« Reply #28 on: February 24, 2014, 01:17:14 am »
Fell for that for a LONG time until I saw the result! NO MORE!
NOTHING is futile unless you make it so!
You cannot win battles you never fight!
You miss every shot you don't take!
"And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.
Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.
And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Sam Kercheval about reform of the Virginia Constitution, July 12, 1816; "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Definitive Edition, Albert Ellery Bergh, Editor, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association (1905) Vol. XV, p. 40
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass August 4, 1857
Very nice Bigun.
Very, very nice.
Al
Logged
White, American, MAGA, 3% Neanderthal, and 97% Extreme Right Wing Conservative.
Recommended
J Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
E Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
N Davies, Europe: A History
R Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
R Penrose, The Road To Reality & The Emperor's New Mind
K Popper, An Open Society and Its Enemies & The Logic of Scientific Discovery
A Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, & Everything he wrote