Quote

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.

L. Neil Smith

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L. Neil Smith
Age: 75 †
Born: 1946
Born: May 12
Died: 2021
Died: August 27
Author
Novelist
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Denver
Colorado
Lester Neil Smith III
Even
Creatures
Wealth
Pitiable
Security
Respite
Liberty
Understandable
Moments
Rope
Others
Sell
Ends
Sells
Power
Deserve

More quotes by L. Neil Smith

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We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.
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Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.
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Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.
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The only hope we have is the Internet. We must strive to keep it free.
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To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
L. Neil Smith
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Forget 'redeeming social value,' dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.
L. Neil Smith
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Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead.
L. Neil Smith
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What I want to accomplish artistically amounts to nothing more than fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution.
L. Neil Smith
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Choose your enemies carefully: you'll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.
L. Neil Smith
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Politicians need human misery. ... Government's a disease masquerading as its own cure.
L. Neil Smith
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Know when to give up a lost cause. Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn't deserve to be.
L. Neil Smith
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It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.
L. Neil Smith
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Government is about stealing and nothing else. That's all it's ever been about. That's all it'll ever be about.
L. Neil Smith
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The function of government is to provide you with service the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.
L. Neil Smith
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As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.
L. Neil Smith
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The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent.
L. Neil Smith
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And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.
L. Neil Smith
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One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.
L. Neil Smith
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There's nothing noble or selfless about politicians and there never has been. Putting it charitably, Profiles in Courage is a compendium of Democratic mythology, ghostwritten for an ambitious young Massachusetts Senator who never did a thing for himself if he could pay to have it done by others.
L. Neil Smith
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The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them . It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.
L. Neil Smith