A pair of excellent signs from the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Park. Sometimes the language of protest grows a little stale. Many oldies-but-goodies like “people over profits” have been around since the Sixties. So I was excited to find the two signs above at Occupy Wall Street. James Madison and Adam Smith—the real Adam Smith, not the one dreamt up by free-market fundamentalists—both have plenty of pithy quotes that make good fodder for protest signage. Here’s a few: A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. - James Madison No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged. - Adam Smith No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. - James Madison With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. - Adam Smith The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. - James Madison All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. - Adam Smith Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant. - James Madison

A pair of excellent signs from the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Park.

Sometimes the language of protest grows a little stale. Many oldies-but-goodies like “people over profits” have been around since the Sixties. So I was excited to find the two signs above at Occupy Wall Street. James Madison and Adam Smith—the real Adam Smith, not the one dreamt up by free-market fundamentalists—both have plenty of pithy quotes that make good fodder for protest signage. Here’s a few:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. - James Madison

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged. - Adam Smith

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. - James Madison

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. - Adam Smith

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. - James Madison

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. - Adam Smith

Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant. - James Madison


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    really said that? Always nice...a historian like Ben Tarnoff comment on contemporary...
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