Connor Boyack > Quotes

“By measuring risk, we can develop coping skills, challenge our abilities, increase our strength, and allocate resources prudently. In essence, life is one constant series of risk calculations as we determine what we will do.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“On the other hand, irrational fears are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Here’s an example: when 152 people were infected with swine flu in Mexico in 2009, people around the world, prodded by the media’s manufactured hysteria, erupted in fear of an epidemic. We were warned that the threat was everywhere—that everyone was potentially at risk; however, the data showed these fears to be completely unwarranted. Weeks into the “outbreak,” there were around 1,000 reported cases of the virus in 20 countries. The number of fatalities stood at 26—25 in Mexico, and one in the United States (a boy who had just traveled to Texas from Mexico). Yet schools were closed, travel was restricted, emergency rooms were flooded, hundreds of thousands of pigs were killed, hand sanitizer and face masks disappeared from store shelves, and network news stories about swine flu consumed 43% of airtime.9 “There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” commented Congressman Ron Paul in response. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”10 He should know. During Paul’s first session in Congress in 1976, a swine flu outbreak led Congress to vote to vaccinate the entire country. (He voted against it.) Twenty-five people died from the vaccination itself, while only one person was killed from the actual virus; hundreds, if not more, contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing neurological illness, as a result of the vaccine. Nearly 25 percent of the population was vaccinated before the effort was cancelled due to safety concerns.”
― Connor Boyack, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them

“The rise of the modern welfare state forced fraternal societies into “full retreat as social welfare institutions.” By assuming the burden of caring for those in need, “governments had undermined much of the reason for the existence of societies and thus for people to join.”72”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“As Goethe said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”27”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Just as a well-traveled person is not likely to be “deceived by the local errors of his native village,” C. S. Lewis once said, a student of history “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Thomas Jefferson’s observation that people can’t be both “ignorant and free”18 also works in the inverse: people can’t be both informed and shackled to the state. Knowledge about the past is how the resistance can fight for a freer future.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Legality and morality are not synonymous, and politically independent families recognize this truth.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“the state’s schools do not teach the dangers of the state.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Consider this book as a similar distress signal—a warning message from a friendly ally sent to caring parents so they can recognize, prepare for, and defend against the state and its diverse methods of undermining the family with the purpose of controlling the individual.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“John Dewey, a socialist pioneer of modern schooling, said in 1928 that he loved that schools had a rule “in building up forces… whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life.”86”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“sometimes governments and cultures promote, institutionalize, and enforce what is wrong. They recognize that the law is whatever those in power say it is, and sometimes those in power are corrupt and worthy of our disobedience.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“So one way to figure out if a law is natural is whether it applies to everybody equally.”
― Connor Boyack, Lessons from a Lemonade Stand: An Unconventional Guide to Government

“If “war is the health of the state,”91 then a state-run schooling system is its lifeblood. Without it, statism is impossible. With it, the state becomes inevitable.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“But money doesn’t equate to improved education outcomes—indeed,”
― Connor Boyack, Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today’s Students

“This subordination to the collective is the foundation of Plato’s dystopian world, and echoes of it are present today. Consider this quote from his writings: The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader… he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… He should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it… in this way the life of all will be spent in total community.34”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Tate’s experience is similar to countless others who are prompted to take action once they realize how bad a particular problem is. But without that exposure—without realizing the significance of the problem—oftentimes solutions aren’t realized. (That’s also the purpose of this book, by the way—to shock you into seeing just how bad the status quo is and the need for education solutions for your children and everyone else’s.) When problems are well understood, then we can begin talking about how to fix them.”
― Connor Boyack, Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today's Students

“a bunch of communists hatched a coordinated campaign to move to New Jersey, gain the majority of elected positions in the state legislature, and then vote to govern New Jersey under a Communist dictatorship, would that be valid? Not according to the Constitution. It, as the higher law, would override this communist plot; the attempted takeover would be unconstitutional, and thus illegal.”
― Connor Boyack, Lessons from a Lemonade Stand: An Unconventional Guide to Government

“politicians don’t make law. At best, they can merely articulate a natural law more precisely to apply it to our modern lives, applying existing law to the age in which we live.”
― Connor Boyack, Lessons from a Lemonade Stand: An Unconventional Guide to Government

“THE TEMPESTUOUS SEA OF LIBERTY “The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore. Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible. It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors, to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.”
—Attributed to Ferdinand Magellan”
― Connor Boyack, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them

“The day you passed [the welfare law in England], you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.25”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Oddly, and perhaps hypocritically, the architect of some of these programs himself warned of their danger. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, patron saint of modern welfare programs for his New Deal, among other initiatives, once wrote that history clearly showed that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”36”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“Affixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence was a point of no return; either they were going to gain their freedom from England and “provide new guards for their future security,” as the document said, or they were going to lose the war to the world’s most powerful military, forfeit all of their possessions, ruin their families, and be hanged, drawn, and quartered.38”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“As Ayn Rand once wrote, “Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.”14”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective

“The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.”
― Connor Boyack, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them

“In the aftermath of 9/11, Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress heading into the 2004 campaign season. Guest speakers and candidates lined up at the Republican National Convention, each referencing and emphasizing the events of 9/11, the need to fight terrorism, the menace of Saddam Hussein, and related threats. They discussed, repeatedly, the “hour of danger,” the “very dangerous world,” a “grave, new threat,” the terrorists’ “horrific acts of atrocities,” people “dedicated to killing us,” torture chambers, mass graves, radical ideologies, deadly technologies, and of course, “weapons of mass destruction.”22 Fear was, as journalist Glenn Greenwald once wrote, the “one very potent weapon” that the Bush administration had in its arsenal, which it repeatedly used.”
― Connor Boyack, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them

“As one prominent official in the National Education Association said in 1934, “The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order.”
― Connor Boyack, Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today's Students

“As Thomas Paine once wrote, “Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”39 That support is most likely to come from those individuals who can afford the time and money necessary to make a significant and lasting impact. If we wish for freedom from the state, our families must be economically independent from it.”
― Connor Boyack, Children of the Collective