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| Michael Oakeshott, Conan O'Brien, Ben Okri, Marvin
Olasky, Keith Olbermann, Gerard
O'Neill, Paul O'Neill, Bill
O'Reilly, P.J.
O'Rourke, George
Orwell, Charles Osgood, John Owen,
Wilfred Owen |
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|
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| Michael Oakeshott, Conan O'Brien, Ben Okri, Marvin
Olasky, Keith Olbermann, Gerard
O'Neill, Paul O'Neill, Bill
O'Reilly, P.J.
O'Rourke, George
Orwell, Charles Osgood, John Owen,
Wilfred Owen |
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Dear
Lovers of Liberty, the struggle is
just beginning! Get ready...
|
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Marvin Olasky
"British sportsman Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) wrote, 'The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are health, wealth, and power.' America as a whole, and many Americans individually, had them all in 2000. If we had read the Bible more, we could have been reassured by Horace Greeley's statement that 'It is impossible to enslave mentally and socially a Bible-reading people.' But even though 92 percent of American households own at least one Bible and the average household owns three, a Gallup survey showed that fewer than half of Americans knew the name of the Bible's first book."
"The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war on the false
premise that it had something to do with 9/11 is lying by implication. The impolite phrase
is 'impeachable offense'."
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, This Hole in the Ground, 9/11/2006
"Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others
and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect
and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression."
Gerard K. O'Neill, (1927-1992)
"I will bet
you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San
Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you
willing to take that wager?"
Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 1/29/2003
"There's
no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks,
try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United
States and British unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold
like that."
Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 2/10/2003
|
George
Orwell
|
Get
the bumper sticker
at LibertyStickers.com! |
"During times of
universal
deceit, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act." George Orwell |
George Orwell, (1903-1950) Notes on Nationalism, 1945
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of
intelligent men."
"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
"There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it."
Notes on Nationalism, 1945
"I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate,
and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny
stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he
grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The
thing that has been cut away is his soul."
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell [1968]
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all
right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state
this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing
orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable
opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the
highbrow periodicals."
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."
Notes on Nationalism, 1945"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. ....(P)olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.... The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of
speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient
minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."
"If the war didn't happen to kill you, it was bound to start you thinking."
Politics and the English Language
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."
"War is a way of shattering to pieces ... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and...too intelligent."
"Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably to the belief that the present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."
James Burnham and The Managerial Revolution (1946)
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.""So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people that don't even know that fire is hot."
"War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil."
"A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor - it is a fixed characteristic of human nature."
"Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism."
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it."
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time."
"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the
symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
Source: Orwell: The Authorized Biography, Michael Shelden, (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 328
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do
not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing
their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-
abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand,
if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never
sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from
evil."
1941
"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the
screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The
P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade
whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that
kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us
and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper
offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the
libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics,
the vilification of the enemy - all these were done, as usual, by people who were not
fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight... Perhaps
when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo
with a bullet-hole in him."
Homage to Catalonia
"Being Politically Correct means always having to say you're sorry."
Charles Osgood
"Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers."
John Owen
"The house built on the sand may oftentimes be built higher, have more fair parapets and battlements, windows and ornaments, than that which is built upon the rock; yet all gifts and privileges equal not one grace."
John Owen
The Father imposed
His
wrath due unto, and the Son underwent punishment for, either:
1. The sins of all
men.
2. All the sins of
some
men, or
3. Some of the sins
of
all men.
In which case it
may
be said:
a. That if the last
be true, all men have some sins to answer for, and so none are saved.
b. That if the
second
be true, then Christ, in their stead suffered for all the sins of all
the
elect in the whole world, and this is the truth.
c. But if the first be the case, why are not all men free from the punishment due unto their sins? You answer, Because of unbelief. I ask, is this unbelief a sin, or is it not? If it be, then Christ suffered the punishment due unto it, or He did not. If He did, why must that hinder them more than their other sins for which He died? If He did not, He did not die for all their sins!
John Owen
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Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy
of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.