Holt: People shaping & the slave state

"Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and anti-human business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."

~ John Holt

Mises: Genius

"Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before."

~ Ludwig von Mises

Nietzsche: Coldest of all cold monsters

Somewhere still there are peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers: here there are states.

State is the name of the coldest of all monsters ... it even lies coldly, and this lie crawls out if its mouth: " I, the state, am the people."

This is a lie! The ones who created the peoples were the creators, the hung a faith and a love over them, and thus they served life.

The ones who set traps for many and call them "state" are annihilators, they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there are still peoples the state is not understood, and it is hated as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights.

The sign I give you: every people speaks its own tongue of good and evil - which the neighbor does not understand. It invented its own language through customs and rights.

But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil, and whatever it may tell you, it lies - and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, this biting dog. Even its entrails are false.

Far too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!
Just look at how it lures them, the far-too-many! How it gulps and chews and ruminates them!

"On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordaining finger of God am I" - thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and the shortsighted sink to their knees!

Oh, even to you, you great souls, it whispers its dark lies! Unfortunately it detects the rich hearts who gladly squander themselves!

It wants to give you everything, if you worship it, the new idol. Thus it buys the shining of your virtue and the look in your proud eyes.

Indeed a dying for many was invented here ...

State I call it, where all are drinkers of poison, the good and the bad; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad; state, where the slow suicide of everyone is called - "life".

Just look at the superfluous! They steal for themselves the works of the inventors and treasures of the wise: education they call their thievery - and everything turns to sickness and hardship for them!

Just look at these superfluous! They are always sick, they vomit their gall and call it the newspaper. They devour one another and are not even able to digest themselves.

Just look at these superfluous! They acquire riches and yet they become poorer. They want power and first of all the crowbar of power, much money - these impotent, impoverished ones!

~Nietzsche
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

Bastiat: reform yourselves!

“Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

Anderson: subtle & nefarious

"Political elections do not choose leaders of society.  Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals, those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to elect their own political strongman. The process can be downright blatant, as is the case in African and Asian countries, or it can be relatively subtle as it is in the United States, where the trappings of 'constitutionality' and 'rule of law' hide many of the more nefarious goings on." ~ William Anderson

Browne: Income Tax

"The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren‘t libertarians if we tolerate it." --Harry Browne

Dunne: a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction

"A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large."
Finley Peter Dunne