The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History Quotes

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“Guess what? ★ Without grand programs, Harding and Coolidge presided over one of the most economically prosperous times in America’s history. ★ Under Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, the top income tax rate fell from 73 percent to 40 percent and later to 25 percent, but the greatest proportional reductions occurred in the lower income brackets, where people saw most of their income tax burden eliminated altogether.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“It’s a myth that “predatory pricing” exploited American consumers and created business monopolies. ★ Thanks to government subsidies, many of America’s railroads were often laid on inefficient, circuitous routes. ★ Rockefeller, Carnegie, Dow, and other great American businessmen did more for America than all the big-government programs combined.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln, 1848”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“The War Between the States was not launched to free the slaves. ★ Lincoln believed that whites were superior, and favored the deportation of freed slaves. ★ The South was for free trade; the North wanted protectionism. ★ With the exception of the United States, every nation in the Western hemisphere where slavery existed in the nineteenth century abolished it peacefully.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“The protective tariff was perhaps the most controversial economic issue of the antebellum period. High tariffs, intended to protect Northern industry from foreign competition, were a terrible burden to the agricultural South, which had little industry to protect. To Southerners, the tariffs meant higher prices for manufactured goods because they bought them abroad and paid the tariff or because they bought them from Northerners at the inflated prices that tariff protection made possible.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the “general welfare” clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“It is only with government help—in the form of subsidies, restrictions on potential rivals, and the like—that business can “exploit” the public in any meaningful sense. That”
― Thomas E. Woods Jr., Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“THE DECADE OF GREED? Ever since the New Deal, no successful American presidential candidate had run on an anti-government, pro-freedom platform; certainly none governed that way.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“The mid-1960s also saw a change in the way a good portion of the American intellectual class chose to view poverty and welfare. Contemptuously dismissed was any distinction between a “deserving” and a “non-deserving” poor; such thinking was said to be terribly judgmental.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“In the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton said he intended to “end welfare as we know it,” he proposed an increase in the Job Corps budget. So a program that had been a total failure for three decades, with very little to show for the billions it had squandered, was to be rewarded with a bigger budget.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“Worse still, throughout the program’s first decade, two-thirds of participants never even finished. Let that sink in: two-thirds did not even bother to complete a free job-training program—financed by hard-working Americans.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“American presidents send a million Russians back to Stalin”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. Ludwig von Mises”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“No wonder historians loathe Harding and Coolidge; these presidents’ success goes to show how much better off the country might be if ambitious politicians with their grandiose plans would just shut up and leave us alone.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“It is only with government help—in the form of subsidies, restrictions on potential rivals, and the like—that business can “exploit” the public in any meaningful sense.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“With all that has been written about Abraham Lincoln, his racial views should be well known to Americans. But they are not. In his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, he declared: I will say that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“The main point that nullification addresses is that a government allowed to determine the scope of its own powers cannot remain limited for long.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“The story of American history that most students have encountered for at least the past several decades amounts to a series of drearily predictable clichés: the Civil War was all about slavery, antitrust law saved us from wicked big business, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression, and so on. From the colonial settlements through the presidency of Bill Clinton, this book, in its brief compass, aims to set the record straight.”
― Thomas E. Woods, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History