“Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.”
– Saint Pope John Paul II

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
– James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis

The ruling class also refers to abortionists as providers of medical services for “reproductive rights,” and indicts as “extremists” those who illustrate what the abortionists do with photos of what surely look like children, with arms, legs, and heads chopped or burned. Yet each of these little ones’ DNA shows him or her to be a son or a daughter of a particular mother and father. Lincoln argued that no one has the right to exclude any other person from the human race. Why is it right so to dispose of millions of little sons and daughters? By what right does anyone dishonor as “extremists” those who show the victims for the human beings they are?
. . .
But science is reason, not pretense. Only the power of government can translate scientific illiteracy into scientific pretense. What President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address has become our reality: “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” Government money is the means by which ruling-class power has become the scientific pretense by which we are instructed what to eat, how to shower, what medical care is proper and what is not, and what to think about right and wrong.
. . .
Demands from on high to join in mouthing lies call forth a visceral reaction: “Who the [expletive deleted] do they think they are to impose this warp of reality on us?”
. . .
As the great Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the sine qua non of liberty is refusal to live by lies.
. . .
Americans tell pollsters that we distrust our bipartisan ruling class. Accusations of racism, sexism, ignorance, etc. have not convinced us. People who pay attention to public affairs are not ignorant about how these accusations contrast with reality.

Standing Up to the Ruling Class, by Angelo M. Codevilla

“What would you call a society that made adoption incredibly hard and abortion incredibly easy? I’d call it sick at heart.”
– Peter Hitchens

“The whole point of a free society is to reduce the number of things that are political, particularly at the national level. When everything is considered political, the totality of life is politicized. And that’s just a clunky way of describing totalitarianism.”
– Jonah Goldberg

“The real conflict in political theory … is not between individualism and community. It’s between voluntary association and coerced association.”
– David Boaz

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
– Sir John Dalberg (Lord Acton)

“‘Bipartisanship’ sounds like a good idea in theory, but it usually ends up as broad congressional agreement that the American people have too many liberties or too much money.”
– Jonathan Blanks

“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”
– Charles Péguy