Samizdata

Harold Wilson said Labour was a crusade or it was nothing. I try not to think about his assertion. The logical implications are too painful.
-Roy Hattersley, 1997

“I’m 48 years old and I’ve been taxed to pay for America’s nuclear arsenal my whole life. Now I want to get my money’s worth.”
-An American on the Rush Limbaugh show, explaining why he wants, as Orrin Judd reports (May 20 – 1.20 pm), “the bombing of every dictatorship in the Middle East” (with thanks also to Instapundit)

I’ve worked out a use for Stephen Byers. If you take the intellectual rigour of John Major, the financial probity of the late Robert Maxwell, the sense of public service of Neil Hamilton and the integrity of Stephen Byers, you get… President Jacques Chirac!
– Antoine Clarke

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an in tolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer!
-Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Every age has a language of its own; and the difference in the words is often far greater than in the thoughts. The main employment of authors, in their collective capacity, is to translate the thoughts of other ages into the language of their own.
– Augustus Hare, Guesses at Truth (1827)

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.
– Henrik Ibsen, in An Enemy of the People