Professor Bikey Bike's Bike Shop

Premise 4

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those loer is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

We are belabored by the insistence on the part of our politicians, businessmen and military leaders, and the claque of scriviners who serve them, that "growth" and "power" are intrinsic goods, of which we can never have enough, or even too much. As if gigantism were an end in itself. As if a commendable rat were a rat twelve hands high at the shoulders—and still growing. As if we could never have peace on this planet until one state dominates all others.

Let us start our republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our constitution.

One need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil.

And so long as the world can contemplate the destruction of a small nation without any deep pang of regret, so long will it be uncivilized.

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners.

What we do to our children, they will do to society.

The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world.

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

We ought to turn this country over to the police for two or three years and everything would be all right.

The theory that holds 'good blood' or 'bad blood' as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged.

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword.It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind...And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so.How do I know?For this is what I have done.And I am Caesar."