed by society, law or religion—all of which are control methods that we, the Divine Few, impose on you, the Nameless Inconsequential, in the hopes that you will censor yourselves into some form of voluntary slavery”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“it is terribly important to a militaristic society to have constant wars going on that are both unwinnable and completely futile, in order to justify a constant running fire-hose blast of deficit spending. For example, I personally vow that the United States will be running full-scale wars against both Drugs and Terror until both Drugs and Terror are completely obliterated from the earth. These”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Central to the idea of a democracy is the ruse that civilian control of the military prevents military dictatorships. But it’s different when the civilians running the defense establishment are oil barons, arms manufacturers, spooks and spokesmen for General Electric.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Any idiot knows that the first thing you do when seizing absolute power is bribe the Praetorian Guard. It’s really the only tenured and tacitly understood method of making the cogs of accession mesh smoothly. First you hand out big fat bonuses to the military, then seize your power by force, then build your consensus via relentless intimidation and bondage attire. Authoritarian”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Oh, oh, look out: MySpace is going to put together a march. On the streets! With big banners! Saying, STOP, BAD GOVERNMENT! STOP DOING THAT BAD, BAD THING! Hold me, Mother! We must, as a governing body, stop doing immoral things immediately, or bisexual college girls with nose rings might wave colorful signs at us! Or”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“let me let you in on a little secret as to why the new American gulag is going to be so popular. MSNBC has already done the math on this one: Prison = Entertainment! Now and forever! You”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Freedom is too abstract a concept: You can’t eat it, fuck it, sit under it when it rains or even do very much with it besides get in trouble and have it taken away from you again. Most”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Please keep abusing each other over differences of skin tone and absurdly tiny religious discrepancies. It’s good for the country. Racism needs to rise in periods where slavery makes a comeback, because if all you simian-browed, atavistic gutter-plebes started cooperating, all of a sudden, you’d barbecue our prissy fannies in a hot ghetto second. Vent”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Do not say, “Personally, I am as worthless as a bolt, but if I stop being an isolated bolt and start gathering with my equally undistinguished and boltlike neighbors, we are, collectively, a big sack of bolts that can hit things harder.” You”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“If you’ve achieved complete ass-out shamelessness, however, you can dispense with virtue quite easily. It’s really very liberating, and crucial to great wealth in a free market. It’s”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Capitalism, like feudalism and slavery before it, is the most enduring, insidious and compelling structure by which a parasitic minority of aristocratic families gets to monopolize life as you know it, and doom You People, the majority, to an insectoid life of debt slavery in office cubicles.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“You think you know what the Department of Defense is spending? The Department of Defense doesn’t even know what the Department of Defense is spending.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Military Keynesianism means the economy gets a sudden juice-boost of wildly unaccountable new defense spending. And here’s the kicker: It requires that we keep up sustained, prolonged and relentless military ambition in order for the economy not to suck backward into itself and collapse like a Superdome-size water blister. It’s the economic plan endorsed by Germany in the 1930s and under former GE spokesman Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Once,”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The privatization of services traditionally provided by the government pretty much exclusively benefits ambitious and well-connected corporations and their wealthy representatives. But the goal, of course (even though nobody explicitly talks about it because it’s impolite), is the direct wealth-jacking of the middle class, and the siphoning off of all its benefits, pensions, pay raises, assets and equity (and free time spent not working), and giving all these to the extremely rich. Because,”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can’t really wake her up, but there’s things she’s still good for. To”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The comfort of the rich depends on an abundance of the poor. —Voltaire”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“I pledge to do what must be done to get everyone before they get you, America. Free country or no free country, democracy or no democracy—at the end of the day, say what you want . . . You have to admit this: you’re American. Naked displays of raw proactive bully-power put a tingling feeling in your undershorts. You like to see the bad guys get it. Might”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“All these massive executive-power-consolidating, pound-you-up-the-fanny-whenever-the-urge-so-takes-me directives could simply be ordered not to exist anymore by me, as your next president, with the simple stroke of my pen. So”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Classically, at the beginning of a regime change, it is usually a good idea and trustworthy gesture for the new leader to renounce the evildoings of the old administration and establish as much distance from the outgoing disgrace as possible. When”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Executive leadership ultimately goes to the candidate wearing the biggest codpiece. I”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . is the definition of tyranny. —James Madison”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The vast majority of you (and democracy is, after all, “majority rule”) don’t actively participate in, protect, fight for or even understand democracy. That’s perfectly natural, mainly because you’ve never really had a democracy. What you have here, technically, is an oligarchy dressed down and slumming around in the hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans of democracy. In”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Give your oppressed masses a sense of virtue accumulated through suffering, and stand back and marvel as they censor themselves and act in a decent, God-fearing, law-abiding and—best of all—long-suffering manner, in order to feel ethically superior to you. I’ve”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Naturally the common people don’t want war . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. —Hermann Goering”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“When Gloria Arroyo ran for reelection in the Philippines in 2004, the Economist published an article titled “Democracy as Showbiz,” and whinged that running for president in the Philippines is so expensive that celebrity name recognition has become crucial. Oh, horrors: Arroyo ran against a movie star and a televangelist. America”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.” (I”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny