Alexis de Tocqueville

Popularity may be united with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed lover of freedom.

I hold it to be… a detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything.

When…the people are invested with the supreme authority…they discover a multitude of wants… to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the state.

To lay down… limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights… [are] the main objects.

True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.

Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard… to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions.

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

It’s alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

So the indigenous population of what’s now the United States was ‘exterminated’, to use the word that the founding fathers used. Not totally, but that was what was considered the right thing to do. They replaced them and it became a kind of settler state, not an imperial state.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.

With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.

As you know my wife is Mexican and my constituency is very, very multi-cultural so what I was going to do was go down to the mosque with him and let him talk to people there.

Japan fended off the European invasions almost entirely. That’s why Japan is the one area of the Third World that developed. That’s striking. The one part of the Third World that wasn’t colonized is the one part that’s part of the industrialized world. That’s not by accident.

One positive development might be the infrastructure program that Trump has promised while (along with much reporting and commentary) concealing the fact that it is essentially the Obama stimulus program that would have been of great benefit to the economy and to the society generally, but was killed by the Republican Congress on the pretext that it would explode the deficit..

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?

Chechnya is part and parcel of the Russian Federation.