Shiny Happy People

OK, I love REM, but you have to admit this is a horrible song. It does have it's practical applications, though. I'm sure there is a car commercial somewhere using it to sell you a lifestyle. I bet it's even in the soundtracks of a few movies, although I'm too lazy to google it and back myself up with citations. But for my purposes today, it's meant in its original spirit. It was a political statement about Tiananmen Square. This is where my life changes. After I hit publish on this post, I'm pretty sure Homeland Security will open up a file on me. But the truth is, I love this country and everything it stands for. I just choose to join the following brilliant people in respectful disagreement.

O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength! But it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
– William Shakespeare

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
– Voltaire

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with...
– Gerard K. O'Neill

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
- Oscar Wilde



It is useless to attack men who could not be controlled even if conquered, while failure would leave us in an even worse position...
– Thucydides

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
– Alfred Adler

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
– Douglas MacArthur

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
– Charles-Louis De Secondat

After each war there is a little less democracy left to save.
– Brooks Atkinson

In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.
– Herodotus

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity.
– James Bryce

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.
– Robert M. La Follette

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
– Sigmund Freud

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your governmant when it deserves it.
– Mark Twain

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
– James Baldwin

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
– David Friedman

Feel free to disagree with me. That's what this country is all about.