35 Quotes by J.R.Nyquist

America is no Third Reich. Though its military knows the technique of blitzkrieg, the politicians don’t know what to do with the resulting “victory.” The American people are not an imperialist people. They do not particularly like foreign adventures, or telling other people what to do. The “war on terror,” therefore, tends toward farce. It is not imperialism, but misguided philanthropy in which many people are killed and America’s enemies gain the advantage.J.R.Nyquist

Once you buddy up to killers you cannot allow yourself to take their criminality too seriously. You become yourself an apologist for them — from necessity.

To seek and hold political power is to seek something that distorts self-conception, enlarging the ego as it corrupts the brain.

But there is a difference between the systematic evil of totalitarianism and the ordinary corruption we find in all institutions, at all times. Totalitarianism is a system of highly organized murder and oppression, driven by ideology. American institutions, in comparison, were not created to facilitate mass murder and dictatorship.

When we see the present machinations of the left in Washington, many are perplexed by the insincerity of its spokesmen. But actually, this is what we ought to expect. This is who they are. Honesty was not part of their training. Revolution has an altogether different ethic.

The ideological erosion of the bourgeois order at every level — economic, political, cultural, social — would proceed the initiation of direct frontal assaults on the state.Carl BoggsGramsci’s Marxism, p. 52via J.R.Nyquist

Here is your modern American solution. And most people think it worked perfectly. We won the Cold War by living high off the hog. Isn’t that the real story here? We beat the Russians by talk and retreat, by growing softer and softer under a shopping ethic. We let our kids smoke pot, our schools descend into political correctness, while counter-intelligence collapsed — if it was ever there at all. But then, we didn’t really win the Cold War.

The best society, in reality, is a society in which evils are limited by devices of Machiavellian construction (as opposed to devices of utopian or ideological construction). And in order to make such devices, you have to understand how things work. This is very different from how they “ought” to work.

Polybius credited the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus with the invention of mixed government. Naturally, mixed governments themselves would eventually succumb to degeneration. But this process would take centuries rather than decades. This was shown by the examples of Sparta, the Republic of Carthage, and Rome.