Adam Smith

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality… for one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor.

Let us not, however, upon this account rashly conclude that she is capable of supporting any burden, nor even be too confident that she could support, without great distress, a burden a little greater than what has already been laid upon her.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

Those unproductive hands … may consume so great a share … that all the frugality and good conduct of individuals may not be able to compensate … this violent and forced encroachment.

The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition … is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration … surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.

But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence. Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called “dangerous classes,” those superfluous people who don’t really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

You have no right to criticise Russia over Chechnya.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

When the Americans could no longer protect Barbie, they moved him over to the Vatican-run ‘ratline’, where Croatian Nazi priests and others managed to spirit him off to Latin America. There he continued his career as a big drug lord and narco-trafflcker.

The most repressive countries in the Middle East are the ones we support. By comparison to Saudi Arabia, Iran looks like Norway…As far as violence in the Middle East is concerned, the Saudi Arabian [and] UAE actions in Yemen, which we’re supporting, are much worse than anything.

I feel that [Trump] cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this.

I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.

Obviously these [white-guard] emigres enjoy the right of asylum existing also in the U.S. So far as we are concerned we would never tolerate a single terrorist in our territory regardless against whom he would contemplate his crimes. Apparently the right of asylum receives broader interpretation in the U.S.A. than in our country.

The Creel [propaganda] Commission…succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist [U.S.] population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.

One goal of a well-crafted propaganda system is to dull the mental faculties, reducing its targets to a level at which they will respond with appropriate enthusiasm to slogans carrying a patriotic message.