Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it – but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.
– Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994).
I want minimum information given with maximum politeness.
– Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994).
The only routine with me is no routine at all.
– Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994).
En god roman eller ett märkligt poem dröjer kvar inom en och hjälper en på olika vis. Om man en tid har levt i ett mästerverk och infogats i dess arkitektur och atmosfär och sedan återvänder till den verkliga världen, tycker man lätt att denna är mer medioker än den värld som stora diktare skapat. Det i sin tur skärper ens kritik av den verkliga och gör det svårare att bli lurad och manipulerad.
– Per Wästberg, författare och akademiledamot, SvD 18/1.
I’m apolictical. The more I travel and the less sure I am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable. The more government systems I see, the less enticed I am to give my allegiance to any set of people, so it would be disastrous for me to adopt a definitive point of view, or to adopt a party of people and say ”these are my people”.
– David Bowie, 1977.
Den karln är vis nog till att spela narr,
Och vett behövs, om slikt skall göras väl;
Han måste giva akt på mänskors lynne,
Personers egenskap och tid och ställe
Samt, falken lik, slå ned på varje fjäder,
Som kommer för hans syn. Det är en idrott
Så full av möda som den vises konst;
Ty dårskap, visligt anbragt, klokhet röjer
Den vises dårskap, säg, vem den förnöjer?
– Viola om narren Feste i Shakespeares Trettondagsafton, akt 3, scen 1.
I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses … We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.
– Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 2003.
I am really only myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
– F Scott Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 2003.
Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light… Then I’m grateful.
– Miles Davis
There was a time, long ago, when the average American could go about his daily business hardly aware of the government – especially the federal government.
As a farmer, merchant, or manufacturer, he could decide what, how, when, and where to produce and sell his goods, constrained by little more than market forces. Just think: no farm subsidies, price supports, or acreage controls; no Federal Trade Commission; no antitrust laws; no Interstate Commerce Commission.
As an employer, employee, consumer, investor, lender, borrower, student, or teacher, he could proceed largely according to his own lights. Just think: no National Labor Relations Board; no federal consumer ”protection” laws; no Security and Exchange Commission; no Equal Employment Opportunity Commisson; no Department of Health and Human Services.
Lacking a central bank to issue paper currency, people commonly used gold coins to make purchases. There were no general sales taxes, no Social Security taxes, no income taxes.
Though government officials were as corrupt then as now – maybe even more – they had vastly less to be corrupt with. Private citizens spent about fifteen times more than all government combined. – Those days, alas, are long gone.
– Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Criticial Episodes in the Growth of American Government, 1987.
As their classic forebearers, new liberals do not seek to takeover any government. They ignore government. They only want to be left alone by government, and secede from its jurisdiction to organize their own protection.
Unlike their predecessors who merely sought to replace a larger government with a smaller one, however, new lberals pursue the logic of secession to its end. They propose unlimited secession, i.e., the unrestricted proliferation of independent free terriories, until the state’s rage of jurisdiction finally withers away.
To this end – and in complete contrast to the statist projects of ”European Integration” and a ”New World Order” – they promote the vision of a world of tens of thousands of free countries, regions, and cantons, of hundreds of thousands of independent free cities – such as the present-day oddites of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, (formerly) Hong Kong, and Singapore – and even more numerous free districs and neighborhoods, economically integrated through free trade (the smaller the territory, the greater the economic pressure of opting for free trade!) and an international gold-commodity money standard.
If and when this alternative liberal vision gains prominence in public opinion, the end of the social democratic ”End of History” will give rise to a liberal renaissance.
– Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy – The God That Failed, 2001.
Christian Dahlgrens Blogg 