Democracy?

"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."

 

William Boss Tweed 

Right To Exist

 "Much of the unreality in U.S. attitudes toward Israel is the result of ahistorical arguments that Israel has "the right to exist". Clearly, no nation has the "right" to exist; Darwinian logic applies to nation states as well as to the other components of the animal kingdom. If there was such a right, the nations of the world would be working to resuscitate the Soviet Union, Sparta, Hannibal's Carthage, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Nations exist as long as they can defend themselves, contain internal societal rot at nonfatal levels, maintain economic viability, and do not gratuitously make a constellation of more powerful enemies. This truism applies equally to all: the United States has no more right to exist than does Israel, Palestine, Bolivia, Saudi Arabia,Belgium or Russia. You form your country and you take your chances..."

Michael Scheuer, "Marching Toward Hell" p. 27

Educating the Entitled

 "Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability. A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement - and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem these expectations."

 - Thomas Sowell, "Race and Culture" p. 184

Prejudice

 "The individual black workman is rated not by his own efficiency, but by the efficiency of a whole group of black fellow workmen, which may often be low. If white people were to lose their racial prejudices overnight, this would make very little immediate difference in the economic condition of most blacks. Some few would be promoted, some few would get new places, but the mass would remain as they are, until the younger generation began to try harder, and until the idle and discouraged were stimulated and the whole race lost the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice." 

 - W.E.B. DuBois as quoted by Thomas Sowell in "Race and Culture" p. 90

Freedom

 "The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant."

- Maximilian Robespierre