The Last Ditch: Beware the sanitisation of public debate

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The original version of the Last Ditch

Quotes

Thomas Sowell
Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Nationalism cannot exist in a conflict-free condition; it cannot exist as a thing devoid of grudges and claims. Wherever the nationalism of one group rears its head, immediately, as if from beneath the ground, this group's enemies will spring up.
Richard Lindzen (climate scientist, MIT)
Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream. If you control carbon, you control life.
Edward R. Murrow
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Mark Twain
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Frederic Bastiat
And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty.
AA Gill
But don’t for a moment imagine that the bicycle-riding, organic-hedgerow-grazing, self-denying, 40-watt miserablists are in fact selfless crusaders for the common good. Never underestimate the sustaining pleasure in a hair shirt. Just look at George Monbiot, and witness a man who couldn’t be happier about the imminent demise of life as we know it. It’s given him purpose, prestige and celebrity: without global warming he’d be a geography teacher.
John W. Gardner
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
Gary Bushell
The Green Party will go from green to red faster than a frog in a blender.
Tom Paine
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Beware the sanitisation of public debate

Link: Taking Liberties - Simon Clark - Home - Beware the sanitisation of public debate .

Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, makes some very good points about free speech. Do read the whole thing. And while you are over there, why not sign up for a feed from the new "Taking Liberties" blog, which promises to be an important new voice from a broadly libertarian standpoint.

Posted by Tom Paine on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 in Civil Liberties | Permalink