"I may think that hornets do not have an ideal social organization. But I know better than to poke their nest."
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Quote collection
Fred Reed quotes
13 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When someone tells me that 'the Almighty told me to do this', I want to see the transcript."
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"Wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power."
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"Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out."
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"The US no longer does decisions. It can neither stop the drug traffic nor legalize it. It can neither win wars nor abandon them, neither make money nor stop spending it, neither stop immigration nor assimilate the immigrants. Washington can beat its thumb with a hammer, yes, and notice that it hurts, but it can't stop beating its thumb. That would take a decision, and Washington doesn't do decisions."
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"Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering."
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"The proper response toward what we occasionally imagine to be democracy, methinks, is to retain one's self-respect by not participating in it."
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"Though the Floundering Fathers didn't intend it, we now see that representative government quickly turns into the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you doubt this, I congratulate you on not having a television."
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"Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum."
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"In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society."
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"Without men, civilization would last until the oil needed changing."
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"Those who wash regularly should not stoop to democracy."
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"Kids esteem themselves when they have accomplished something worth esteeming."
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