Quotations

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

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

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

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

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 and to steal their bread.
-- Anatole France

Politics is the business of gaining power and privilege without possessing merit.
-- P.J. O'Rourke

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

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

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 know 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

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

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

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

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: the 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

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

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 most foolish 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

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are those who need public cures for their private ails.
-- Eric Hoffer

Kill them all. God will easily recognize His own.
-- Arnaud Amalric

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

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

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

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

It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar.
-- Seneca

That's what men do!
-- Vicky 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

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

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 essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
-- Aubrey Menen

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

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

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark

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

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 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

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.
-- Frederic Bastiat

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
-- George Orwell

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.
-- Frederic 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

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.
-- Frederic 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

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-Gyorgi

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

Never attribute to conspiracy what may be be explained by stupidity.
-- Unknown

Today the only people who don't think markets work are the North Koreans, the Cubans and the stock pickers.
-- Rex Sinquefield

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

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.
-- Frederic Bastiat

Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults.)
-- Unknown

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

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

Physics is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
-- Thomas Szasz

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-- Thomas Edison

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

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

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

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

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

Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty.
-- Giacomo Casanova

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

When anything tempts you to be bitter, think not "This is a misfortune" but rather "To bear this worthily is good fortune."
-- Marcus Aurelius

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

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 acquired his expertise.)
-- 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 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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.
-- Nietzsche

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
-- Thomas Pynchon

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

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

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

When you are going about any action, remind yourself of what the action entails: If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen at the baths: some people splash the 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.
-- Cicero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competition is merely the absence of oppression.
-- Frederic Bastiat

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

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... Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
-- 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

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

In any bureaucracy, people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself get ahead and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy was created to accomplish are eventually eliminated entirely.
-- Jerry Pournelle

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 programmes by their intentions rather than by their results.
-- Milton Friedman

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
-- Edsger Dijkstra

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 issue is never the issue. The issue is control.
-- Unknown

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

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
-- Andre Gide

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson