Brian Paonessa

Every now and then I feel that I need to share the words of someone else. Over the last few months the following quotes were posted by me to facebook and I wanted to archive them here.

Every morning a Gazelle wakes up knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed and eaten. Every morning a lion wakes up knowing it must outrun the slowest Gazelle, or it will starve to death. It does not matter if you are a lion or a Gazelle…when the sun comes up each morning, you’d better be running.

– Unknown [African Proverb]

Associated with the concept of natural rights and servings as an additional buttress to the edifice of laissez-faire was the faith of Americans in the self-sufficiency of the individual. To a great extent the result of the unusually favorable economic conditions that prevailed in the United States, individualism became part and parcel of the nation’s democratic faith. Americans placed their trust not in “external government” but in the free individual, who must be kept free from restrains; and it was widely held that as individuals became more intelligent and more attuned to the moral law, there would be a decreasing need for government.

– Sidney Fine [Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State / Michigan Press (July 15, 1956)]

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

– Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan [in his 1967 book “Gold and Economic Freedom”]

The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.

-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, page 403)

“YOU are the first responders, and police are always second. You face the criminals first, in every event. Police, with all their deadly bullets, only show up later. Police are the second responders”.

– Alan Korwin

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

– Cicero , 55 BC