Libertarian Prepper's Quotes

Just a humble and ongoing collection of thoughts I've expressed.

"Paradoxically, you have to shine brightly yourself to be able to see the other stars. When it comes to people, you do not see better because you dim yourself and your surroundings."

Libertarianism

"As long as people act within a framework of voluntary, mutually consensual interactions, they can only achieve their own selfish desires by satisfying the selfish desires of others. While people act out of self-interest, through the free market system they help others. The free market is therefore the only known system of economic organization that is both fully compatible with human nature, and at the same time altruistic."

"It is not a coincidence that the word anarchy simultaneously means absence of a coercive government, and utter chaos. Orwell wrote about how language is and will be corrupted in order to gain political control. What could be more effective at stifling dissent than to contaminate the words necessary for its expression? The need for a constant stream of propaganda disappears when the very language by which people think becomes their cage, for they will happily keep themselves enslaved by making freedom itself unthinkable."

"The only difference between a criminal and a Statist is that the Statist is also a coward. A criminal at least backs up his criminal intent with his own actions - a Statist gets the government to commit the crime on his behalf. (And then runs from any responsibility.)"

"Libertarian moral philosophy is both very simple, and very profound. At its base there are two principles. The first, the principle of self-ownership, merely states that you own yourself. In contradistinction, the alternative is that someone else owns you. Thus, self-ownership is really the repudiation of slavery. And the second principle is that of non-aggression, that you will not initiate the use of force against others. This principle both covers every standard moral prohibition from theft to rape and murder, and also elegantly allows for defensive use of force. Interesting is the absence of any prohibitions of so-called immoral behavior such as the marriage of two people of the same gender. That is because rightly what two consenting adults do in their own time is of no one else's business."

"What the hell had to have happened to the minds of otherwise intelligent people for them to equate an insignificantly small influence on a vote to choose a new slave-master once every few years with freedom?"

"Some people want to free others. Some want to enslave them. That's pretty much the vital distinction in politics."

"I think the mark of a civilized person is when they're able to separate their personal opinions from their political ones, and not try to use violence through the proxy of government as a ban-hammer for every type of behavior they find to be icky."

"Between services like Bitcoin and the strategy of Agorism, I think there's a (small) chance that a Stateless society will happen in our lifetime. Not because everyone has a revelation about economics and morality, becomes consistent, and starts advocating for the NAP, but because, like anything else on the market - people don't require market theory for markets to work. The State will be destroyed through self-interest, not through libertarian ideology."

"The meek shall inherit the earth" is slave pacification.

"Paid yet more taxes. Maybe I should rename my blog to "Letters from the human farm"..."

"A government cannot protect your rights if its existence is predicated on violating them."

"It's not that private property rights stem from government. Quite the opposite - true private property cannot exist if there is a government, since the very existence of a coercive government is predicated upon the systematic violation of property rights."

"Anarchy is not the absence of laws, government is the absence of laws. It is precisely the existence of rulers, who are by definition above the law, which precludes the existence of laws. If an entire class of people have the power to write laws that apply to others, and then without repercussion break these laws insofar as they apply to themselves, then this is exactly the kind of chaotic lawlessness that opponents of anarchy so fear."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the bible say something along the lines of 'You shalt have no gods before me?' In which case, that statement itself implies that there are indeed other gods - but that they must not be worshiped. Not that they do not exist."

My opinion on laws, in short:

"If it doesn't violate the NAP, there should be no law on it. Regulations should be made by private property owners for conservation of resources or determining rules of behavior on private property. Law must either come from actual dispute resolution, or not at all. Statutory law is a crime."

"When government violence is a socially acceptable means of dispute resolution, and its cost can be externalized onto unrelated third parties, the frequency with which violence is used to resolve disputes increases. When the costs, both direct and indirect, of violence are borne by the initiator, the violence is looked down on by others, and the initiator risks to attract the ire and ostracism of those in his community, then suddenly the negotiating table looks a lot more attractive, and people will naturally have a greater propensity to seek out peaceful resolutions to conflict."

Although the words used to justify the violence will differ and evolve as mindsets change, the essence, the primal violent core of the State, will always remain. You can know it when you ask yourself a simple question - what will happen to me if I do not comply? For however many layers of legitimacy are veiled over the threat, and however eloquently it may be stated, one who questions and peels back layer by layer will eventually face the undeniable emptiness of the entire charade, and stare at the heart of the State and of politics - violent compulsion of peaceful people.

"For governments around the world, millions of people being mugged, assaulted, kidnapped, raped, and murdered in preventable crimes, is an acceptable cost for ensuring that their subjects are disarmed and easy to control. Even the reduced defensive capabilities of a disarmed nation in case of foreign aggression by another government is usually an acceptable disadvantage. The citizen advocates of gun confiscations are cowards who side with the tyrant. The crowds, madly cheering on the dictator? That's them."

"The contradictions inherent within the left and the right are there on purpose. Getting people to hold two or more contradictory beliefs as simultaneously true causes cognitive dissonance, and when in such a state, a person's mind can be far more easily manipulated by propaganda."

"Government schooling is not education - it is indoctrination designed to brainwash children into being obedient slaves."

"Don't assume those in government are stupid. It dulls you to their evil."

"Peace is the default mode of existence absent a State (I'm not counting small-scale crimes here). Humans have been behaviorally modern for 50,000+ years. War has existed for less than 10,000. Large scale war only exists in societies enslaved by a government able to conscript and tax unwilling participants in order to increase the scale of its war. War, and its causes, are fairly well established if you do the research. Unfortunately, most people seem to have a misanthropic attitude about human beings, and that war, environmental destruction, etc., are inevitable. I can only assume this starts out as propaganda propagated by the State, who, in an attempt to move the spotlight away from themselves, scapegoat human nature as evil. How do I know this? The biggest justification for the existence of organized evil is Hobbes and theories like his. That great evil is necessary to keep small evil in check. All of this is bogus."

"Lord of the Flies is Hobbesian propaganda. It tries to instill into the yet vulnerable minds of children, from a young age, that people are by default evil. That such is their natural state. That they will choose to slaughter, destroy, and suffer, rather than cooperate, create, and thrive. This vile piece of propaganda serves both to cement the importance of obedience to parental and teacher authority, and when the child grows up, to the authority of the State, acting as though a parent over unruly adult-children. The result is that far from seeking freedom from oppression and slavery, those indoctrinated with the belief that humans are in their natural state evil, will seek out to justify and thus empower their oppressors - for they now believe that being free is an unjustifiable risk. They will say such contradictory statements as, "A powerful and centralized State is necessary to prevent disorder and crime," when in fact, the State is always the greatest criminal organization in any society. The only difference being that it codified its crimes into law, sanctified itself in the minds of its subjects through propaganda, and obfuscated its crimes with euphemisms, renaming mass murder as war, and mass theft as taxation. They will fail to see that the State is simply a violent bureaucratic apparatus by which the greatest sociopaths in society can put their often sadistic plans into action. They will, ironically but more importantly tragically, create a focal point in which the very evil they so fear can collect and fester, and from which it can spread forth its corruption."

"The education of a child in a State school is complete the day he begins to believe that evil is necessary."

"Soviet propaganda destroyed the concept of political freedom by defining freedom as freedom from need, not from oppression. Thus, freedom became an impossible pipe dream, since humans can never be free of needs."

"I keep getting these arguments that in a Stateless society, "the guy with the biggest stick will rule the world", when in fact, that is the definition of a State. One day, perhaps, this will become the dictionary example of irony."

"It is no surprise that psychologists have determined police to have the same psychological profile as the criminals they arrest. That's because the police are just another group of armed criminals. The biggest, in fact, which is why they write the rules that enable the crimes they commit to go unpunished. You have as much of a moral obligation to follow the scribblings of politicians as you do the edicts of the Gambino crime family. The only reason you submit to these "laws" is to not be assaulted and thrown into an even smaller cage. Maybe if people stopped referring to "the law" like it's some kind of mandate passed on by a supernatural deity, the government's legitimacy would quickly erode."

"In the end collectivism fails because it runs counter to simple economic laws. It doesn't matter how ignorant or servile people become - incentives are incentives."

"Collectivism dehumanizes people. There are no more individuals. No more people, as such. There is only The Collective, or The Proletariat, or The Poor, or The Black, or The Women, or, for the particularly elitist, The Unwashed Mashes. Under such a worldview, the individual ceases to matter – they are now just a replaceable cog in an amorphous mass, a master plan. This engenders and eases abuses. It seems much less of a crime to steal from, to enslave, and to murder people, when they are pixels on a screen, numbers in a statistic, or little pawns on a chess board. There are more where they came from – right? That is the kind of sociopathic attitude that guides politicians and those who fall prey to collectivist language and ideas. Collectivism serves only to separate us from other humans through theoretical constructs that don't actually exist."

"Collectivism is all about putting people into groups. You know why? Because it dehumanizes people. You're not a human being anymore - you're a capitalist, so it's okay if we take your stuff, burn your home, put you in a Gulag, and starve your family. It makes theft and murder sit much lighter on a conscience."

"Collectivist notions replace the worship of supernatural deities, with worship of amorphous abstracts."

"We vote with our bodies and with our actions. It doesn't matter what opinions we hold or what name we write on a piece of paper once every four years. What matters is what we do, every hour and every day. And if our time is spent working to pay taxes and fund a criminal regime of vultures and sociopaths, then no amount of opinions and ballots is going to change a damn thing."

"While libertarians have done a fairly good job of denouncing collectivism and all of its trappings, a great number of them continue to attempt collectivistic solutions to tyranny. They walk around with banners, they vote, they organize politically, they submit petitions. Some talk of secession, and how if only their local collective secedes from the greater one, they will be free again. Perhaps rather than trying to make the world free, they should concentrate on making themselves, as individuals, as free as possible. Not by using the same political tools that have enslaved them, but by walking away from the system altogether. By making it as irrelevant in their personal lives as possible."

"I wonder when more people will realize that quoting existing laws as some measure of justice is as much of a ridiculous appeal to authority to an anarchist, as quoting the bible is to an atheist."

"I defend rules based on the NAP, which area) Consistent. b) Allow for proportionality of force. and c) Do not violate the rights of anyone who has not themselves violated the rights of someone else."

"There is, in fact, no such thing as the "common good". It is a lie, a trick of language."

Shaw said "the worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity."

Thus, are sociopaths who lack empathy essentially inhuman?

"Have you heard how the needs of the group supersede the needs of the individual? Such a feat is not possible if the group is just an abstract concept symbolizing a collection of individuals. The claim is absurd because the group is not an entity separate from its constituent individuals, and has no needs of its own. What it really boils down to is that some individuals claim their needs supersede the needs of others, and they use collectivist language to justify why their needs are prior by deferring to a “greater” entity."

"I'm an individualist for the simple reason that only individuals exist."

"You think you are free, but you are not. A man who must spend half his life working to placate a sociopathic government, that would not hesitate to throw him in jail should he miss a payment - is a slave. A man who must risk spending years in a cage, for smoking a LEAF! - is a slave. A man whose choices in an election are between two or more slave-masters, but never to opt out of the human farm - is a slave! And a man who is told by other slaves that if he doesn't like the farm, he should leave - is surrounded by someone worse than slaves. He is surrounded by willing slaves."

"What sane person wants to live in perpetual war in a country-sized military base?" (About growing Israeli immigration to Europe and the U.S.)

"Coercion and the legal ban-hammer is a shortcut to avoid thinking about peaceful and sustainable solutions to problems – solutions that will actually work, and not result in a myriad of unintended consequences. Propose to an advocate of government that roads can be built without pointing a gun at people’s heads, and they will draw up a blank. They’ve been taught that way. Because Statism is mental sloth."

"It doesn't matter whether the murder of innocent people is in disregard of a law or not. If a politician's scribble 'authorizes' some great evil, that doesn't automatically excuse it from being such."

"When a crimimnal hurts you, you run to government. When the government hurts you, who will you run to then?"

"An ad hominem is an admission of defeat. It is the replacement of reasoned argument with childish name-calling. It is the ultimate refuge of the incompetent, of the intellectually bankrupt, and of the vulgar."

"Behind every act of government charity stands a gun and a victim."

"Simple mental experiment: Imagine for a moment that it was you (a private citizen without a badge) who had broken into a house, tied up the wife, and murdered the husband. You would be sent to jail for life. No question about it. This is the depth of the legal and moral double standards prevalent under Statism - that wearing some cotton and a little bit of metal lets one literally get away with murder. Much the same way a Roman citizen might not be as severely punished for the killing of a slave. What conclusion can we make except that those in power treat their subjects as slaves - as fodder for wars, or as expendable productive assets with an income flow to take taxes from."

"If you accept that government is a malignant tumor - a cancer that feeds upon the product of society until its parasitism grows so big that it destroys itself and society with it, then the question of "In a free world, how will you guarantee that a government will not arise once again?" is as absurd as the patient asking his doctor "If this cancer is removed, how can you guarantee that another will not appear in the future?""

"Translated: The largest mafia organization in the world met today, and decided it didn't want anyone else to have guns." - in response to UN small arms gun control treaty.

"We do not live in a civilized society. The barbarians have long ago stormed the gates and taken over. You see them every day - talking to their cattle through television screens."

"If the people who advocate gun control understood that responsibility for crimes lies with the moral agent (the human), and not the weapon of choice - they'd also realize that they're advocating the initiation of violence by wanting the State to enact this law or that regulation. You're talking, from the get go, with people who do not understand the most basic concept behind a civilized and peaceful society - individual responsibility."

"Government is worse than the Mafia. At least the Mafia doesn't brainwash your kids for 8 hours a day."

"Step 1 in reclaiming your mind: Stop watching T.V. and listening to the mainstream news."

"An adult who is told what he can and cannot put into his own body is not an adult - he is a slave."

"The war on terror is just a code word for the war on freedom."

"Politicians like Obama are elitist, tyrannical, control-freaks. He thinks he's better than you - but he isn't. He is the lowest of the low - the scum of the earth, because every meal he eats is stolen. And the clothes he wears he did not pay for. Even the words he says are not his. Everything about him is false - yet you worship him as your idol, as if he were your almighty deity. You listen to his every words, as if they were a message from on high. You, Statists of all colors, are part of the most dangerous and vile cult to have ever existed upon this earth. And you're proud of it."

"In light of the sordid history of government force, most notably throughout the 20th century, perhaps the single most important philosophical achievement for mankind would be the classification of Statism as a religion; with all of its rituals, crusades, and blind obedience to authority as a manifestation of collective insanity - no less psychotic or damaging than when other organized religions were at the height of their power. But while Statism remains the refuge of the incomplete skeptic, and belief in human authority an appropriate and culturally accepted alternative to belief in supernatural authority - human misery will be boundless, and human survival questionable."

"The pomp with which governments pass a new law is nothing short of a religious ritual."

"Taxation, insofar as it occurs through threat of force and without the voluntary consent of the taxpayer, is indistinguishable from theft."

"The system is diseased. We need a reboot."

"In seeking to safeguard his welfare, the individual creates a social safety net in the form of a collective. In order to imbue the collective with power, the individual surrenders his time, faculties, resources, and rights. Thus, does the collective come to supersede the individual; and in a collective, the individual ceases to matter. For to the apparatchiks in charge who manage its affairs, the individual becomes a mere replaceable cog in the greater apparatus of social welfare. Thus do free people condemn themselves to such a fate as no external force could foster on them."

"I think the real moral of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is not that the emperor has no clothes - but that there is no emperor. There's just a stupid naked man."

"As it stands, patents are basically legal sledgehammers to violate actual property rights; but in a free market, patents would not exist."

"I see the world as a set of probabilities. In a sense, certainty is almost a heresy."

"Three quick reasons for why government is a bad idea: 1. A monopoly on dispute resolution cannot be a third party in disputes involving itself. 2. A government must tax to exist. Therefore it fails in its capacity as protector of human rights. An entity that must violate rights in order to protect them exists in a permanent state of performative contradiction. The conclusion? Government doesn't exist to protect rights. 3. It is the imposition of one set of rules and ideas on millions of people. Those people have no choice in the matter - they must abide by these rules or be punished. When the ideas and rules a government chooses are bad, they lead to the destruction of the rest of society too."

"The only after-life, the only immortality, is in the memories of the living. Everything else is a fiction. If you really want to live on after you've died, do something memorable. Just, try to make sure you do something for which you are fondly remembered, not for which you are hated."

"Licenses are professional collars - a way to stop the most valuable professionals from leaving the farm."

"People stuck within the left-right false dichotomy tend to assume that criticism of the left means an endorsement of the right, and vice versa. It's easy to control dissent when in most people's minds there are only two alternatives, and the ruling class controls both of them."

"Blame the institutions and not the people. People respond to incentives. Institutions create those incentives. Humans have simply had the wrong institutions for most of their existence, resulting in the terrible mess many have made of the world. But Humans are not the disease - specific institutions and the incentives they provide are the disease. If we have a failed system that results in a constant tragedy of the commons, the solution is to change the system - especially when we already know what will work and what won't. Instead, I hear a constant stream of misanthropic nonsense about eradicating humans as a disease."

"Democracy is always the institutionalized oppression of a minority by a majority."

"Beware - Statists will often co-opt the language of freedom to confuse people."

"Be careful, Statists are very delicate creatures. Approach them with caution. Even the slightest rustle of reason and sense can scare them off, or cause them to become catatonic with cognitive dissonance before verbally exploding in a flurry of bile and stupidity."

"As fanciful as the arguments of a Statist may be, they always boil down to this: They have a certain perceived need, and they are willing to use force to get it from you, whether directly or through proxy of the State. Whatever they say, at the end of the day the libertarian stands holding his opinion, and the Statist stands pointing a real or metaphorical gun at his face, saying 'Nope! No rights for you.'"

"Your use of 'we' betrays deep confusion as to who is actually doing anything. You may wish to have your Stockholm Syndrome checked out."

"The essence of the libertarian argument is: let people do what they will as long as they initiate no harm against others. The essence of the Statist argument is: a group of armed men must constantly initiate harm to all of humanity in an institutionalized and systematic use of violence, so that the ideas I and a few others share are foisted on everyone else. So when libertarians and Statists argue, remember that one of them will respect your rights to do what you want with your life, liberty, and the product of your labor, while the other has no compunction forcing you to do their bidding and finance their ideas at the point of a gun. Who here is really your friend?"

"Congress is filled with wannabe dictators just like the puppet-in-chief. I wouldn't place your hopes for freedom in the lap of power-hungry politicians."

"When a State sponsors scientific research, all it does is externalize the costs of technological progress onto taxpayers. By tearing the connection between economic viability and technology, governments, more often than not, derail by decades technological growth into unsustainable pathways. Sometimes, by the time people realize the economic insanity of a particular technology, too much of other people's money has already been sunk, and alternatives are now too expensive. Then the derailment cements itself, becomes irreversible, and the alternatives seem to be nothing more than outlandish science fiction."

"Euphemisms destroy our perception of reality."

"Anyone who lives behind euphemisms is guilty of something they don't want you to know. And they're ashamed of it, too. They know it's wrong, so they hide the meaning of what they do to deceive the public."

"So long as the U.S. military forces are voluntary and not based on conscription, the people who sign up to fight these foreign wars of aggression are even more complicit than the taxpayers who fund them without protest. The government could hardly have their war if people didn't sign up to fight for it."

"A soldier's paycheck is often blood money."

"Two simple rules for world peace: 1. Whoever agrees with or votes for a war must personally fight it. If they are disabled, one from their family must go. 2. Whoever opposes the war cannot be compelled to participate in it as a soldier, or fund it as a taxpayer, on moral grounds. When wars are fought by those whose mouths speak loudly, then we will have peace."

"War always starts when a government declares war on its own people. It is only after its own people are conquered, and become obedient subjects who can be taxed and conscripted, can a government wage war on another nation."

"Pensions for politicians are in the profession of robbery the equivalent of a tenured professorship."

"The American political system is like all the others. A gang of crooks, thieves, and murderers who ransack and pillage productive people so that they may obtain wealth by the political means, as opposed to be actually providing value to others."

"When a theistic anarchist says that he's not going to look at human-made laws as his source of authority, and then proceeds to look at laws made by humans pretending to be messengers God, it's just sad."

"War almost never makes any financial sense – even when trying to get ahold of resources. The only reason these wars are conducted instead of peaceful trade is because they are funded by tax money – i.e. through the forcible expropriation of the aggressor country’s citizenry. In every other area of human affairs, peaceful resolutions are preferred because they are quite simply cheaper and less risky. Not so with the State. A war whose cost is externalized onto the taxpayers can indeed be profitable to a range of groups, just like any business that earns revenues and gets others to shoulder the costs will always be profitable. But the problem doesn't begin with the war itself – the problem begins when the principle is allowed that one group of men may legally plunder another without the other’s consent. Abolish legal plunder, and you will have no more war. Allow legal plunder, and no amount of checks and balances will ever bring the madness to an end."

"If you want to know a sure way to lose a game - play against the people who made the rules."

"A society with no government will be far more resilient to foreign aggressions than one with even the most powerful government military. And this for the simple reason that there is no throne, no system of power, no apparatus of coercion. It is much simpler to take over the ownership of a group of slaves, than to enslave free people."

"Concepts don't act, and ideas don't have needs. Collectivism is the logical fallacy of misplaced concreteness turned into an ideology. It elevates abstractions into Gods, and then uses them to oppress actual, living and breathing people."

"To group people according to race, or any other criteria, is a disservice to every individual. Such is the essence of collectivism."

"True property rights can exist only in the absence of the systemic coercive violence of the State. For the State itself can only exist by forcibly expropriating the citizenry."

"It's never been about what the constitution protects. It's always been about who protects the constitution."

"Opponents of free markets are really just opponents of self-determination. Just as central planners are opponents of people planning their own lives. The subjugation of some people to others is slavery."

"Evil men relish in the ability to take away the lives and livelihoods of others."

"Once the principle that one group of men may wantonly violate the rights of another is established, the predation will not end until society collapses under the weight of the parasites."

"There are only two classes of people - producers and parasites." (And I define a parasite only as a coercive entity. So for example a child, being voluntarily supported by a parent, is not a parasite.)

"Republicans, Democrats - distinctions without a difference. Don't buy into the false dichotomy of the left-right paradigm. It numbs the mind to the things that actually matter."

"The false dichotomy of the left-right paradigm is perhaps the greatest of political lies. Well, after 'evil is necessary'."

"Only deluded people see any material difference between two teams wearing different color shirts, but playing the same game on the same field - the real purpose of which is to screw everyone else."

"What is an election, if not a group of people getting together to endorse a ruler for both themselves and everyone else, regardless of what everyone else wants?"

"There is never any treason for exposing the lies of a gang of criminals. Said war criminals, however, are treasonous against our very humanity."

"If the terrorists really were after American's freedoms, then the terrorists won."

"The war on terror is a manufactured fraud, there only to serve as justification for geopolitical interests that in a different context would be considered as terrorism themselves."

"Evil never sleeps. That's why it's always in such a foul mood."

"It's not "if I don't support gay marriage", it's "if I oppose gay marriage". For example, I don't really give a damn either way what peaceful consenting adults do because it's NONE OF MY DAMN BUSINESS. You don't have to support what someone else does to leave them alone."

"Either everything harmful should be banned, or nothing harmful should be banned. Everything in between is purely arbitrary."

"Some day in the future they will write about how Americans, too, elected their own dictator. Or maybe they won't. Maybe such writings will not be 'approved'."

"The widespread injustices perpetrated against men in divorce courts are terrible enough, but I feel even worse for the children who grow up in broken homes. A mother who is willing to unjustly destroy the father of her children should have her parenting rights taken away from her - she doesn't deserve them. She doesn't understand what raising children means, or how important the father is."

"Anyone who wishes for you to burn in an agonizing fire for eternity is truly and (usually) irredeemably evil. Whether hell exists or not is not even relevant at this point - their wish for you to be tortured is."

"Skepticism is important. That and putting the search for truth above ego and self-aggrandizement."

"Society doesn't hold views - individuals do. There have always been opponents to slavery (abolitionists), and making appeals to the prevailing thoughts of other people around the time, or to a concept such as Society, only excuses the very personal and individual responsibility of the slave-owners."

"It seems that as a crime becomes enormous enough in scale, it is without delay redefined into something else and vigorously defended as necessary. Thus, organized mass murder becomes "war". Organized mass theft becomes "taxation". Organized mass slavery becomes "conscription" and the "income tax". A new concept is then created, that of a "Necessary evil", and is invariably defended with greatest vigor by those who suffer the most from it."

"So people who saved the Jews in Nazi Germany were criminals? Abolitionists who freed slaves were criminals? Writers who tried to tell us the truth about Gulags in the Soviet Union were criminals? A criminal is anyone who breaks any government law, regardless of the morality of that law? There is often a big, wide gap between what is moral and what is law, and it's every human being's duty to figure out what is moral regardless of what is law, so that governments can't get away with atrocities just because they're legalized."

Economics

"A brief overview of history will confirm this. Whatever proximate cause (such as a war), the ultimate cause of the decline and fall of a civilization is always the expansion of the plundering class, and the reduction of the producing class, until so little is produced that the government and the plundering class can no longer parasite off of the surplus created by producers."

"If moral arguments do not prompt you to advocate a stateless society, perhaps practical ones will. Around the world, systems of government are fast approaching a point at which they will overwhelm productive people and buckle the economy in a horrifying collapse. And while people bicker about the details, the bigger picture seems to elude them. The foundation of a free and prosperous society lies not in the specific configuration of the rules by which people are plundered, but in the abolition of legal plunder altogether."

"Bad weather, wars, disasters – they only test and stress the system. These external forces are less of a threat than the poor foundation on which the system is built in the first place. A society that institutionalizes plunder cannot survive – and often this is realized only when an external event magnifies a fault-line."

"Markets are both fragile and not. Even the smallest intervention will disrupt them and cause unintended consequences, but even the most insanely tyrannical one will not stamp them out completely. In the end, markets are only as bad as the government's legal framework makes them."

"If you don't want organizations to become corrupted, don't setup incentives that let their corruption go unpunished. The solution is competition, not monopoly. If you want a firm to stay honest, make their living dependent on it. And that means being able to withdraw funding when they become dishonest. When as a customer you become dissatisfied with a business, you don’t try to change the CEO and vote for a new leadership, you withdraw funding. Making the withdrawal of funding illegal is a hell of a way to promote corruption."

"The only reason Keynesians are such big fans of condensing all economic activity into a series of over-simplified aggregates that have no resemblance to reality is because they require such simplistic aggregates for their models to function. Keynesian economics is not a function of, and did not develop because of, any reasonable observations about the economy. It is merely the combination of expediencies requires by a central planner to satisfy his sociopathic need to plan and regulate the lives of others."

"Every consumption decision is a vote. Vote wisely."

"There are only costs where the government is involved, prices must come from markets. It therefore becomes impossible to determine the value on government-provided goods, and hence to decide whether those goods increase societal wealth, or reduce it. In point of fact, even costs are really just the prices of inputs. Socialism inevitably runs into the calculation problem, trying to produce goods while blindfolded, and with its arms tied behind its back."

"In seeking equality of wealth for humanity, one removes the mechanism of incentives for people to grow. For what purpose does a tall grass grow, if it is to be cut to the height of its peers? It's dignity stamped on?"

"Free markets are really the competitive equivalent of natural selection. The difference is that in evolution, less adapted creatures die. In free markets, it is only bad ideas that die."

"Dreams of great wealth from pure luck, devalue the means, and hence also the ends. One ought rather not to acquire something of value at all, so that it remains as a vestige of hope; than face the sorrow of owning it devalued and worthless."

"The inability to value what one has, creates a hole in the heart that one desperately tries to fill with more... Yet if you cannot value what you already have, how will you come to appreciate what you have yet to acquire? To fill one emptiness with a greater one yet, is indeed a tragedy."

"Government bureaucrats and politicians don't have any incentive to learn. They operate in a competition-free environment where failure to learn does not endanger their livelihoods."

"Central planners will always choose and popularize those economic theories that justify their central planning. They will fund and promote economists who agree with them into positions of prominence. It will then appear "mainstream" to support central planning, and extreme to oppose it. That is how governments influence economics, and for that matter other professions too."

Preparedness

"A storm is coming, and those people who are unwilling to prepare for it (whether its economic collapse or WWIII) will have much lower chances of survival. Waking up and doing something, or watching their regularly scheduled (mind) programming, will be the difference between survival and not."

Miscellaneous

"In the bible, God says that murder is evil, and then in the same book proceeds to commit genocide, killing almost every human being on earth. Thus, the real lesson the bible teaches us is that murder is wrong for you, the subject, but excusable and justified for me, the ruler. The bible was written by men to rule over other men, and was thus merely a tool of control.

"The lesson of "do as I say, not as I do" lies not in what is said - what is said is in fact entirely irrelevant to the lesson. The relevant and intended lesson is that of domination. That you must obey the word of God, your parents, your teachers, your politician rulers, etc., and not look to them as an example because the rules are not intended for them. The rules are not intended to be consistent in application. The rules are intended to create a moral double standard between the ruler and the subject, to punish you for committing acts that may hurt the rulers' property (other subjects), but not to punish the ruler in doing the same, for after all the ruler claims ownership over his subjects as though they were slaves. In short, the law, as presented by government, exists solely to create a human farm."

"One thing's for sure - in the search for truth, you'll have to leave your ego behind."

"The invention of the wheel probably happened as a fella stumbled and rolled down a hill, thinking to himself, 'If only I had less jagged edges - the rolling would be so much smoother!'"

"Do not take the limits of your knowledge and imagination for the limits of the world."

"I think I can now give the definition of truly enjoyable and fulfilling work. Ask yourself this simple question: would you still do it if you were all set and didn't have to worry about money?"

"Truth is more of a journey than a place."

"We wash our clothes the minute they get dirty, and yet we leave our environment looking like utter trash."

"I think the roots of ridicule might be in low self-esteem. Why does a bigot make fun of fat people, except to elevate himself by putting someone else down - consoling his poor self-esteem with his superiority over someone else?"

"Organized religions were about control from the very beginning. The priest class and the ruling class were often either one and the same, or would complement each other. The priest class would be the power of propaganda, justifying why the ruler had a divine right to rule, and the ruler would make sure to persecute every other religion within his domain.

I think that if you want spirituality, you should go out into the woods and live with nature for a while - not pray in a stone construct filled with gold, silver, and precious shiny things. Too many religions take as their basis materialism and then profess some kind of spirituality. It's strange that so many people consistently fall for this."

"I'm semitic, but monotheistic religions are boring as hell. Where's the excitement? It's like observing the economics of a market in which a monopolist has full control and there's no competition."

"Foolishness implies embarrassment and ego. If you really want to get someone to think, try to create a safe environment in which they can back down from a position without feeling like an idiot for holding it in the first place. Otherwise they just dig in their heels and reject reason."

"Many men will shame others of their gender for expressing any kind of non-masculine traits, as in their mind that elevates them to "more of a man". All it really does is reveal their insecurities :)"

"There are two kinds of people - supportive people and destructive people. Those who support you must be kept close to you; but those who destroy your dreams and lower you to elevate their own poor self-esteem - those people must be distanced from with all haste. Even if they are family."

"Students: finding new ways to procrastinate every day, extending the frontier of boredom into the domain of absurdity."

"I like sleeping on my side - it's my side that doesn't like me sleeping on it."

"For some, makeup is war paint."

"It's not so much a question of how we can interest children. It's more a question of how we can get out of the way and not destroy their inherently curious minds with silly notions."

"Always remember: the end-purpose of all complaining is to make one's problem someone else's."

"Your body is only as good as its building blocks."

"A bunch of people always say that "it's just a game - pixels on a screen". But that's not really true, is it. If it were just a game, then griefers (e.g. KOS 'bandits' who don't even care about looting the dead) would not derive the kind of psychic enjoyment that they do. Their enjoyment is directly correlated to another gamer's emotional distress and time investment. A sort of anti-empathy.

Gotta say, not really something I can relate to. When I think of killing other players, it better be justified as self-defense or defense of someone else. I would feel bad if I accidentally killed an innocent player who invested hours into the game. I wonder if KOS players in this game have fully developed mirror neurons." - my thoughts about griefers in games that feature permanent death or other serious time investment, such as DayZ standalone or Minecraft.

"The totalitarian state - a phenomenon of modernity - consists in the attempted extension of the secular state into all dimensions of life, and the only way this would be possible is through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology that can brook not a single dissenter or heretic. In an ideocracy, the greatest criminal is imagined by ideocrats to be the dissenter, the one who by his very existence reveals the totalistic construct imposed on society to be a lie." - Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions