Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Compulsory Education is Sickening
Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Writings of Leonardo da Vinci (1833)
Real Science is Never Certain
Climate bureaucrats violate the scientific method, by claiming certainty
Science is always tentative, expecting that modification in its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary, and aware that its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration.
— Bertrand Russel, Religion and Science (1935)
Shoot a Senator
Our constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U. S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
— Will Rogers, Autobiography
Liberty Requires Agitation
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. 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 lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
— Frederick Douglass, An address on West India Emancipation (1857)
Unfit to Rule
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right…The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
Democracy is Not Freedom
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch.
Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
— James Bovard, “Individual Rights“, Sacramento Bee (1994)
Words of the Sentient 
