Saturday, October 16, 2004

Quote of the Day

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg trials

8 comments:

totalkaosdave said...

How true, how true...Anyone for donning our brown shirts to do a little goose-stepping?

totalkaosdave said...

This is one of my favorites. From Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn't writing about the United States. This quote is well over one hundred years old. Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

SJ said...

You know, you can't go 5 days without posting. You just can't. It's not allowed. And I should know. I make the fucking rules. What, do you just have to WORK at your JOB or something? Man.

totalkaosdave said...

Irb? Irb! SJ is blogging at you...Irb?

Irb said...

Sorry. Been plugging away on the ever-elusive novel for the past few days. I've cranked out 40+ pages, which puts this draft several steps ahead of my usual false starts and dead ends ;-)

Nice quote, cracker. (BTW, is "cracker" lowercase due to some sort of artsy affectation, or are you just too damn lazy to use the Shift key?) I used to have a great quote about democracy from Garth Ennis. I don't have it handy, but it went something like this:

"You want to know what a democracy is? Let's say you're locked in a cell with nine mad bastards, and the ten of you are trying to decide what you're going to do that weekend. You vote for going to the movies. They vote for raping you in the ass until you're dead. So guess how you're going to be spending YOUR Saturday night..."

totalkaosdave said...

Oh God, it's my Boy Scout days all over again!...what's the movie? Besides, what makes you think I am not one of the nine mad bastards? I think I might take offense.

I didn't know liberals knew what "upper case" was, and I didn't want to scare any off.

The difeerence between Democrats and Republicans? Democrats have never been mugged. I read that somewhere. I think it was next to, "Here I sit, brokenhearted, came to.." uhhh, I forget the rest.

SJ said...

No, no, no. REPUBLICANS have never been mugged. We Democrats hang out in the bad parts of town, live among the muggers and thieves, attend hip hop concerts, have friends with names that end in 'qua' or 'nez' and have a false sense of security that allows us to feel as if we WON'T get mugged.

totalkaosdave said...

OH THAT'S RIGHT! I just remembered. It's the Republicans that do the mugging. My bad. We mug the middle-class and give to the wealthy. Well, actually, our maid/manservant would do the mugging for us. And, by the way, it is NOT wrong for a man to have another man as his servant, or to have that man mug for him. You know, you have to watch the nails-just had 'em done.