Talk:L. Neil Smith

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to L. Neil Smith. --Antiquary 18:32, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

• I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.

• It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.

• It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

• Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.

• My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.

• Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.

• Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.

• We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children.

Antiquary, you're a schmuck. Instead of stripping these quotes, why didn't you just use Google, enter "L. Neil Smith" and phrases like "solved problem" and "younger generations," eh? Had you done so, you would've easily found the source of most of these quotes, which include a speech entitled "Merchants of Fear,"[1] and another called "How Many Americans Does it Take to Change a Dim Bulb?"[2]

I've just sourced every goddam one of these quotations, complete with tested URL references to support each citation. You yourself could've done this in about twenty or thirty minutes, just as I did. Want to delete that "Sourced" heading on the quotations page? Now they're all sourced. 71.251.140.124 19:23, 3 January 2010 (UTC)