Revolting Cocks…and marvelous quotes

There’s this industrial rock band known as the Revolting Cocks. I quite like their music; they’re really good.

There’s this bunch of politicians in South Africa known as the Repulsive Dicks [Ok, they’re not really known as the Repulsive Dicks as yet, but time will rectify that]. I really detest their dishonesty; they’re quite bad.

In fact their repulsiveness was predicted by some very famous people such as:

H L Mencken

[I]f experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change … [T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Ludwig von Mises

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

Barry Goldwater

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

And my personal favorites:

George Will

The reign of Virtue shall begin when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Or so ’twas said many reigns of Virtue ago.

Anonymous

Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently – and for the very same reason.