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JSONPolitics
Some cynical, some idealistic, but all true.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A liberal is someone who will give you the shirt off of somebody else's back. | ||||
| Conservatives view Liberals as political opponents. Liberals view Conservatives as evil incarnate. | ||||
| The only reason the US doesn't have a Gestapo is that the FBI, BATF, DEA, EPA and CIA can't speak German. | ||||
| The political left seems to regard economic policy issues as litmus tests for whether you are a good person, rather than as questions of facts about what works and doesn't work. | ||||
| Administrator Dan Goldin fired hundreds from NASA Headquarters. A week later no one could remember what they did: they weren't missed at all. On the other hand, when bureaucrats get in charge of reductions in force, they always try to get rid of key people who actually do the work: that way they'll have no choice but to hire more. | ||||
| In opposing conscription, Gen. William Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" | ||||
| In the years leading up to and during the revolution, if a modern political reporter was present, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Jay, Madison, Lee, Coxe, all of the founders, would have been described as terrorists. In fact, if the Patriot Act had existed at that time, we would still be under the rule of Great Britain. All of the founders would have ended up on prison hulks in Boston Harbor, never to be heard from again. They would have been tortured, their property confiscated under RICO, and probably hanged after being convicted in secret trials, trials held secret by reason of 'national security.' In fact, even if the revolution had never happened, George Washington would have been stripped of his property, convicted and imprisoned for growing hemp, if that is, the current laws had been in effect back then. | ||||
| If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own--that thing is the preservation of their own liberties and institutions. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. | Adlai Stevenson | |||
| Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. | Albert Jay Nock | |||
| The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. | Albert Jay Nock | |||
| There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. | Albert Jay Nock | |||
| A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain. | Anatole France | |||
| To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. | Arthur C. Brooks | |||
| Give a man the secure possession of bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert... The magic of property turns sand into gold. | Arthur Young | |||
| Politicians work energetically to solve problems they themselves create. | Assar Lindbeck | |||
| The Berlin Wall did not fall. It was pushed. | Bill Bennett | |||
| Buying Saudi oil is like sending LendLease to Hitler. | Bill White | |||
| There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public. | Booker T. Washington, 1911 | |||
| A politician in power tends to remain in power. | Boortz's First Rule of Political Dynamics | |||
| Mr. Obama's energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of 'green' energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality! | Bret Stephens | |||
| The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun. | Buckminster Fuller | |||
| One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are. | Cal Thomas | |||
| We once taught our young people the virtues of hard work, saving, personal responsibility and accountability for one's actions ... We now teach them entitlement, victimhood, class envy and rights to other people's money. | Cal Thomas | |||
| Liberalism seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power. | Camille Paglia | |||
| The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. | Camille Paglia | |||
| Fanatical jihadism will continue to be a tactical problem, but its attacks, however devastating, will always be sporadic and local. Jihadism cannot destroy the U.S. But our own reckless politicians, spending us into oblivion and servitude to China, can. | Camille Paglia | |||
| The law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care. | Camille Paglia | |||
| America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. | Claire Wolfe | |||
| America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. | David Goldhill | |||
| Today our Democratic leaders look south and say, 'I see one third of the nation and it can go to hell.' | Democrat Sen. Zell Miller | |||
| I believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe in, the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in, and the personal freedom that America used to believe in. | Doug Mataconis | |||
| Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. | Douglas Casey | |||
| I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves. | Dr. Thomas Sowell | |||
| A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| Here in America we are descended in blood and spirit from revolutionists and rebels; men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea. | Enoch Powell | |||
| Reporters are easily fooled, intellectually lazy, and combative. It’s a dangerous combination. | Fred Reed | |||
| You can’t fly Chicago-San Francisco on All Nippon Airlines or JAL. If you could, the domestic lines would be out of business in three weeks. | Fred Reed | |||
| Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. | Freeman Dyson | |||
| Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism. | George Will | |||
| My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' | Gilbert Keith Chesterton | |||
| Remember: Under a Republican President, whistleblowers are brave heroes, standing up for accountability and the rule of law. Under a Democratic President, they’re deranged partisans. | Glenn Reynolds | |||
| It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people. | Gore Vidal | |||
| Even if the laws of arithmetic are ignored during campaigns, they provide a real constraint when making actual policy | Greg Mankiw | |||
| Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid. | Harrison Ford as President James Marshall,"Air Force One" | |||
| Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. | Henry Kissinger | |||
| Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along .... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | Hermann Goering | |||
| We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. | Hillary Clinton (scary, huh?) | |||
| If you are Christians and love peace,' said a New Zealand savage to a civilized Englishman, 'why do you bring us gunpowder and muskets?' | House of Commons, Hansard, 1845 | |||
| The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. | Hubert H. Humphrey | |||
| The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| Anyway, my point is, I just want those protestors to stop for one moment and think that if America really is as evil and imperialistic as they say, then why aren't they dead? If they think we just want oil, hell, we could take over the entire world and have not just all the oil in the world, but all the gold, all the diamonds, all the chimpanzees and orangutans, and all the corndogs. And who could stop us? France? | IMAO | |||
| If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend. | Irwin Schiff | |||
| When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. | James Dale Davidson | |||
| A politician thinks of the next election -- a statesman of the next generation. | James Freeman Clarke | |||
| Spending your way out of a recession? Isn’t that like drinking yourself out of alcoholism? | Jay Leno | |||
| The surest way to civil war is to begin prosecuting policy differences as criminal. There is no faster way to destroy a republic than to give the loser great fear of losing the election. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| The Regulatory State seems determined to restrict America to two kinds of companies: those with fewer than 50 employees, and giant corporations with thousands of employees. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| What we do is bring foreign nationals to the world's greatest universities. We train them, invest in them and make them go home. What kind of national strategy is that? | John Doerr | |||
| Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. | John Hasnas | |||
| For the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe. | John Hasnas | |||
| Economics exists to made astrology look respectable. | John Kenneth Galbraith | |||
| Leadership is not about telling the public what they necessarily want to hear. Leadership is standing up and telling the public how things really are. | Jon Corzine | |||
| If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. | Ludwig von Mises | |||
| The best social services program is a job. | Maine Gov. John Baldacci | |||
| A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns. | Mario Puzo | |||
| As a general proposition, when told by unanimous elites that a particular course of action is urgent and necessary to avoid disaster, there’s a lot to be said for going fishing. | Mark Steyn | |||
| Right now, if you don't like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you're sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don't like 'global governance'? What polling station do you go to to vote it out? | Mark Steyn | |||
| Every economist knows that minimum wages cause unemployment. That's not a statement, that's a definition. | Milton Friedman | |||
| In a poorer and less socialist era, we produced a nationwide network of roads and bridges and subway systems that were the envy of the world. Today we are unable even to maintain them. | Milton Friedman | |||
| It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost. | Murray N. Rothbard | |||
| A lot of people out there pay good lip service to the idea of personal freedom--right up to the point that someone tries to do something that they don't personally approve of. | Neal Boortz | |||
| We are creating a nation of pussies and candyasses who can't tell you the difference between a legislature and a ligature. | Neal Boortz | |||
| Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river. | Nikita Khrushchev | |||
| The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. | Norman Thomas, Former Presidential Candidate, U.S. Socialist Party | |||
| When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice. | Otto von Bismarck | |||
| A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire. | Peggy Noonan | |||
| Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. | Pericles | |||
| The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. | Peter Brimelow | |||
| One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. | Plato | |||
| The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. | Plutarch | |||
| We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans. | President Bill Clinton (USA Today, 3/11/93, Page 2A) | |||
| ...In the United States alone, approximately 25 million chickens are killed and eaten every day. It has been said that the difference between chicken hawks and people is that when chicken hawks eat more chickens, there are fewer chickens, but when people eat more chickens there are more chickens. The more fundamental difference is that people establish private property rights and, as a result, take the future into consideration; chicken hawks don't. | Prof. Dwight R. Lee, Univ. of Georgia | |||
| The liberal is continually angry, as only a self-important man can be, with his civilization, his culture, his country and his folks back home. His is an infantile world view. At the core of a liberal is the spoiled child--miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| There is something more horrible than hoodlums, churls and vipers, and that is knaves with moral justification for their cause. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.' | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it's free. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| Immigration, multi-culturalism, democracy. Pick any two. | Rand Simberg | |||
| Anybody who wants to be President badly enough to go through everything that it takes is intrinsically not to be trusted. | Rand Simberg | |||
| By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that, no matter how bad things are, Congress could always make it worse. | Rasmussen Reports, Aug 2009 | |||
| The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer. | Richard Fernandez | |||
| A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If all of us tried to go back-to-nature, most of us would starve rather quickly. These back-to-nature freaks can't do arithmetic. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If the horse can't jump the hurdle, shoot the horse. Keep on doing this and eventually you will find a horse that can clear the jump--if you don't run out of horses. This is the sort of plausible pseudologic that most people bring to political affairs. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they--' is almost always, 'Money.' | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We are not liked, we have few friends; therefore we should quit being afraid, stand up and assert ourselves. The only friends we will lose thereby are those we never had. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We can't make the world safe for children, nor for men either--and God didn't appoint us to do it. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| We did not want it that way--but if somebody has to be boss, I want it to be us. Disarm them and don't turn them loose. We can treat the individual persons decently in an economic sense, but take away their sovereignty. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. | Robert Kennedy | |||
| The greater the desire to perform humanitarian deeds through legislation, the greater the violence required to achieve it. | Ron Paul | |||
| Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. | Ronald Reagan, Notre Dame (May 17, 1981) | |||
| The difference in opinion between the Political Class and the rest of the nation is larger than the gap between the political parties. | Scott Rasmussen | |||
| Collectivists only revere democracy until it has voted them sufficient power… then democracy becomes a cumbersome inconvenience that allows selfish, ignorant fools and corporate shills to interfere with the brilliant work of great men. | Sherman Logan | |||
| When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. | Sinclair Lewis | |||
| We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. | Stephen Schneider, environmental activist ('Discover', Oct 89) | |||
| It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power--the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power--American and European perspectives are diverging. | Steven den Beste | |||
| 'Fuzzy' academics is where success is not a matter of finding objective answers, but of convincing peers or superiors that your views are valid... Engineering doesn't work like that. There is no 'consensus' on the tensile strength of aircraft aluminum. If you get it wrong, people die. | TB | |||
| I do not represent public opinion; I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public's opinion of these interests. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is kindled, it burns like a consuming flame. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| It may be that at some time in the dim future of the race the need for war will vanish: but that time is yet ages distant. As yet no nation can hold its place in the world, or can do any work really worth doing, unless it stands ready to guard its right with an armed hand. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle--before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime 'get out of jail free' card, exempting you from responsibility for what you do thereafter. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Envy plus rhetoric equals social justice. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Much of what are called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? | Thomas Sowell | |||
| No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices *down* unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| To liberals, 'compassion' means giving less productive people the fruits of the efforts of more productive people. But real compassion means enabling less productive people to become more productive themselves. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Two questions would destroy at least half the agenda of the political left: 'Compared to what?' and 'At what cost?' | Thomas Sowell | |||
| We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Whenever you have a couple of hundred thousand human beings involved in any operation, you can rest assured that there will be some absolute jackasses among them--regardless of what country, race, religion or ideology these people come from. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in— power. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| A cult is a religion with no political power. | Tom Wolfe | |||
| It is hard for those who live near a Police Station to believe in the triumph of violence. | T.S. Eliot | |||
| The politics of the left are now about power, ego, status, and the notion of control, rather than genuine concern for the planet, or the creed of egalitarianism or for freedoms of the people. | VIctor Davis Hanson | |||
| In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists. | Whittaker Chambers | |||
| I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. | William F. Buckley | |||
| A man who is not a liberal by the time he's 20 has no heart, and a man who is not a conservative by the time he's 40 has no brain. | Winston Churchill | |||
| An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. | Winston Churchill | |||
| The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | Winston Churchill | |||
| Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggie!' till you can find a rock. | Wynn Catlin | |||
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