Children of the Collective Quotes

“By measuring risk, we can develop coping skills, challenge our abilities, increase our strength, and allocate resources prudently. In essence, life is one constant series of risk calculations as we determine what we will do.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“The rise of the modern welfare state forced fraternal societies into “full retreat as social welfare institutions.” By assuming the burden of caring for those in need, “governments had undermined much of the reason for the existence of societies and thus for people to join.”72”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“As Goethe said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”27”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Thomas Jefferson’s observation that people can’t be both “ignorant and free”18 also works in the inverse: people can’t be both informed and shackled to the state. Knowledge about the past is how the resistance can fight for a freer future.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“sometimes governments and cultures promote, institutionalize, and enforce what is wrong. They recognize that the law is whatever those in power say it is, and sometimes those in power are corrupt and worthy of our disobedience.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Legality and morality are not synonymous, and politically independent families recognize this truth.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Just as a well-traveled person is not likely to be “deceived by the local errors of his native village,” C. S. Lewis once said, a student of history “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“the state’s schools do not teach the dangers of the state.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“John Dewey, a socialist pioneer of modern schooling, said in 1928 that he loved that schools had a rule “in building up forces… whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life.”86”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Consider this book as a similar distress signal—a warning message from a friendly ally sent to caring parents so they can recognize, prepare for, and defend against the state and its diverse methods of undermining the family with the purpose of controlling the individual.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“As Ayn Rand once wrote, “Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.”14”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“As Thomas Paine once wrote, “Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”39 That support is most likely to come from those individuals who can afford the time and money necessary to make a significant and lasting impact. If we wish for freedom from the state, our families must be economically independent from it.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Affixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence was a point of no return; either they were going to gain their freedom from England and “provide new guards for their future security,” as the document said, or they were going to lose the war to the world’s most powerful military, forfeit all of their possessions, ruin their families, and be hanged, drawn, and quartered.38”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Oddly, and perhaps hypocritically, the architect of some of these programs himself warned of their danger. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, patron saint of modern welfare programs for his New Deal, among other initiatives, once wrote that history clearly showed that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”36”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“The day you passed [the welfare law in England], you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.25”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“If “war is the health of the state,”91 then a state-run schooling system is its lifeblood. Without it, statism is impossible. With it, the state becomes inevitable.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“This subordination to the collective is the foundation of Plato’s dystopian world, and echoes of it are present today. Consider this quote from his writings: The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader… he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… He should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it… in this way the life of all will be spent in total community.34”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective