First listen, my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster.
-- Aristophanes
So long as you are praised, think only that you are
not yet on your own path, but on that of another.
-- Friedrich Nietzche
To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
-- Elbert Hubbard
Freedom is actually a bigger game than power.
Power is about what you can control. Freedom is
about what you can unleash.
-- Harriet Rubin
The successful construction of all machines depends on the
perfection of the tools employed, and whoever is a master of
the art of toolmaking possesses the key to the construction
of all machines.
-- Charles Babbage
How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.
-- Eric Hoffer
Shun those studies in which the work that results
dies with the worker.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
-- George Eliot
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge
of anything... The least productive people are usually
the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
-- Thomas Sowell
Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking
their noses in things that are properly their business.
-- Paul Valery
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten
percent a bad reputation.
-- Henry Kissinger
Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of
pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we
do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede
their efforts to obtain it.
-- John Stewart Mill
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than
an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything
permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day:
we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday.
But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we
are fixed, so to speak, for life.
-- Eric Hoffer
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants
were standing on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson
I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.
-- Cicero
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor
alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and
to steal their bread.
-- Anatole France
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness is
the sanction of character.
-- George Santayana
Politics is the business of gaining power and privilege
without possessing merit.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-- Ernest Rutherford
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous
way of making decisions than by putting those decisions
in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
-- Thomas Sowell
I believe that every individual is naturally entitled
to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his
labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other
men's rights.
-- Abraham Lincoln
The individual shrinks in proportion as the state grows.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
Philosophy requires us to fit our mind to the world.
Ideology compels us to fit the world to our mind.
-- Dibarcus
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on
the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most
money, with the result that a democracy always collapses over
loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
-- Alexander Tyler
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any
problem, it is generally employed only by small children
and large nations.
-- David Friedman
Only idiots and infants need things. The language
of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists,
and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy
dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting
adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.
-- Thomas Szasz
A rule is a screw that can only be tightened.
-- Benjamin Watts
What America does best is produce the ability
to accept failure.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have not yet found the right kind of solitude
if you remain preoccupied with yourself.
-- Karl Kraus
Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny; for no power that
is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them.
-- John Milton
It's better to be known by six people for something you're
proud of then to be known by sixty million for something you're
not.
-- Albert Brooks
Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some, the currency
is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy
cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls,
and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility,
tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.
-- Eric Hoffer
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the
slime of a new bureaucracy.
-- Franz Kafka
Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up
with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and
sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war
minus the shooting.
-- George Orwell
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men
should be elected. The best men do not want to govern
their fellowmen.
-- George MacDonald
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself;
and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzche
The markets can be irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
-- John Maynard Keynes
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day.
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest
of his life.
-- Terry Pratchett
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the
wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide
who are the wisest and best?
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain.
-- H. R. Giger
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality
and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for
freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity.
The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to
be one thread of the many which make up the tunic; one thread
not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us
out, measure us against the others and expose our inferiority.
-- Eric Hoffer
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.
You can tell if a man is wise by his questions.
-- Naquib Mahfouz
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation,
the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to
program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline
in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning
to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep
voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his
own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for
his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
-- Eric Hoffer
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand
that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes
are nothing.
-- Thomas Sowell
The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something
that will always be useful and which will never grow dim or
doubtful.
-- Mark Twain
In any given society the authority of man over man runs
in inverse proportion to the intellectual development
of that society.
-- P. J. Proudhon
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep, just like my grandfather,
not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
-- Usenet signature
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is
big enough to take it all away.
-- Barry Goldwater
We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis
of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world
may be the result of genuine error on our own part; and that the
pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced
results utterly different from those which we expected.
-- Friedrich Hayek
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan "press on"
has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
-- Calvin Coolidge
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in
the "social sciences" is: some do, some don't.
-- Ernest Rutherford
Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords.
-- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
One puts into one's art what one has not been capable of
putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy
that God created the world.
-- Henri de Montherlant
No one has a right to happiness.
-- Eric Hoffer
To compel a man to furnish contributions of money
for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves
and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
-- Thomas Jefferson
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than
to be coming up it.
-- Henry Allen
In our age, there is no such thing as "keeping out
of politics." All issues are political issues, and
politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred and schizophrenia.
-- George Orwell
Even the silliest martial art is effective with
air support.
-- Mal Isles
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow
man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-- G. Gordon Liddy
Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who have found it.
-- Vaclav Havel
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are those who
need public cures for their private ails.
-- Eric Hoffer
Desire for the unearned is the root of all evil.
-- Bruce Grether
Nothing can be explained to a stone.
-- John McCarthy
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing
people around.
-- Thomas Szasz
Depression is rage spread thin.
-- George Santayana
Raise no more devils than you can lay.
-- Bobbie Lou Comstock
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
There is no reason to believe that the nature of the
violent minorities is now greatly different from what
it was in the past. What has changed is the will and
ability of the majority to react.
-- Eric Hoffer
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher
has said it.
-- Cicero
The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks
the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.
-- Wilhelm Reich
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-- Anais Nin
I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and
replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs
that will be distributed equally throughout the world.
-- Rev. Dr. President Idi Amin
What ought one to say then as each hardship comes?
"I was practicing for this, I was training for this."
-- Epictetus
Don't water the weeds.
-- Don Pearson
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people
who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm
- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it,
or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless
struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
-- Eric Hoffer
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker,
but simply because I detest the sort of people who go
to lectures and don't want to meet them.
-- H. L. Mencken
There are two tragedies in life: one is not to get your
heart's desire. The other is to get it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to
fear the unfamiliar.
-- Seneca
That's what... MEN DO!
-- Vicki Mongeau
The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy.
The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and
a terrible waste of time.
-- Edwin Bliss
The ultimate effect of shielding man from the effects
of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spenser
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work;
I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
-- Woody Allen
Where people are the most sure and arrogant
they are commonly the most mistaken.
-- David Hume
The FDA calls certain substances "controlled."
But there are no "controlled substances," there
are only controlled citizens.
-- Thomas Szasz
A people that values its privileges above its principles
soon loses both.
-- Dwight Eisenhower
A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's
sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's
sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a
minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
-- Eric Hoffer
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the
diminution of ill-temper.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want
of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has
begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's
education is complete.
-- Epictetus
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now
that I am old, there is no respect for age -- I missed it
coming and going.
-- J.B. Priestly
The measure of success is not whether you have a tough
problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem
you had last year.
-- John Foster Dulles
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
-- W. C. Fields
All who have ever written on government are unanimous
that amoung a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot
long exist.
-- Edmund Burke
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that
escape those who dream only at night.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead,
confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow.
-- John Leo
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents
and the second half by our children.
-- Clarence Darrow
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs
is to be ruled by evil men.
-- Plato
The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
-- Tacitus
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
-- Eric Hoffer
The simple is carefully shunned by those who
labour to seem what they would be.
-- Paul Fussell
There's no sense in being precise when you don't
even know what you're talking about.
-- John von Neumann
There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
-- Edmund Wilson
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one
can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the
sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his
wife is beautiful and his children smart.
-- H. L. Mencken
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
Time is the great teacher, but unfortunately it kills
all of its students.
-- Hector Berlioz
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that
will last at least until we've finished building it.
-- Unknown
What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes
the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.
-- Herbert Simon
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the
unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for
a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a
person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make
ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
-- Carlos Castaneda
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is
force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a
fearful master.
-- George Washington
The methods that help a man acquire a fortune are the
very ones that keep him from enjoying it.
-- Antoine de Rivarol
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of
it remains about nothing to the end.
-- George Santayana
The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence,
and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all
of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the
other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught
except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by
diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading
fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
-- Eric Hoffer
What a superior man seeks is within himself.
What the inferior man seeks is in others.
-- Confucius
Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people.
Hollywood is a Washington for the simple minded.
-- Senator John McCain
The more numerous public instrumentalities become,
the more is there generated in citizens the notion that
everthing is to be done for them, and nothing by them.
Every generation is made less familiar with the
attainment of desired ends by individual actions or
private agencies; until, eventually, governmental
agencies come to be thought of as the only available
agencies.
-- Herbert Spencer
Never invoke the gods unless you really want
them to appear. It annoys them very much.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The man who gets on best with women is the one who
knows best how to get on without them.
-- Charles Baudelaire
When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.
-- Jack Finney
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of
civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized
before it is too late.
-- Thomas Sowell
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
See if the law takes from some persons what belongs
to them; and gives it to persons to whom it does not
belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the
expense of another by doing what the citizen cannot
do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law
without delay, for it is not only an evil in itself,
but also is a fertile source for further evils, for it
invites reprisals. If such a law is not abolished
immediately, it will spread, multiply and develop
into a system.
-- Frédéric Bastiat
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense
of responsibility.
-- George Orwell
Even the law of gravitation would be brought into
dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
Make me one with everything.
-- Zen Master to the hot dog vendor
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one
party; there is no battle unless there be two.
-- Seneca
Manage things. Lead people.
-- Grace Hopper
You may choose any two from personnel, content, and schedule.
-- Fundamental theorem of management
Government is the great fiction through which everybody
endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
-- Frédéric Bastiat
You know you get a lot more with a kind word
and a gun then you do with a kind word alone.
-- Al Capone
What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the
grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
-- J. B. Priestley
The desire for safety stands against every great
and noble enterprise.
-- Tacitus
Everything is controlled by a small evil group to
which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.
-- Woody Allen
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society
to moral law.
-- Ayn Rand
If you haven't found something strange during the day,
it hasn't been much of a day.
-- John Archibald Wheeler
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who
understand what they do not manage, and those who manage
what they do not understand.
-- Unknown
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 J. Nock
You have achieved the rarified state where, from my
consideration, your very existence acts as a net subtraction
on the sum total of human knowledge.
-- Henry Warwick
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy.
When work is duty, life is slavery.
-- Maxim Gorky
Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent
ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
We are not troubled by things, but by the opinion which we have of things.
-- Epictetus
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own
debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would
save one-half the wars of the world.
-- Thomas Jefferson
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men
living together in society, they create for themselves
in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes
it and a moral code that glorifies it.
-- Frédéric Bastiat
All the contact I have had with politics has left me
feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.
-- Ernest Hemmingway
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
-- Tacitus
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when
you have forgotten your aim.
-- George Santayana
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society
must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has
lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people
is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally
denied.
-- Arthur Miller
The object of life is not to be on the side of
the majority, but to escape finding oneself in
the ranks of the insane.
-- Marcus Aurelius
How is the world ruled and led to war?
Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies
when they see them in print.
-- Karl Kraus
The universe is full of magical things, patiently
waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
-- Eden Phillpots
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has
seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
-- Albert Szent-Györgi
Computer Science is no more about computers than
astronomy is about telescopes.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to
see every problem as a nail.
-- Abraham Maslow
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to
their capacity for experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until
you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The sons of Hermes love to play,
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn't;
Apollo's children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.
-- W.H. Auden
Heinlein's Razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what may be
be adequately explained by stupidity.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Today the only people who don't think markets work are
the North Koreans, the Cubans and the stock pickers.
-- Rex Sinquefield
Change breaks the brittle.
-- Jan Houtema
The question of whether a computer can really think is as
interesting as the question of whether a submarine can really swim.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power
would bring me happiness. I was right.
-- Gahan Wilson
The first myth of management is that it exists.
The second myth of management is that success equals skill.
-- Robert Heller
I think we have more machinery of government than is
necessary: too many parasites living on the labor of the
industrious.
-- Thomas Jefferson
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
-- Richard Bach
You have to realize that the government, any government,
is insane. You have to treat it the way pagans treated
their gods: As an irrational, capricious, and powerful
entity which will mete out total destruction if not
sacrificed to or otherwise placated.
-- Mike Long
The danger is not that a particular class is
unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
-- Lord Acton
Economic independence is the foundation of the only
sort of freedom worth a damn.
-- H. L. Mencken
I find it hard to understand why those who demand
Unitary Education by the State do not also demand
a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State
is infallible, in which case we could not do better
than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent
thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more
rational to hand over education to it than the press.
-- Frédéric Bastiat
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript
catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only
outlaws will have catapults.)
-- Ancient Roman proverb
If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful
to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering,
I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real
egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but
find it in solving the puzzles of nature.
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgi
The real art of governing consists, so far as possible,
in doing nothing.
-- Lao Tzu
The reward of pain is experience.
-- Aeschylus
Leveling is the barbaric replacement for order.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
The people cannot delegate to government the power to
do anything which would be unlawful for them to do
themselves.
-- John Locke
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from
his friends.
-- Baltasar Gracian
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable
men in the furnace of adversity.
-- Ecclesiasticus 2:5
Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the
machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-- Thomas Edison
Much that passes as idealism is diguised hatred
or disguised love of power.
-- Bertrand Russell
The first panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of
the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary
prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin.
-- Ernest Hemingway
Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or
even lack of information.
-- John McCarthy
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
-- Winston Churchill
If associations to control burglary and murder were tolerated
we should take it for granted that the members should all be
burglers and murderers.
-- George Bernard Shaw
For centuries, theologians have been explaining
the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing.
-- H. L. Mencken
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
Good judgment comes from experience... Usually experience
that was the result of poor judgment.
-- Bill Putnam
The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic
the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
-- James Surowiecki
This isn't right; this isn't even wrong.
-- Wolfgang Pauli
The meaning of life is that it stops.
-- Franz Kafka
A person in a uniform is merely an extension of
another person's will.
-- Philip Slater
The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the
voluntary sector; and...the "public sector" is, in fact,
the coercive sector.
-- Henry Hazlitt
The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the
active power became lodged in the hands of those who
sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor
alike, but to stand for one special class and for its
interests as opposed to the interests of others.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Every decent man is ashamed of the government
he lives under.
-- H. L. Mencken
The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his
ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not
recognize the ability that he has.
-- Confucius
The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few,
but information in the hands of many.
-- John Naisbitt
The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country
is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry
incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would
do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of
government and education.
-- Neal Boortz
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
[Today] it doesn't matter if the children are illiterate, provided they
are all equally illiterate.
-- John McCarthy
It is easier to apologize than to get permission.
-- Grace Hopper
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling,
is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin
Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government
with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered
and laid waste by barbarians in the Twentieth century as the Roman
Empire was in the Fifth --with this difference-- that your Huns and
Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your
own institutions.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
Putting a murderer in jail means one less murderer on the street.
Putting a drug dealer in jail means a job opening.
-- Joshua Wolf Shenk
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.
Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means
that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the
real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is
reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great
precisely because they broke with the consensus.
-- Michael Crichton
Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be.
The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive
forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are
not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.
-- Damian Conway
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation
of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control
the people who must use the words.
-- Philip K. Dick
The best government is the one that charges
you the least blackmail for leaving you alone.
-- Thomas Rudmose-Brown
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure
of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -
that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are
nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it
is cured of one error, is usually simply another error,
and maybe one worse than the first one.
-- H. L. Mencken
The philosophy of the classroom today will determine the philosophy
of the government tomorrow.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent
for their beauty.
-- Giacomo Casanova
Nothing multiplies the number of fools so much as the
example of celebrities.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the
woman is for the desire of the man.
-- Madame de Stael
A taste for Ingmar Bergman films is the modern substitute
for attending hangings.
-- John McCarthy
Prospero's Books is the Terminator II
for intellectuals.
-- Peter Greenaway
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils
nothing better.
-- George Santayana
When anything tempts you to be bitter, think not
"This is a misfortune" but rather "To bear this
worthily is good fortune."
-- Marcus Aurelius
A dentist's diploma is respectable, but a philosopher's degree is grotesque.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The easiest way for your children to learn about money is
for you not to have any.
-- Katherin Whitehorn
Self-importance requires spending most of one's life
offended by something or someone.
-- Carlos Castaneda
The absent are always in the wrong.
-- English Proverb
It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such
character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
The worst government is the most moral. One composed
of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when
fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
-- H. L. Mencken
A horse is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable
in the middle.
-- Ian Fleming
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
-- Eric Sevareid
By studying the masters and not their pupils. (In reply
to a question about how he became a great mathematician.)
-- Neils Abel
There was no surer means of overturning the existing
basis of society than to debauch the currency...
Inflation engages all the hidden forces of economic
law on the side of destruction. and it does it in a
manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes
The difference between death and taxes is that death
doesn't get worse every time congress meets.
-- Will Rogers
The market is not an invention of Capitalism.
It has existed for centuries. The market is an
invention of civilization.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
-- Francis Bacon
A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and
a glass of potassium cyanide does not choose between
two beverages; he chooses between life and death.
A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism
does not choose between two social systems; it chooses
between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.
-- Ludwig von Mises
For poets that have had my luck,
Seldom write when they can kiss.
-- Alexander Comfort
When politicians presume to do God's work,
they do not become divine but diabolical.
-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion
that it has taken place.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that
one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels.
For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are
first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
-- H. L. Mencken
When we see that almost everything men devote their
lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering
a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has,
in the end, no further object than to raise themselves
in the estimation of others; when we see that not only
offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay even
knowledge and art, are striven for only to obtain as the
ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's
fellowmen - is not this a lamentable proof of the extent
to which human folly can go? The truth is that the value
we set on the opinion of others, and our constant
endeavor in respect of it, are each quite out of proportion
to any result we may reasonably hope to attain; so that
this attention to other people's attitude may be regarded
as a kind of universal mania...
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man.
Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there,
now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority,
frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed
by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is
kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out
of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions,
and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly
just for two things - bread and circuses.
-- Juvenal
Property in ideas is an insoluble contradiction.
He who complains of "theft" of his idea complains that something
has been stolen which he still possesses, and he wants back
something which, if given to him a thousand times, would add
nothing to his possession.
-- H. Rentzsch
To the man who's hammer is C++, every problem begins to
look like a thumb.
-- Steve Haflich
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute.
-- Abelson & Sussman
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
-- Alan Kay
Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach.
-- John Gall
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always
have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar,
it will cease to be popular.
-- Oscar Wilde
The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he
ought to be... The natural disposition is always to believe.
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough.
-- Adam Smith
Remember, the more engineering projects there are,
the more products there will be.
-- Richard Moore
Every so often someone comes along and tries to re-invent
the wheel, but usually ends up with an octagon that has an
off-center hole.
-- E. N. Parker
Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and
fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind
discovers.
-- Rodan of Alexandria
When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom;
you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Saving is a fine thing. Especially when your
parents have done it for you.
-- Winston Churchill
C++ has its place in the history of programming languages,
just as Caligula has his place in the history of the
Roman Empire.
-- Robert Firth
Clarity of text is the sole incontrovertible sign of the maturity of an idea.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who
mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
-- Dr. Seuss
You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of
gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of
government.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Gold would have value if for no other reason than
that it enables a citizen to fashion his financial
escape from the state.
-- William Rickenbacker
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
Find out just what any people will quietly submit
to and you have found out the exact measure of
injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them.
-- Frederick Douglass
There is only one success - to be able to spend your
life in your own way.
-- Christopher Morley
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
-- Marcus Aurelius
It is important to remember that government interference
always means either violent action or the threat of such
action. Taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid
of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that
any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this
is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect
the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last
resort the employer of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes,
soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature
of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating,
killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more
government are asking ultimately for more compulsion and
less freedom.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Never build your emotional life on the weakness of others.
-- George Santayana
Being a leader is like being a lady - if you have to
go around telling people you are one, you aren't.
-- Margaret Thatcher
All "regulatory agencies" are summoned into existence
by the criminal elements of the industries they "regulate."
-- Bill Walker
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish
a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
-- George Orwell
It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who
is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done
him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in
his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Like the ski resort full of girls hunting for husbands,
and husbands hunting for girls, the situation is not
as symmetrical as it might seem.
-- Alan Lindsay Mackay
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists,
but too few capitalists.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly
as they choose and for someone else to pay when things
go wrong.
-- Theodore Dalrymple
The immense and ever increasing sums which the state
wrings from the people are never enough for it; it
mortgages the income of future generations, and
steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.
-- P. A. Kropotkin
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
The idea of “the free development of personality” seems admirable
as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has
developed freely.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Everything that rises must converge.
-- Teilhard de Chardin
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the
corruption of power... The time has come to consider how we
might bring about a separation, as complete as possible,
between Science and Government in all countries. I call this
the disestablishment of science, in the same sense in which
the churches have been disestablished and have become
independent of the state.
-- Jacob Bronowski
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard Feynman
Suffering increases to meet the means available for its
alleviation.
-- Colin Brewer
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven
being good at billiards or golf.
-- H. L. Mencken
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better
informed then he who reads them; inasmuch as he who
knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose
mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
-- Thomas Jefferson
He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant
of the fact that the diagonal of a square is
incommensurable with its side.
-- Plato
The doctrine which [...] has been held by bigots of all
sects... is simply this: I am in the right, and you
ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate
the truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute
you; for it is my duty to persecute error.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the
world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-- William Osler
The central task of education is to implant a will
and a facility for learning; it should produce not
learned but learning people. The truly human society
is a learning society, where grandparents, parents,
and children are students together.
-- Eric Hoffer
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which,
when you looked at it in the right way, did not become
still more complicated.
-- Poul Anderson
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face
for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs
really seek: not the chance to serve.
-- H. L. Mencken
The simplicities of natural laws arise through the
complexities of the languages we use for their
expression.
-- Eugene Paul Wigner
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon,
directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated,
preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded,
by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue.
To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction,
every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped,
measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized,
indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.
-- P. J. Proudhon
Don't bite my finger - Look where it's pointing.
-- Warren McCulloch
Wisdom is not a product of schooling
but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
-- Albert Einstein
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then
they fight you. Then you win.
-- Mahatma Ghandi
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler
is to look at the men he has around him.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a
committee of Shakespeares.
-- William Bateson
Many companies forget what it means to make great products.
After initial success, sales and marketing people take over
and the product people eventually make their way out.
-- Steve Jobs
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
-- Bertrand Russell
The brain is the organ of longevity.
-- George Alban Sacher
Do nothing in a depressed mood, nor as one afflicted,
nor as thinking that you are in misery, for no one
compels you to that.
-- Epictetus
The racist is annoyed because he secretly suspects that the
races are equal. The anti-racist is annoyed because he secretly
suspects that they are not."
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
I have little interest in streamlining government or in
making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.
I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to
extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal
them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel
old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that
have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people
an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to
discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have
first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible.
And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my
constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was
informed their main interest is liberty and that in that
cause I am doing the very best I can.
-- Barry Goldwater
Of the second-rate leaders, people speak respectfully,
saying, 'He has done this, he has done that.' Of the
first-rate leaders they do not say this, but rather:
'We have done it all ourselves.'
-- Lao Tsu
Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or
even lack of information.
-- John McCarthy
The problem with socialism is that you eventually
run out of other people's money.
-- Margaret Thatcher
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new
evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
-- Francis Bacon
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they
don't have to worry about the answers.
-- Thomas Pynchon
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-- T. S. Eliot
In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
-- Confucius
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of
individual ignorance.
-- H. L. Mencken
I and my public understand each other very well: It does not
hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
-- Karl Kraus
The history of this country was made largely by people who
wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left
to themselves never felt at ease in America.
-- Eric Hoffer
Religion is regarded by the common people as true,
by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
-- Seneca
...He had a theory, Walt, that the religious life, and all the
agony that goes with it, is just something God sticks on people
who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
-- J.D. Salinger
Every great cause begins as a movement, degenerates into a
business, ends up as a racket.
-- Eric Hoffer
Adding manpower to a late software project
makes it later.
-- Frederick Brooks
I believe that all government is evil, and that
trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
-- H. L. Mencken
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a
soul controlled by geography.
-- George Santayana
When you are going about any action, remind yourself of what
that action entails: If you are going to bathe, imagine the
things which usually happen at the baths: some people splash
water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal.
Thus you will more safely proceed if you say to yourself:
"I will now go bathe and keep my mind in a state conformable to nature."
Then, if any annoyance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say
"It was not only to bathe that I desired, but also to remain undisturbed
by what occurs at public baths."
-- Epictetus
A disciple of another programming school once came to the Master
as he was having his morning coffee. "I would like to show you
a new software methodology," said the outsider, "because I want
to help you be more productive." The Master took the paper that
was offered him and put it into the paper shredder saying: "And I
want to help the shredder be more productive too."
-- Unknown
With the exception only of the period of the gold
standard, practically all governments of history have
used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud
and plunder the people.
-- Freidrich von Hayek
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to
live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral
busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes
sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end, for they do so with the approval of their
own conscience.
-- C. S. Lewis
The budget should be balanced, the treasury refilled,
public debt reduced, the arrogance of officialdom
tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign
lands curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 B.C.
The worse the society, the more law there will be.
In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process
will be meticulously observed.
-- Grant Gilmore
Watch what people are cynical about and you can often
discover what they lack.
-- George Patton
In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man
is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
A novice was trying to reboot a processor by turning the power
switch off and on. The Master, seeing what the student was doing,
spoke sternly: "You can't expect to fix a machine by just
power cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong!"
The Master reached out and turned the power switch off and on.
The processor booted normally.
-- Unknown
The welfare state is not really about the welfare
of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
-- Thomas Sowell
When your only tool is coercion, every problem looks
like too much freedom.
-- Roy Cordato
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they
cannot think what they cannot say.
-- John Ralston Saul
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the
faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if
the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms,
legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the
loss to humanity.
-- H. L. Mencken
When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is
necessary not to make a decision.
-- Lord Falkland
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which
can be made in a very narrow field.
-- Niels Bohr
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with
their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can
be ignored when they are unwelcome.
-- George Orwell
The secret of all victory lies in the organization
of the non-obvious.
-- Marcus Aurelius
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale
of stolen goods.
-- H. L. Mencken
Suspicious princes often promote the last of mankind,
from a vain persuasion that those who have no dependence
except on their favor will have no attachment except to
the person of their benefactor.
-- Edward Gibbon
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one
word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy
seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in
restraint and servitude.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what
we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
-- Eric Hoffer
What one fool can do, another can.
-- Silvanus Thompson
There is no nation on earth so dangerous as a nation
fully armed and bankrupt at home.
-- Henry Cabot Lodge
Few great men could pass Personnel.
-- Paul Goodman
I like flowers. I also like children, but I do not chop
off their heads and keep them in bowls of water around
the house.
-- Georage Bernard Shaw
Successful men are influenced by the desire for pleasing results.
Failures are influenced by the desire for pleasing methods and
are inclined to be satisfied with such results as can be obtained
by doing the things they like to do.
-- Albert Gray
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
Progress is precisely that which rules and
regulations did not foresee.
-- Ludwig von Mises
Gresham's Law for Bureaucracy:
Useless work drives out useful work.
-- Milton Friedman
To be getting an education means this: to be learning
what is your own, and what is not your own.
-- Epictetus
A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
-- Will Durant
A painter should not paint what he sees but what should
be seen.
-- Paul Valery
A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will end
up with neither.
-- Milton Friedman
People often say that this or that person has not yet
found himself. But the self is not something one finds,
it is something one creates.
-- Thomas Szasz
Any discipline with the name "-- Studies" is the abode of charlatans.
-- Gerry Harbison
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
-- Eric Hoffer
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay
for what he does not want merely because you think it
would be good for him.
-- Robert H. Heinlein
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
-- Adam Smith
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of
freedom for individuals that is consistent with the
maintenance of social order.
-- Barry Goldwater
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is
more attractive than freedom from restraint.
-- Eric Hoffer
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says,
does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are
maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the
highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which
children are heaved while they are still young and tender;
therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and
covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-- H. L. Mencken
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
-- Sigmund Freud
Being afraid of Central Services,
especially when they involve computers,
is like being afraid of really big gorillas,
especially when they are on fire.
-- Unknown
There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of
the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and
property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to
superintend our private habits.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
-- H. L. Mencken
Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
-- Frédéric Bastiat
I've noticed that even people who believe in fate look
both ways before crossing the street.
-- Stephen Hawking
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that
religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from
what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn.
To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised,
to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously--these have been
thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would
dispence favours and punishments on the most exorbitant scale.
-- George Santayana
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have
entirely given up the habit of self-government should
succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they
are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a
liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from
the suffrages of a subservient people.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
What is necessary is never unwise.
-- Sarak
Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works
with what sounds good.
-- Thomas Sowell
The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good
for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior
status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to
acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he
derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing,
instructing, and planning - from minding other people's business -
and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people
believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal
affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation.
-- Eric Hoffer
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong
and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a
thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually
turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
-- Douglas Adams
The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those
things that are in line with your principles and can bear the
light of day.
-- Heraclitus
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make
you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire
Unbought scientific opinion is increasingly hard to find.
-- John le Carré
Every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about
which he busies himself.
-- Marcus Aurelius
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same
as to be right in doing it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
I believe that any man or woman who, for a period of say
five years, has earned his or her living in some lawful
and useful occupation, without any recourse to public
assistance, should be allowed to vote and that no one
else should be allowed to vote.
-- H. L. Mencken
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare,
it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
-- Seneca
The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.
-- William Gibson
Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of
mankind are possessed by them.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are
those that aren't there.
-- Gordon Bell
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.
-- Isaac Asimov
The opposite of success isn't failure; it is name-dropping.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In any bureaucracy, people devoted to the benefit of
the bureaucracy itself get ahead while those dedicated
to the goals the bureaucracy was created to accomplish
are eventually eliminated entirely.
-- Jerry Pournelle
No child under the age of fifteen should receive
instruction in subjects which may possibly be the
vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy or religion,
for wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted
out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgement
is the last to arrive at maturity.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
-- Gustave Flaubert
Formerly we suffered from crimes;
now we suffer from laws.
-- Tacitus
Committees do harm merely by existing.
-- Freeman Dyson
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent
person could believe in them.
-- George Orwell
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress
discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
-- Alexis De Tocqueville
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more
to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and
programs by their intentions rather than by their results.
-- Milton Friedman
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
If you want to learn something, read about it.
If you want to understand something, write about it.
If you want to master something, teach it.
-- Yogi Bhajan
We don't stop playing because we grow old.
We grow old because we stop playing.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Some people fear that technology will become more engaging
than live human interactions. That's silly - technology is
already way more interesting than other people.
-- Scott Adams
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.
When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they
want to hear.
-- Thomas Sowell
The philosopher Diogenes was sitting on a curbstone, eating
bread and lentils for his supper. He was seen by the philosopher
Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said
Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king,
you would not have to live on lentils." Said Diogenes, "Learn
to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king."
-- Louis Newman
The will of the gods is easy to know: men call it the past.
The will of man is also easy to know: The gods call it the future.
-- Dibarcus
Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.
-- Lawrence Bragg
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to
save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by
running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
-- H. L. Mencken
All philosophy lies in two words, bear and forbear.
-- Epictetus
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the
consequences of avoiding reality.
-- Ayn Rand
Someone once asked the famous violin pedagogue:
"Mr. Jacobsen, how much do you charge for your violin lessons?" He answered:
"It depends. Do you want the expensive lessons, or the cheap lessons!"
-- Maxim Jacobsen
There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead
and the ability to lead, and even less to the ability to lead
somewhere that will be to the advantage of the led...
Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive
than the able, and those who scramble to the top are more
often motivated by their own inner torments than by any
demand for their guidance.
-- Bergen Evans
When companies get bigger they try to replicate their
success. But they assume their magic came from process.
They try to use processes to substitute content.
-- Steve Jobs
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing
our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to
deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
-- John Stuart Mill
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other
people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to
the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying
it to your own actions.
-- Marcus Aurelius
Life is not something that happens to you.
Life is something you create.
-- Unknown
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's
initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they
could and should for themselves.
-- Abraham Lincoln
A complex system that works is invariably found to have
evolved from a simple system that worked.
-- John Gall
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest
degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace,
easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice:
all the rest being brought about by the natural course
of things.
-- Adam Smith
All cruelty springs from weakness.
-- Seneca
I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the
industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two
of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted
for the highest staff appointments. Use also can be made of those
who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however
is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves
to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious
is a menace and must be removed immediately!
-- General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
-- Marshall McCluhan
The first destroyer of the liberties of
a people is he who first gave them bounties
and largesses.
-- Plutarch
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall
be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is like the bible - it begins in a
garden and ends with Revelation.
-- Oscar Wilde
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your
enemies will float by.
-- Sun Tzu
When smashing monuments, save the pedestals - they always come in handy.
-- Stanislaw Lem
People who are unable to motivate themselves must
be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive
their other talents.
-- Andrew Carnegie
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery.
The mystery is that there is no mystery.
-- Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
-- Stephen King
...Doctor No said, in the same soft resonant voice, "You are right.
Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest
men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them
forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers,
the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness
of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept
them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond,
is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation
of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through - these
are the vices of the herd." Doctor No sat slightly back in his
chair. "I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly
say, a maniac"
-- Dr. No
Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
For a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a
man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up
by the handle.
-- Winston Churchill
Good sex is like good Bridge: If you don't have a good
partner, you'd better have a good hand.
-- Mae West
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and
intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
-- Marshall McLuhan
A man is rich in proportion to the number of
things he can afford to let alone.
-- Henry David Thoreau
A basically dishonest man can survive longer in the church or the classroom
than he can in the grain exchange or the furniture business.
-- Ben Rogge
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
-- Thomas Edison
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease
worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
-- Epictetus
The study of history, while it does not endow with
prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
-- John Steinbeck
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very";
your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as
it should be.
-- Mark Twain
A 'hate crimes' law would expand the law's concern from criminal
action to 'criminal thought.' It would institute the premise that
the purpose of our legal system is not to defend the rights of the
victim, but to punish socially unacceptable ideas.
-- Robert Tracinski
I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put
out the sun and gone away.
-- Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark
Anyone who loves work does not need entertainement.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely
believe they are free.
-- Goethe
When you're one step ahead of the crowd
you're a genius. When you're two steps
ahead, you're a crackpot.
-- Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
Ethernet always wins.
-- Andy Bechtolsheim
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge,
but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
-- Michel de Montaigne
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Geniuses remove it.
-- Alan Perlis
Whosoever the Gods would cast down, they must first raise up.
-- Dibarcus
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to
make men good reasoners.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
It is the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The Constitution was made to guard the people
against the dangers of good intentions.
-- Daniel Webster
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world
would have no meaning.
-- Aristotle Onassis
These things never happened, but always are.
-- Sallust (4th century A.D.)
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work
he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
-- Robert Benchley
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions -- as
attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him
answers above all.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid
having to exercise his superior skill.
-- Frank Borman
The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism
by those who have not got it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
It's better to be lucky than smart, but it's easier
to be smart twice than lucky twice.
-- Unknown
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor;
the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong.
-- Goethe
You will not be punished for your anger - you will be
punished by your anger.
-- The Fake Buddha
When you're a connoiseur you look for interesting rather than good.
-- Bram Cohen
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
-- Henry Miller
If you are clever enough to figure out what men want,
you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating
for them to marry you.
-- Spengler
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage
over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain
Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to
ruin among the great number who are not good.
-- Niccolò Machiavelli
If you cannot listen to the answers, why
do you inconvenience me with questions?
-- Orac
If I knew for certain that a man was coming to
my house with the conscious design of doing me
good, I should run for my life.
-- Henry David Thoreau
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not
allowed to criticize.
-- Voltaire
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
If you are told that someone speaks ill of you, make no defence
against what was said, but answer, "He surely knew not my other faults,
else he would not have mentioned these only!"
-- Epictetus
The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good,
you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something
than anyone else might reasonably expect.
-- Raymond Joseph Teller
It's a good idea to pay attention to the world and try to
understand how it works rather than how you would like it
to work.
-- Matthew Crawford
A man who limits his interests limits his life.
-- Vincent Price
If a man is ambitious for power, he can have no better
supporters than the poor: They are not worried about their
own possessions, since they have none, and whatever will
put something in their pockets is right and proper
in their eyes.
-- Sallust (1st century B.C.)
When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when
I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.
-- Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers
A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest.
-- John McCarthy
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance
and the gospel of envy.
-- Winston Churchill
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless
by the good intentions of those who created it.
-- Milton Friedman
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise.
Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it.
There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool.
But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
-- Charles Spurgeon
Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
-- Thomas Carlyle
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you
don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what
you'd rather not.
-- Mark Twain
When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana
You can't break a man's leg and then blame him for limping.
-- Brad Thoen - An old saying
The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.
-- Luc de Clapiers
There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells and
fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated pools here
and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving them parched for
wonder. There are also those who believe that if you stick your fingers up
your nose and blow, it will expand your mind.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
-- Vernon Schryver
The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the
one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
-- Ludwig Borne
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
-- G. K. Chesterton
These Be Mysteries whereon but to think may snatch thy soul into peril.
-- E. R. Eddision - The Worm Ouroboros
"...the racisim of low expectations..."
-- Maajid Nawaz
Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.
-- J. B. Priestley
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan,
more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system.
For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the
preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders
in those who gain by the new ones.
-- Niccolò Machiavelli
The greatest arrogance of the present is to
forget the intelligence of the past.
-- Ken Burns
When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that
they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue
do you expect?
-- Thomas Sowell
Deliberate complexity is the mark of an amateur.
Elegant simplicity is the mark of a master.
-- Unknown, quoted by Robert A. Crawford
It doesn't make sense to hire intelligent people and tell them what to do.
We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
-- Steve Jobs
The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools
out of as many men as possible.
-- Bernard Baruch
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
-- Claire Wolfe
Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
-- Richard Feynman
Only a few prefer liberty. The majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
-- Sallust (1st century B.C.)
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists
and the risk-takers.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
History is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and
woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species,
all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have
been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that
have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of
high intelligence with low desires.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
You will get all you want in life if you help enough other
people get what they want.
-- Zig Ziglar
Not to know what happened before you were born is to
remain forever a child.
-- Cicero
Nothing is as dangerous for the state as those who would
govern kingdoms with maxims found in books.
-- Cardinal Richelieu
I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
-- Howard Roark
As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's
condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.
-- Jeanne Moreau
Teach thy tongue to say "I know not," and then thou wilt progress.
-- Moses Maimonides
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
Blessed is the man who has a sprinkling of enemies, for they shall make him a hero...
-- Anton LaVey
When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The more antagonists desire to become different from each other, the more they become identical.
-- René Girard
Every solution seems trivial to the one who
does not understand the problem.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty;
When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace;
When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.
-- Lin Yutang
When a man has reached the point where he does not think he
knows better than others, that is, when he has become indifferent
to what they have done badly and he is interested only in what
they have done right, then peace and affirmation have come
to him.
-- G. W. F. Hegel
The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes.
The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will
not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the
virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you
should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will
be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the
memories of your loved ones.
-- Marcus Aurelius
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,
doesn't go away.
-- Philip K. Dick
The more he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted the spoons.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few things in this world are more predictable than the
reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas.
-- John Anthony West
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is
and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
-- Jean Francois Revel
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
-- Thomas H. Huxley
A liberal’s paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed
employment, free comprehensive health care, free education, free food,
free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement
has guns. And believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist:
It's called Prison.
-- Sheriff Joe Arpaio
I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for
superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt
that such men do not run.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one
thinks of changing himself.
-- Leo Tolstoy
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that
decides between success and failure.
-- Edsgar Dijkstra
Republics decline into democracies and democracies decline into despotisms.
-- Aristotle
Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody
else wants you to do is not the way to live it.
-- Cormac McCarthy
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-- Milan Kundera
A government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people,
ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.
-- Bob Dole
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If
we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for
drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy
to use as my telephone. My wish has come true because
I am no longer able to figure out how to use my telephone.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the
universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
-- Bill Watterson
Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
It is error alone that needs government support; truth can stand by itself.
-- Thomas Jefferson
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
To read Nietzsche as an answer is not to understand him.
Nietzsche is an immense question.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
There's a big difference between knowing the name of something
and knowing something.
-- Richard Feynman
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.
Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody
write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.
Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what
it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
-- Milan Kundera
Time stays. We go.
-- H. L. Mencken
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- William Orville Douglas
Public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-- Boies Penrose
Memory is the foundation of culture in society and business.
It can't be successfully replaced by rules and collective
decision making.
-- Milan Kundera
The liberation promised by every invention ends with the growing
submission of the man who adopts it to the man who manufactures it.
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Terrible is the temptation to be good.
-- Bertolt Brecht
The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.
-- Louis Kronenberger
The only think necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
Character is determined more by the lack of certain
experiences than by those one has had.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
When a true genius appears in this world you may know
him by the sign that the dunces are all in confederacy
against him.
-- Johnathan Swift
Perilous to us all are the devices of
an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
-- Gandalf
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man
have come through people feeling quite certain about something
which, in fact, was false.
-- Bertrand Russell
Research is a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into
the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.
-- Thomas Kuhn
Mythologies are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one.
If you include them in your consciousness, you can understand all manner
of things which could not be understood without them.
-- Dibarcus
One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the
appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by
mediocre intelligences.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief
in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
-- Eric Hoffer
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have
chosen. Few in pursuit of the goal.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The most basic question is not what is best, but who
shall decide what is best.
-- Thomas Sowell
Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.
-- James Branch Cabell
It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty
and how few by deceit."
-- Noel Coward
Often when he looked at the multitude of wares exposed for sale,
he would say to himself, "How many things I can do without!"
(Quoted by Michael Gilleland in "Socrates at the Mall of America")
-- Diogenes Laertius
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
-- Albert Camus
It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how
to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong,
without commenting.
-- T.H. White
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to
their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites...
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and
appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within,
the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal
constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot
be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
-- Edmund Burke
Ideas are more powerful than guns.
We wouldn't let our enemies have guns.
Why should we let them have ideas?
-- Joseph Stalin
Although tyranny may successfully rule over foreign peoples,
it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the
national institutions of its own people.
-- Hannah Arendt
You cannot reason a man out of a position
he did not reach by reason. [pph]
-- Johnathan Swift
Oh this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.
-- Gaius Valerius Catullus, 70 B.C.
It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer,
but man himself who is man's greastest danger to man, for the
simple reason that there is no adequate protection against
psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than
the worst of natural catastrophies.
-- Carl Jung
To have opinions is the best way to escape the obligation of thinking.
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are
no longer fit for freedom.
-- Pythagorus
Then at last man will behold beauty with the eye
of the mind and will be able to bring forth not
mere images of what is good for man, but realities.
Would that be an ignoble life, Socrates?
-- Diotima of Mantinea, 440 B.C.
Only those who will risk going too far can
possibly find out how far one can go.
-- T. S. Eliot
All beekeepers can agree on one thing, and that one thing
is that all beekeepers can't agree on one thing.
-- Unknown
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps
them to deceive themselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
-- Cormac McCarthy
The obedient always think of themselves
as virtuous rather than cowardly.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution
which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence,
the money of their constituents.
-- James Madison
The mainstream media talks nonstop about justice and compassion and
fairness, and what it does is encourage envy, repression, and revenge.
-- Taki Theodoracopulos
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the
extent of your own ignorance.
-- Thomas Sowell
Applying C++ to engineering problems is simply a matter
of finding the right wrench to pound in the right screw.
-- Corollary to Breznikar's Law
There are writers who can express in a mere twenty
pages things I sometimes need two whole lines for.
-- Karl Kraus
The government of an exclusive company of merchants is,
perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.
-- Adam Smith
Attempting to prevent stupidity also prevents cleverness.
-- Maxima
We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health,
lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge,
governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information,
religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
-- Chris Hedges
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its
institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
-- Montesquieu
Darken your room, shut the door, empty
your mind. You are still in great company.
-- Austin Osman Spare
Freedom of opinion can only exist when
government thinks itself secure.
-- Bertrand Russell
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish
them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
-- Thomas a Kempis
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise,
just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine
it run by a board of gods.
-- H. L. Mencken
A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has
as many masters as there are people who may be
useful in bettering his position.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
The only fool bigger than the person who knows
it all is the person who argues with him.
-- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts.
Wisdom lies in their simplification.
-- Martin Fischer
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
-- Richard Feynman
Dying societes accumulate laws like dying men
accumulate remedies."
-- Nicolas Gomez Davila
Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
-- James Harrington
It is deplorable that many people think the best way to improve the
world is to forbid something. However, they're morally more advanced than
the people who think the best way to improve the world is to kill somebody.
-- John McCarthy
One should not always name names. What should be said
is not that someone did it but that it was possible.
-- Karl Kraus
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are
full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
-- Charles Bukowski
In any existential conflict, the side that is willing
to discard the rules will be the winner.
-- David Mamet
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a
mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.
-- Eric Hoffer
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever
you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel,
be sure that is what you feel.
-- T. S. Eliot
You are precisely as big as what you love
and precisely as small as what you allow to
annoy you.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
We will not be ruled by those whose ways are strange to us.
-- Hone Heke Poki - Maori chieftain and connoisseur of British cooking
...[The] daydream that underlies all Marxism: that a thing
might somehow be worth other than what people will give for it.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of
government with a strong hand; or your republic will be
as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in
the Twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the Fifth
--with this difference... that your Huns and Vandals will
have been engendered within your own country by your own
institutions.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
You can tell more about a person by what he says about
others than you can by what others say about him.
-- Audrey Hepburn
That which is evil brings with it failure.
-- Dibarcus
We do not need a censorship of the press.
We have a censorship of the press.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
There is no nonsense so arrant that it
cannot be made the creed of the vast
majority by adequate governmental action.
-- Bertrand Russell
Beware of he who would deny you access to information,
for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
-- Pravin Lal
The free market must exist to entice the able to reveal
their abilities.
-- Milton Friedman
Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by
strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by
leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their
fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness
and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by
defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by
observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the
Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
The most dangerous moment for a bad government
is when it begins to reform.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
-- Donald Knuth
Everything that needs to be said has already been said.
But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
-- Andre Gide
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?
-- Norman Douglas
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson