Quotations Concerning The Triumph Of Stupidity

First Lady, Abigail Adams

Dear M,

Thanks for the splendid quotes!

Setting aside a few quotations I already knew, I think my favorite is Frederic Bastiat's: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."  (I did not know Bastiat was considered a forerunner of libertarianism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Bastiat)

Abigail Adams' epitomization of The Tea Party gives Bastiat a run for his money: "Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Adams

Curiously, Abigail dovetails with Hermann Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg Trials: "The people don't want war, but " they " can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goering (I did not know Goering was a life-long morphine addict.)

Into this stew I will add Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." 
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/07/conservatives-scare-more-easily-than.html

I think you will enjoy the compendium of quotations, "War, Peace and Political Manipulation," posted at 
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2011/10/war-peace-and-political-manipulation.html

Pax tecum

Alan

PS You remind me that it's time to re-read Eric Hoffer. 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-resentment-of-weak-springs-from.html

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/san-francisco-stevedore-eric-hoffer.html  

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On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 1:38 PM, MH wrote:

Thanks Patrick and Alan, this is tough stuff but ideas we must keep uppermost in explaining events of our time and planning for the future. The Founding Fathers never intended plutocracy but were starting to worry about it, as this time-ordered list of quotes shows, as well as that the moneyed few have long exploited the passions of ignoramuses against their own interests. -M.

"...Neither body to jail nor soul to damn." - Lord Edward Thurlow (1731-1806) describing a new British invention, the corporation. One might add, "nor conscience to pique, nor death to ponder."

"Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind." - John Adams

"There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy." - Thomas Jefferson

"Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." - Abigail Adams

"Prejudice is the child of ignorance." - William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) about a new, educated, bureaucratic class, having no idea it would better describe political activity of Robber Barons of the future.

"TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY.(title of a section in his book, Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter XV, 1835) ... In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them." - Alexis de Tocqueville

"(Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition." Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, Savannah, March 21, 1861.

"Fear is the parent of cruelty." - James Anthony Froude (1818-94)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause." - Victor Hugo

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."- Abraham Lincoln

"Let them eat grass." - Andrew Myrick, a white trader to the starving Sioux, at a meeting of US Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Indians and traders, in August 1862. Afterward Myrick was found dead with grass in his mouth.

"The great mistake of my life was taking a military education." - Robert E Lee

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." - William Jennings Bryan, 1896

"To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." - Smedley Butler, highest ranking, most decorated U.S. Marine, two Congressional Medals of Honor, 1914, 1917, Distinguished Service Medal, 1919. Republican candidate for Senate, 1932.

"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." - Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936, and "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." 1942

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." - John T. Flynn (1882-1964, American writer), 1944

"The people don't want war, but" they "can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." - Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials

"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many... The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy (what they perceive to be) weakness wherever they see it." - Eric Hoffer - "It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil... attracts the weak."

"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash." - Harper Lee, To_Kill_a_Mockingbird

"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public (corporate) manipulation." - Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)

"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, Australian social scientist, 1995

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon

"The greatest threat to democracy is the increasing concentration of major electronic media in ever fewer hands." - Rep. David Price (D-NC)

"It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." - Warren Buffett (See charts below.)

http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f1.jpg
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f2.jpg
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f3.jpg

"I refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving." - Michael Moore