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Thought

David Stockman

[T]he only consistent way forward for America at this late stage of the game is a return to free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule. Unfortunately, that is not about to happen anytime soon — even if by some miracle Donald Trump is elected President. But . . . the tide is turning against the failed Wall Street/Washington bipartisan consensus. I call this insurrection the ‘revolt of the rubes’ in Flyover America.

This uprising against the rule of the financial and political elites has counterparts abroad among those who voted for Brexit in the UK, against Merkel in the recent German elections in her home state, and among the growing tide of anti-Brussels sentiment reflected in polls throughout the EC.

Needless to say, the political upheaval now underway is largely an inchoate reaction to the policy failures and arrogant pretensions of the establishment rulers. Like Donald Trump himself, it does not reflect a coherent programmatic alternative.

But my contention is that liberation from our current ruinous policy regime has to start somewhere — and that’s why the Trump candidacy is so important. He represents a raw insurgency of attack, derision, impertinence, and repudiation.

If that leads to throwing out the beltway careerists, pettifoggers, hypocrites, ideologues, racketeers, power seekers and snobs who have brought about the current ruin then at least the decks will be cleared.


David Stockman, “It Won’t Be Long Now — The End Game of Central Banking Is Nigh,” 2016/09/08. Image: detail of his forthcoming book.

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Ernest Bramah

However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.


Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities,” Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928). Pictured: detail of the cover of the 1974 Ballantine edition of the quoted book.

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J. H. Levy

Socialism is essentially inimical to family life, which it regards as a bourgeois institution — to use its own favorite anathema. Socialism would make motherhood a State business or profession, would pay women for this sexual function, and deprive fathers of all status or recognition.

J. H. Levy, The Outcome of Individualism, Third Edition (1892); detail of a portrait, above, courtesy (by Creative Commons license) of the National Portrait Gallery, London, after a portrait by Joseph Solomon (photograph, 1901), © National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Dr. Johnson

Example is always more efficacious than precept.


Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 29.

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Thomas Jefferson and Peyton Randolph

This House, being deeply impressed with apprehension of the great dangers, to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston, in our Sister Colony of Massachusetts bay, whose commerce and harbor are, on the first Day of June next, to be stopped by an Armed force, deem it highly necessary that the said f first day of June be set apart, by the Members of this House, as a day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy Calamity which threatens destruction to our Civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War; to give us one heart and one Mind to firmly oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American Rights; and that the Minds of his Majesty and his Parliament, may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, to remove from the loyal People of America, all cause of danger, from a continued pursuit of Measure, pregnant with their ruin.


Thomas Jefferson’s Fast Day Resolution, as passed by the Colony of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, Peyton Reynolds presiding, May 24th, 1774.

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Eugene Field

Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.


Eugene Field, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field: The love affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896), “The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me,” (chapter 4), p. 44.

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Dr. Johnson

The first years of man must make provision for the last.


Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 27.

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Dr. Johnson

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.


Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 41.

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Samuel Johnson

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.


Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 26.

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Mario Vargas Llosa

“I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. . . . Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.”


Mario Vargas Llosa, from a televised conference in Mexico, “The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom,” August 30, 1990.