Every country ended slavery without civil war; US could have.
I believe that when we overdo our military aggressiveness, what it does it actually weakens our national defense. I mean, we stood up to the Soviets. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons. Now we're fretting day in and day - night about third-world countries that have no army, navy or air force.
[Political] conventions lend themselves to pandering, as few politicians can resist the temptation to tell a national television audience how well they will run the country if elected. The problem is that government is not supposed to run the country - we're supposed to be free.
They ask me if I'm going to quit. I thought we were just getting started. We have a revolution to fight, a country to change.
Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.
During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.
The World's Smallest Political Quiz is responsible for many Americans' first contact with libertarian ideas. While traveling around the country, I have often heard people say, 'I never knew I was a libertarian until I took the Quiz!'
What we need is a strong defense, but right now there is zero chance of an invasion by another country and right now we have more firepower than all other countries put together.
Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession.
Immigrants can spread diseases for which we may have no immunity. There is also the question of crime and culture. Many immigrants come from countries with different legal structures and are not willing to behave in the way we expect American citizens to behave.
From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.
We're bankrupting our country and we have an empire that we're trying to defend which costs us $1 trillion a year. And the standard of living is going down today. It's going down and the middle class is hurting because of the monetary policy. When you destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out.
There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.
Flight attendants all over the world saw 'Sex and the City.' Doesn't matter what country you are in. The flight attendants know Jack Berger.
Sitting in the Oval Office, beneath a painting of George Washington, with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. over his right shoulder and a bust of Abraham Lincoln over his left shoulder, Obama told 'National Journal' that the country's economic woes are deep and endemic.
Many countries that formerly saw Israel as an enemy now see Israel as a potential partner in addressing their primary security challenges. And so first and foremost, Iran. The rise of Iran, the empowerment of Iran has created a big change in the dynamics in the region. The second was the rise of ISIS.
There's a lot of disputes around the world, a lot of territorial conflicts around the world. But Israel is the only country in the world whose capital is not recognized. I don't think the United States recognizing Jerusalem as a capital will prevent any sort of peace agreement from happening in the future. It's not actually a sensible argument. What it will do is it will right a historic wrong. Something that should have happened 69 years ago will finally happen. And then we have to get about the process of trying to advance peace between the parties.
As the tech industry continues to grow and sprout successful startups across the country, it is important that we understand our responsibility to affect positive change in our communities.
The Italian economy is certainly the weakest of the big European countries.
Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.
My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
The audiences are really different in general. Even in the same country or in the same city, from one venue to another, the audiences can be totally different.
Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.
Mexico is a country we Americans should be cultivating a positive dialogue about how we work together to make ourselves more secure and more competitive vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
Being known for Bond, certainly when you're in foreign countries, makes people curious. You get to see presidents because their wives were curious; their children were curious about Bond or The Saint or whatever. Then once you have your foot through the door, you can then let them see that you're serious about what you're talking about, and not just a twit.
