Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Approach

"And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either money or power, or both?"
--Socrates

Monday, February 27, 2017

Step

"In the whole history of law and order,
the biggest step was taken by primitive man when...
the tribe sat in a circle and allowed only one man to speak at a time.
An accused who is shouted down has no rights whatever."
--Curtis Bok
(1897-1962) Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, philanthropist, writer, Quaker
Source: Saturday Review, 13 February 1954

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Diseases

"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Commencement address at Harvard University (June 7, 1978)

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Providing

"He was still not at all certain that he was doing any good, aside from providing the drug of religious hope to timorous folk frightened of hell-fire and afraid to walk alone."
--Sinclair Lewis
"Elmer Gantry" (1927)

Friday, February 24, 2017

Cultivation

"The cultivation--even celebration--of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint."
--George Will

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Inanimate

"In so far as the purported use of 'violence' by the Animal Liberation Front in the furtherance of its fundamental mission is concerned; The fact of the matter is that violence cannot be committed against an inanimate object."
--Will Hazlitt

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Hanging II

"In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."
--Erma Bombeck

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Doctrines

"It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases.  This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses.  The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government."
--Ayn Rand
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.  Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It

Monday, February 20, 2017

Disjoins

"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
--William Shakespeare

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Pyramid

"Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid."
--John Taylor Gatto,
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Continuous

"The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."
--George Orwell

Friday, February 17, 2017

Bookkeepers

"The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food."
--Martin H. Fischer

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Fundamental II

"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future."
--Thomas Sankara

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Exactly

"Enron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism. As a creature, in effect, of politicians, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their politician-friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers)."
--Rick Gaber,
Libertarian writer

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Lady-Like

"The ['Hillary Care'] plan prescribed some eye popping maximum fines:$5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment. When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton said, 'I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America.'"
--Tony Snow
(1955-2008) White House Press Secretary for the George W. Bush administration
Source: reporting on Hillary's health care plan, to which Zoh Hieronimus added, "Perhaps Hillary’s legacy will be that she made fascism seem lady-like."

Monday, February 13, 2017

Look II

"Look a pig in its eyes, and understand the truth behind bacon."
--Mango Wodzak,
"Destination Eden"

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Fatalist

"I'm not a fatalist; even if I were, what could I do about it?"
--Emo Philips

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Unhappy

"Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here."
--Aldous Huxley,
"Brave New World"

Friday, February 10, 2017

Writing II

"In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously."
--Gore Vidal,
"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"

Thursday, February 09, 2017

Lie

"What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?"
--Andrew P. Napolitano,
"Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History"

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Future

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!"
--H.G. Wells,
"When The Sleeper Wakes" (1899)

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Exterminate

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. [Explaining rationale for using prominent black leaders to advocate birth control and abortion]"
--Margaret Sanger

Monday, February 06, 2017

Managed

"The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive 'reforms' -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works."
--John Stossel
(1947-) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and columnist

Sunday, February 05, 2017

Artists II

"This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there."
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.,
"Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons" (1974)

Saturday, February 04, 2017

Deeds IV

"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery."
--Horace Greeley
(1811-1872) Editor of the New York Tribune, ran against Ulysses Grant for presidency
Source: 1872, in reference to the National Bank Act of 1863

Friday, February 03, 2017

Superstars

"In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market."
--Andrew J. Coulson

Thursday, February 02, 2017

Hope IV

"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it."
--Patrick Henry
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: Patrick Henry, Speech at the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia (23 March 1775); first published in Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817) by William Wirt

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Garden-Variety

"The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government."
--Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Two Lucky People, 233