Author: James Wesley Rawles

“There is no better way to return the matter of taxation to full public discussion than to repeal the withholding taxes on wages and salaries. Only when the American people are confronted with the enormous excesses of government in a personal and direct way – by an annual bill for services rendered – will they be able to make an informed judgment about which services they want and which ones they can do without.” – Karl Hess

“My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?” – Richard Matheson, on his initial inspiration for the novel Bid Time Return (1975). It was later made into the film Somewhere in Time  

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has …

“Tyrants find great joy in creating all kinds of logical fallacies, mental gymnastics and morally relative sales pitches in order to convince a group of people that their wrong assumptions are right. The truth becomes foggy and evidence becomes unnecessary. In this state of mind, when individuals melt together into a mob, assumptions become cult dictates and “winning” becomes paramount. False assumptions and biases can be used to turn normal upstanding people into monsters, all because they refused to accept that their ideological position was flawed; all because they were afraid to feel embarrassed or admit they had been conned.” …

“Fundamental Rights are those rights that we can derive from a universal non-conflicting criteria that allows all men to exercise their maximum free will without infringing on others rights, equally claimed, nor forcing others to serve their needs. These non conflicting rights are inviolable, and superior to all forms of human government, and therefore not subject to political confirmation. This is a radically new concept to those schooled to believe that the highest form of justice comes by democratic means. It becomes clear, under the concept of “inviolable rights” that fundamental rights should never be subject to ratification, even in …

“Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets. I may get killed with my own gun, but he’s gonna have to beat me to death with it, cause it’s gonna be empty.” – Thunder Ranch firearms training school founder Clint Smith