#tate

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#conservatism #economics #intellectuals #keynesianism #law

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#decrease #desire #growth #must #only

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#capitalist #literature #state #subversive #art

A more accurate statement would be that I was the first person since Jedi who was permitted to stick a fork into the piecrust to see if there was still any steam underneath. ↗

— Timothy Zahn

#any #first #fork #i #into

The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#islam #islamism #jihad #music #taliban

Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction. ↗

— Benjamin Tucker

#defence #destruction #doubtless #effected #function