Samizdata

Is using perfectly legal methods of minimising tax right? The answer is no.

– Andrew Pendleton, a senior campaigner at Christian Aid

The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy

– Fred L. Smith

It felt like a lion being savaged by Christians

– Madsen Pirie, when asked how it felt to be the only one in a room offering strongly dissenting opinions from the usual statist consensus.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

– Voltaire, without a doubt one of the greatest Frenchmen who have lived. His novel, Candide, with its great character Dr Pangloss, reads as fresh today as when it was written two centuries and a half ago.

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

– Ronald Reagan

I think this whole episode proves that – as usual – Noam Chomsky is correct: The West will lie about everything. These marines were not patrolling, they were probably planting WMDs on board Arab vessels on behalf of “Hallel”burton. Mr. Ajehhijihad, Ajamaamadad, Arimenmejood, well, however what’s-his-name’s name is pronounced (we arrogant Westerners rarely take the time to learn the names of foreign dignitaries), is the true Nobel prize candidate here. He treated these ‘sovereignty violators’ with courtesy and decency, even giving what’s-her-name (the non-male, Fay something) her own Islamic scarf … because Her Royal Navy is presumably too racist to supply one. Anyhow, I’m glad this is all over, and that it ended in a way that proves my theory that if you are sufficiently patient and obsequious, the so-called tyrants of the world will see the light of reason, if you give them enough apologies

– tkehler on the Guardian’s Commentisfree, responding to the article by Abbas Edalat, the founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.