Alan Bock quotes

“The Declaration of Independence has been called, with some justice, the most revolutionary document in human history, in that it placed the individual person first in the political scheme of things and made the legitimacy of governments and ruling classes contingent on their success at preserving individual rights.”
-- Alan Bock

#Class Quotes #Rights Quotes #Government Quotes

“The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services.”
-- Alan Bock

#Men Quotes #Years Quotes #Civilization Quotes

“Since 1937, about half the forests in the world have been cut down to make paper. If hemp had not been outlawed, most would still be standing, oxygenating the planet.”
-- Alan Bock

#Cutting Quotes #Hemp Quotes #Half Quotes

“Invaluable....the best one-stop source I've seen for what various officials actually said at various times, suffused with intelligent analysis.”
-- Alan Bock

#Intelligent Quotes #Analysis Quotes #Source Quotes

“Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition”

“When I was right out of college, I felt competitive with some of the guys in my class over career stuff.”

“I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.”

“The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed. They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where consciousness once resided. These Dionysians obliterate themselves by removing filters, ultimately becoming insensate with sensation. This mode of behaviour originates in the superstitious belief that transcendence is acquired in the precise ratio by which reason is destroyed.”

“True religion, like our founding principles, requires that the rights of the disbeliever be equally acknowledged with those of the believer.”

“I don't know whether you have any rights before you're born. All I know is that being born again doesn't entitle you to twice as many.”

“Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.”

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

“I agree that ***** laws are overdue for an overhaul. I also favor the medical use of ***** -- if it's prescribed by a physician. I cannot understand why the federal government should interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, nor why it would ignore the will of a majority of voters who have legally approved such legislation.”

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”