“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”- George Orwell
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”- Joseph Goebbels
From Eric (Classical Values, What if you aren't nice but you just don't like meanness?, May 8, 2009):
OTOH, might my complaints involve just a matter of taste? If I happen not to like certain personalities, certain styles of writing, and certain beliefs, should these things go to the way I define myself? I mean, it's not as if someone set up a conservative litmus test which says that if you are a conservative, you have to like Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and WorldNetDaily, and you have to believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya, so perhaps I'm being illogical and I'm setting up an unreasonable test.
There is a conservative litmus test, but those on Eric's list don't pass it. Unfortunately, there has been grade-inflation on the test, and the majority of people who also use the term to describe themselves grade-inflated themselves, and have redefined it to mean something it never meant before.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.Edmund Burke, 1791
The distinguishing part of our Constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the only liberty, I mean is a liberty connected with order: that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.- Edmund Burke, 1774
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