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

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

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 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

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