Real Dissent Quotes

“Behavior that Christians would never support in any other context suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, simply because the state has declared that a war is under way. (That’s what Voltaire meant when he said, “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”)”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“No one forces you to buy a Twinkie. But governments do force you to fight in their wars and pay for their bailouts.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Ron Paul is crazy,” the guardians of respectable opinion assured us. What they really meant was that Ron Paul defied traditional political categories and advanced positions outside the Clinton-to-Romney continuum. People whose minds have been formed in ideological prison camps for 12 years have learned to confine themselves within an approved range of possibilities. Tax me 35 percent or tax me 40 percent, but don’t raise the possibility that taxation itself may be a moral issue rather than just a matter of numbers. Either bomb or starve that poor country, but don’t tell me there might be a third option. The Fed should loosen or the Fed should tighten, but don’t tell me our money supply doesn’t need to be supervised by a central planner. As always, confine yourself to the three square inches of intellectual terrain the New York Times has graciously allotted to you.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The biggest anachronism, usually, in a historical movie is, again, the author doesn’t want to be thought to in any way share the social conventions or whatever of the time, so there’s always this auctorial alter ego. So you have a movie set in the 1830s where you’ll have a female character who has the attitudes of a twenty-first-century screenwriter. And that to me is a true anachronism.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The war was fought to prevent the secession, not to free the slaves. People who took up arms in the South did so because they were being invaded.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“If you want to stop the war machine, you’ll have to go after the money machine.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“We’re being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“a society that hopes to foster both justice and prosperity needs to discourage wealth acquisition via the political means and encourage it through the economic means.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“As Ludwig von Mises puts it in this seminal book, modern man “must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Another example I used in the article, I got from watching the old movie Gandhi. The British – who are basically very moral people – were willing to assault Indians who just wanted to make salt in their own country. The movie dramatizes the scene of British soldiers striking down defenseless people. Why? Why would ordinarily decent human beings do that? Well, they wouldn’t, unless they could be convinced that what they were doing was not oppressing an indigenous population, but upholding the rule of law.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“[Isaiah] preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor, and answerable only to his august Boss.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“If the federal government is an addict, then the Federal Reserve System is its enabler.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Since the Fed was established in 1913 the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The economy which prefers fictitious money to real, is, at best, like that which prefers a leaky ship to a sound one.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“the people who attacked Mr. Paul are much more concerned with staying in power than they are with protecting my family and yours.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The greatest gains against poverty in the United States occurred when government was least involved.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“society degenerates into a condition of low-intensity civil war, with each pressure group anxious to secure legislation aimed at enriching itself at the expense of the rest of society.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Twenty years ago, as I was completing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown neoconservative. Except I didn’t know it. Having concluded that I was not a leftist, I simply decided by process of elimination that I must be a Rush Limbaughian.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest & best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, & united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, & a very unexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants….”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Nisbet could find much to disturb a traditional conservative even in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan: “President Reagan’s deepest soul is not Republican-conservative but New Deal-Second World War Democrat. Thus his well noted preference for citing FDR and Kennedy as noble precedents for his actions rather than Coolidge, Hoover, or even Eisenhower. The word ‘revolution’ springs lightly from his lips, for anything from tax reform to narcotics prosecution. Reagan’s passion for crusades, moral and military, is scarcely American-conservative.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success a victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Why does she [Borowski] rail against other women’s choices? Surely a core libertarian value is neutrality between different conceptions of the good?” Actually, no. I replied: “The core libertarian value is nonaggression. ‘Neutrality between different conceptions of the good’ has nothing to do with libertarianism. If you were truly neutral between different conceptions of the good, you wouldn’t be arguing against Julie’s conception of the good.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“what remotely educated or even half-conscious living being could consider John McCain a fit candidate for anything?”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The issue is whether the orders are morally acceptable or not, and that question is not answered by anti-intellectual demands of obedience.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value since the Fed was created.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“we should abolish the Fed altogether, since in the view of these economists it is entirely superfluous to a market economy.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“The dot-com and housing bubbles can both be explained by artificial credit expansion, say such economists.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“We need sweeping, systemic changes, carried out by a real supporter of the free market who sees the whole picture, not trivial tinkering by some empty suit.”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion

“Was U.S. entry into World War I such an act of genius that criticizing it is necessarily perverse?”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion