"Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy."

James Bovard Literature See all quotes by James Bovard →

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“The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve.”

“Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives.”

“A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.”

“People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom.”

“We need a constitutional amendment to make the federal government obey the Constitution.”

“The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous agains…"

— H. L. Mencken

Literature1880–1956

#politics

"But we don't yet know whether the Universe is open or closed. More than that, there are a few astronomers who doubt that the redshift of distant galaxies is due to the doppler effect, who are skeptica…"

— Carl Sagan

Science1934–1996

#religion

"Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "…"

— Richard Rodriguez

Literature1958

#life

"For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatura…"

— Philip K. Dick

Literature1928–1982

#nature