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Quote | Author | Tags | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A computer without Windows is like a dog without bricks tied to its head. | computers | ||||
| A Liberal believes that schools should teach children about self esteem, the environment, diversity, etc. A Conservative believes that schools should teach children reading, writing, math and history. | education | ||||
| A liberal is someone who will give you the shirt off of somebody else's back. | politics | ||||
| Amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic. | humor | ||||
| Being a Mac user is like being a Navy Seal: a small, elite group of people with access to the most sophisticated technology in the world, whom everyone calls on to get the really tough jobs done quickly and efficiently. | computers | ||||
| Bill Gates' greatest achievement was conditioning the average PC user to anticipate, expect, and accept mediocrity as the gold standard. | computers | ||||
| Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat. | philosophy | ||||
| Computers are a lot like air conditioners--they both work great until you open up Windows. | computers | ||||
| Conservatives view Liberals as political opponents. Liberals view Conservatives as evil incarnate. | politics | ||||
| Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. | government | ||||
| Did you ever notice that, if you eliminate punctuation, 'The I.R.S.' spells 'THEIRS'? | humor | ||||
| 'Global warming' is just another term for 'good weather.' | humor | ||||
| Henry Ford didn't invent automobiles. In 1902, at least 50 US firms manufactured and sold cars mostly to wealthy customers as high end luxuries. ...Henry Ford famously said, 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' | business | ||||
| Hydrazine is flammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic. | space | ||||
| In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees. James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, '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.' | government | ||||
| Look out the window, not in the mirror. | advice | ||||
| Mac OS X: because making Unix user-friendly is easier than debugging Windows. | computers | ||||
| Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat. (It's not the heat, it's the humidity.) | humor | ||||
| Optimists say the glass is half full. Pessimists say the glass is half empty. Engineers say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. | science | ||||
| Perfectionists should NOT be allowed access to computing equipment! | computers | ||||
| Programmers call their mistakes bugs, because no one could acknowledge making as many mistakes as programmers do. | computers | ||||
| Sometime near Christmas of 2002, the commander of a U.S. carrier battle group leaving Norfolk for the Middle East perfectly expressed the will and intention of the United States when he picked up the microphone of the 1MC, the intercom system heard in every compartment of the ship and said,'Peace on earth to men of good will. All others--stand by.' | history | ||||
| That's not a jury of my peers, they're all common citizens! | humor | ||||
| The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners. | computers | ||||
| The Marine rule for a gunfight is 'Bring a gun. Bring two guns. If you have friends with guns bring them. If you have friends without guns, go get them some guns and bring them.' | 2nd amendment | ||||
| The only reason the US doesn't have a Gestapo is that the FBI, BATF, DEA, EPA and CIA can't speak German. | politics | ||||
| The political left seems to regard economic policy issues as litmus tests for whether you are a good person, rather than as questions of facts about what works and doesn't work. | politics | ||||
| The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now. | government | ||||
| There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. | humor | ||||
| UNIX is very user-friendly. It is just picky who it is friendly with. | computers | ||||
| Venture capitalists only have two emotions: fear and greed. All their decisions are reached by balancing one against the other. | business | ||||
| WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above, as apparently my cats have learned how to type. | humor | ||||
| We will be a compassionate empire, to make whole the broken parts of the world, to protect the weak and make humble the proud; we will carry liberty across the world on the points of our bayonets. | government | ||||
| When the rotor stops turning, a helicopter assumes the glide ratio of a set of car keys. | humor | ||||
| Windows is a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit graphical shell for an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition. | computers | ||||
| You have just received the Amish Computer Virus. Since the Amish don't have computers, it is based on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your computer. Thank you for your cooperation. | computers | ||||
| You only get one chance to make a first impression. | advice | ||||
| Except for ending slavery, fascism, Nazism & communism, war has never solved anything. | history | ||||
| Last century over 170 million people were murdered by their own governments, and your government doesn't want you to have a gun. Doesn't that bother you just a little? | 2nd amendment | ||||
| Liberal: 'Why don't you gun nuts go start your own country?'<BR>Gun nut: 'We did. Who the hell let *you* in here?' | 2nd amendment | ||||
| Why do computer techs urge their employers to buy Windows machines? Because they break! What do computer techs do? They repair computers that break. Get it? | computers | ||||
| Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. | humor | ||||
| Administrator Dan Goldin fired hundreds from NASA Headquarters. A week later no one could remember what they did: they weren't missed at all. On the other hand, when bureaucrats get in charge of reductions in force, they always try to get rid of key people who actually do the work: that way they'll have no choice but to hire more. | politics | ||||
| In opposing conscription, Gen. William Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' | politics | ||||
| In the years leading up to and during the revolution, if a modern political reporter was present, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Jay, Madison, Lee, Coxe, all of the founders, would have been described as terrorists. In fact, if the Patriot Act had existed at that time, we would still be under the rule of Great Britain. All of the founders would have ended up on prison hulks in Boston Harbor, never to be heard from again. They would have been tortured, their property confiscated under RICO, and probably hanged after being convicted in secret trials, trials held secret by reason of 'national security.' In fact, even if the revolution had never happened, George Washington would have been stripped of his property, convicted and imprisoned for growing hemp, if that is, the current laws had been in effect back then. | politics | ||||
| An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject. | 2nd amendment | ||||
| Gun control is not about guns; it's about control. | 2nd amendment | ||||
| If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words. | 2nd amendment | ||||
| If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. | A Nation at Risk, 1983 | education | |||
| Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done. | Aaron Burr | advice | |||
| History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. | Abba Eban | history | |||
| How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. | Abraham Lincoln | philosophy | |||
| 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 | government | |||
| I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. | Abraham Lincoln | history | |||
| If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own--that thing is the preservation of their own liberties and institutions. | Abraham Lincoln | politics | |||
| In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all, and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it, will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement. | Abraham Lincoln | philosophy | |||
| No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. | Abraham Lincoln | philosophy | |||
| You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. | Abraham Lincoln | government | |||
| Unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation. | Abram Stevens Hewitt | government | |||
| High taxes, sometimes by diminishing the consumption of the taxed commodities, and sometimes by encouraging smuggling, frequently afford a smaller revenue to government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes. | Adam Smith | government | |||
| A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. | Adlai Stevenson | government | |||
| Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. | Adlai Stevenson | politics | |||
| Above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. | Adolf Hitler (scary, huh?) | government | |||
| This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future. | Adolf Hitler, 1935 | 2nd amendment | |||
| When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. | Adrian Rogers | government | |||
| The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, the chances are better that you've screwed up than that you've invented warp drive. | Akin's 19th Law | advice | |||
| A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. | Akin's 20th Law | business | |||
| Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis. | Akin's Ninth Law | advice | |||
| When we enter a board meeting, we only ask two questions. One, are we going to fire the CEO today? If not, then how can we help? | Al Paladino | business | |||
| It has always been in the interest of the federal government to encourage certain attitudes and ideas that support our fundamental freedoms and the responsibilities that go with them. A viable, living republic depends on it. The government, however, does not have the right to legislate what we must believe. | Alan Caruba | government | |||
| In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. | Alan Greenspan (!), 1966 | government | |||
| I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification. | Alan Kay | science | |||
| The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. | Albert A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, Univ. of Chicago | science | |||
| When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him, and you are torn by the thought of unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter. | Albert Camus | philosophy | |||
| If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward then we are a sorry lot indeed. | Albert Einstein | philosophy | |||
| It's not that I am smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. | Albert Einstein | advice | |||
| Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. | Albert Einstein | government | |||
| Now I know why there are so many people who enjoy chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees the results. | Albert Einstein | philosophy | |||
| The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax. | Albert Einstein | government | |||
| Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. | Albert Einstein | philosophy | |||
| Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. | Albert Einstein | philosophy | |||
| You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles... And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. | Albert Einstein | science | |||
| You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. | Albert Einstein | science | |||
| The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals.... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. | Albert Gallatin | government | |||
| Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. | Albert Jay Nock | politics | |||
| The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. | Albert Jay Nock | politics | |||
| There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. | Albert Jay Nock | politics | |||
| And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. | Alcuin of York, 798 A.D. | government | |||
| Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are ignored. | Aldous Huxley | philosophy | |||
| Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government. | Aldous Huxley | government | |||
| 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 treasury. Democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. | Alexander Fraser Tytler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic | government | |||
| The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. | Alexander Fraser Tytler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic | government | |||
| It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue. When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty, that, 'in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four.' If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them. | Alexander Hamilton | government | |||
| The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. | Alexander Hamilton | 2nd amendment | |||
| A society which maintains that the interest of the individual is neglible compared to the interest of the nation is a lawless society. | Alexander Zinoviev | government | |||
| It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. | Alexis de Tocqueville | government | |||
| The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. | Alexis de Tocqueville | government | |||
| In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law. | Alexis de Tocqueville | government | |||
| 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 | government | |||
| It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. | Alfred Adler | philosophy | |||
| 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 | politics | |||
| Asking NASA to develop low cost space access is analogous to asking Amtrak to develop new low cost locomotives. | Andrew Beal | space | |||
| The last great innovation to transform classroom instruction occurred during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson: the invention of the chalkboard, around 1801. Since that time, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a student from the mid-1800’s would immediately recognize a modern classroom setting. | Andrew Coulson | education | |||
| Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. | Andrew Jackson | government | |||
| The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people. | Andrew Johnson | government | |||
| The parallel between the dates of Microsoft Windows gaining popularity and Alfa Romeo and Renault pulling out of the American market suggests that Microsoft simply created flawed software in order to employ all of the Alfa Romeo and Renault mechanics that had recently become unemployed. | Andrew Kator | computers | |||
| The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. | Ann Coulter | government | |||
| Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than to polish. | Anne Bradstreet | government | |||
| Perfection has been achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | philosophy | |||
| What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean? | Antonin Scalia | politics | |||
| If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men... the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege. | Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878 | government | |||
| Good ideas never come from Washington. | Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education | government | |||
| Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. | Arnold Toynbee | history | |||
| To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. | Arthur C. Brooks | politics | |||
| Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | Arthur C. Clarke | science | |||
| If there had only been government research establishments in the Stone Age, by now we would have had absolutely superb flint tools. But no one would have invented steel. | Arthur C. Clarke | government | |||
| The dinosaurs are not around today because they did not have a space program. | Arthur C. Clarke | space | |||
| For all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean—'spaceship.' | Arthur C. Clarke | space | |||
| Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. | Arthur C. Clarke | space | |||
| Give a man the secure possession of bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert... The magic of property turns sand into gold. | Arthur Young | politics | |||
| To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, then call whatever you hit the target. | Ashleigh Brilliant | advice | |||
| Politicians work energetically to solve problems they themselves create. | Assar Lindbeck | politics | |||
| An entrepreneur is someone that steals office supplies from home and brings them to work. | Auren Hoffman | business | |||
| It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. | Ayn Rand | government | |||
| There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. | Ayn Rand | government | |||
| The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity. | A. Edward Newton | advice | |||
| I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. [But who decides?] | Barack Obama | government | |||
| There is no crueler form of tyranny than which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. | Baron de Montesquieu | government | |||
| Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush mustache and swastika armband--it creeps up insidiously step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone. | Baron Lane | government | |||
| A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. | Barry Goldwater | government | |||
| Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. | Barry Goldwater | government | |||
| Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. | Benjamin Disraeli | advice | |||
| If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy... You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason... You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete. | Benjamin Disraeli | government | |||
| It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. | Benjamin Disraeli | government | |||
| Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. | Benjamin Franklin | government | |||
| Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech. | Benjamin Franklin | government | |||
| The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. | Benjamin Franklin | advice | |||
| When people realize that things are going wrong, there are two questions they can ask. One is, 'What did we do wrong?' and the other is 'Who did this to us?' | Bernard Lewis | philosophy | |||
| One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. | Bertrand Russell | advice | |||
| The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. | Bertrand Russell | advice | |||
| The Berlin Wall did not fall. It was pushed. | Bill Bennett | politics | |||
| And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven’t yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? | Bill Bryson | humor | |||
| I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. | Bill Cosby | advice | |||
| If we can put a man on the Moon, how come we can't put a man on the Moon? | Bill Engfer, Space Frontier Foundation | space | |||
| The job candidates who have the best interviewing skills are those who have done it most often. | Bill Neal | business | |||
| Buying Saudi oil is like sending LendLease to Hitler. | Bill White | politics | |||
| Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it | Billings Learned Hand | government | |||
| I used to dream of the day when my computer would be as easy to use as my mobile phone. It has happened, I no longer know how to use my phone. | Bjorn Stroustrup, the inventor of C++ | computers | |||
| Nothing good ever happens after midnight. | Bo Schembechler | humor | |||
| The will to succeed is important, but the will to prepare is more important. | Bobby Knight | advice | |||
| There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public. | Booker T. Washington, 1911 | politics | |||
| A politician in power tends to remain in power. | Boortz's First Rule of Political Dynamics | politics | |||
| Peace /n/: A rare state which has only existed when a despot has been fearsome or strong enough to impose it. The image of your head on the end of a stick is a strong incentive toward 'visualizing world peace'. | Boyd Rice | history | |||
| Mr. Obama's energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of 'green' energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality! | Bret Stephens | politics | |||
| The only meaningful memorial, the only one that will really count, will be when there are streets, tunnels, living and working quarters named after each of those astronauts--and those who will yet die in this effort--in permanently occupied stations on the moon, on Mars, in the asteroid belt, and beyond. | Bruce F. Webster | space | |||
| Terrorists with leverage are scary, but I'm much more scared of nutty, cocksure attempts to build 'technology' that supposedly keeps us safe. Terrorists get tired, give up, or shoot each other over the spoils, but once the hardware's installed, a lousy technology is harder to kill off than a cockroach. | Bruce Sterling | science | |||
| The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun. | Buckminster Fuller | politics | |||
| There is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. | Buckminster Fuller | science | |||
| History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve. | Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut | space | |||
| There's not a place in the universe that's safe forever; the universe is telling us, 'Spread out, or wait around and die.' | Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut | space | |||
| The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. | B.H. Liddell Hart | philosophy | |||
| I am not robbed by people who have more money than I. I am robbed by a government that wants to penalize my industry and give increasing portions of what I earn to people who do not emulate my principles, morals and ethics. | Cal Thomas | government | |||
| One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are. | Cal Thomas | politics | |||
| We once taught our young people the virtues of hard work, saving, personal responsibility and accountability for one's actions ... We now teach them entitlement, victimhood, class envy and rights to other people's money. | Cal Thomas | politics | |||
| Civilization and profits go hand in hand. | Calvin Coolidge | business | |||
| Four-fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still. | Calvin Coolidge | advice | |||
| It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. | Calvin Coolidge | government | |||
| The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. | Calvin Coolidge | philosophy | |||
| The American system of higher education has become an insane assembly line -- bankrupting families to process hapless students through an incoherent, haphazard and mediocre liberal arts curriculum. | Camille Paglia | education | |||
| We're heading down a path similar to that of the Roman empire -- with a sophisticated, self-absorbed upper class enjoying a comfortable lifestyle whose security is maintained by a career military (increasingly foreign or mercenary as Rome declined). | Camille Paglia | history | |||
| Liberalism seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power. | Camille Paglia | politics | |||
| The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. | Camille Paglia | politics | |||
| Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. | Camille Paglia | education | |||
| Fanatical jihadism will continue to be a tactical problem, but its attacks, however devastating, will always be sporadic and local. Jihadism cannot destroy the U.S. But our own reckless politicians, spending us into oblivion and servitude to China, can. | Camille Paglia | politics | |||
| The law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care. | Camille Paglia | politics | |||
| Selecting personally charismatic and compellingly persuasive leaders has rarely worked out well, for any nation, at any point in history. | Carl Pham | history | |||
| In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. | Carl Sagan | science | |||
| Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. | Carl Sagan | science | |||
| They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. | Carl Sagan | science | |||
| Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. | Carl Sandburg | advice | |||
| If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. | Catherine Aird | advice | |||
| And the first thing I would do in my government, I would have nobody to control me. | Cervantes | government | |||
| Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty. | Charles de Montesquieu | government | |||
| The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles. | Charles de Montesquieu | government | |||
| Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditures twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. | Charles Dickens | advice | |||
| An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously. | Charles F. Kettering | business | |||
| My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. | Charles F. Kettering | philosophy | |||
| You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. | Charles F. Kettering | advice | |||
| Men think in herds... [and] they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. | Charles Mackay | history | |||
| Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. | Charles Peguy | history | |||
| The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. | Chinese Proverb | philosophy | |||
| Ten years ago the most common password on the web was 'password' and today it's 'password1'. | Chris Clark | computers | |||
| You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war. | Chris Rock, 2003 | humor | |||
| America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. | Claire Wolfe | politics | |||
| Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. | Clark's Law (J. Porter Clark, NASA) | humor | |||
| We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years... and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in. | Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State | history | |||
| The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws. | Cornelius Tacitus | government | |||
| If we fixed a hangnail the way our government fixes the economy, we'd slam a car door on it. | Cullen Hightower | government | |||
| Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. | C.S. Lewis | philosophy | |||
| Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... 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 | government | |||
| 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 | government | |||
| Where benevolent planning, armed with political and economic power, becomes wicked is when it tramples on peoples' rights for the sake of their own good. | C.S. Lewis | government | |||
| If you really want what's best for your customers, you'll never fear competition. Regroup and deliver something better. | Daniel Jalkut | business | |||
| Not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed. | Daniel Polsby and Don Kates | 2nd amendment | |||
| Thinking for yourself is like most addictive behaviour. It is frowned upon by all right thinking people and is bound to get you killed sooner or later. | Daniel Safford | philosophy | |||
| God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. | Daniel Webster | government | |||
| Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. | Daniel Webster | government | |||
| As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government. | Dave Barry | government | |||
| If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.' | Dave Barry | humor | |||
| Modern cyberspace is a deadly festering swamp, teeming with dangerous programs such as 'viruses,' 'worms,' 'Trojan horses' and 'licensed Microsoft software' that can take over your computer and render it useless. | Dave Barry | computers | |||
| Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve 'tax breaks,' which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money. | Dave Barry | government | |||
| See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs. | Dave Barry | government | |||
| You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe Daylight Savings Time. | Dave Barry | humor | |||
| Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions, and great wizards of emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch. | Dave James | humor | |||
| Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat. | David Brin | history | |||
| The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. | David Brinkley | philosophy | |||
| We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money. | David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35 | government | |||
| America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. | David Goldhill | politics | |||
| How do you know a great entrepreneur when you meet one? Great entrepreneurs would do a better job running the competition than their competitors are doing. | David Hornik | business | |||
| It is seldom that liberty of any kinds is lost all at once. | David Hume | government | |||
| Just because James Madison forgot to ban it, that doesn't mean you ought to do it. | David Keene | government | |||
| Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps. | David Lloyd George | advice | |||
| You can bail out a bank; you can't bail out a generation. You can print money, but you can't print knowledge. It takes 12 years. | Dean Kamen | education | |||
| Chance of a lifetime, nuts! This is the greatest chance in all history. It's raining soup; grab yourself a bucket. | Delos (DD) Harriman, The Man Who Sold The Moon | space | |||
| Today our Democratic leaders look south and say, 'I see one third of the nation and it can go to hell.' | Democrat Sen. Zell Miller | politics | |||
| Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe. | Demosthenes | philosophy | |||
| There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism. | Denis Diderot | philosophy | |||
| Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian. | Dennis Wholey | philosophy | |||
| Federal law is invariably carried to its most ludicrous extreme. | Diane Alden | government | |||
| Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain. | Diarmuid O’Scannlain, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals | government | |||
| Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. | Donald Knuth | computers | |||
| I believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe in, the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in, and the personal freedom that America used to believe in. | Doug Mataconis | politics | |||
| Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. | Douglas Casey | politics | |||
| Research is the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money. | Dr. Geoffrey Nicholson, 3M (inventor of the Post-it) | business | |||
| I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves. | Dr. Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatans, quacks, and hustlers. | Dr. Walter Williams | government | |||
| In the 21st century stupid people will have an inexhaustible supply of cheap, easy ways to screw up their lives. | Duende | history | |||
| Forgive everybody everything everyday. | Dulles | philosophy | |||
| A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | politics | |||
| Here in America we are descended in blood and spirit from revolutionists and rebels; men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | politics | |||
| History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | government | |||
| The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | politics | |||
| Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | government | |||
| The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | politics | |||
| The world is divided into people who do things, and people who get credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class, there is far less competition. | Dwight Whitney Morrow | advice | |||
| There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. | Ed Howdershelt | government | |||
| 40 years after the Wright Brothers made their first flight, more than a million people had flown in a plane; 40 years after man first went into space, fewer than 500 people have followed them there. | Ed Hudgins | space | |||
| The income tax is 'a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialistic act... The crusade for an income tax is the most unreasoning and un-American movement in the politics of the last quarter-century.' | Editorial, New York Times, 1894 | government | |||
| Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. | Edmund Burke | government | |||
| Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. | Edmund Burke | philosophy | |||
| The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away for expedients. | Edmund Burke | government | |||
| When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, then Athens ceased to be free. | Edmund Gibbon | government | |||
| They don't hold White House lunches the way they used to at the beginning of the century. On Jan. 1, 1907, for example, the guest list was as follows: a Nobel prizewinner, a physical culturalist, a naval historian, a biographer, an essayist, a paleontologist, a taxidermist, an ornithologist, a field naturalist, a conservationist, a big-game hunter, an editor, a critic, a ranchman, an orator, a country squire, a civil service reformer, a socialite, a patron of the arts, a colonel of the cavalry, a former Governor of New York, the ranking expert on big-game mammals in North America and the President of the United States. All these men were named Theodore Roosevelt. | Edmund Morris | history | |||
| A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. | Edward Abbey | government | |||
| If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. | Edward Abbey | 2nd amendment | |||
| The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy .... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. | Edward Abbey | 2nd amendment | |||
| A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. | Edward R. Morrow | government | |||
| Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely. | Edward R. Tufte | business | |||
| To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. | Elizabeth Cady Stanton | government | |||
| For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea. | Enoch Powell | politics | |||
| Yes, [science fiction author] Arthur C. Clarke predicted communication satellites. He also predicted whale ranching. | Eric Flint | science | |||
| When the US was attacked on 9/11, it was as if an elephant had been bitten by a virus-bearing mosquito. But instead of developing a better immune system, we tried to grow bigger tusks and sharper ears. | Eric Haseltine | history | |||
| The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. | Erwin N. Griswold | government | |||
| Bad businesses go out of business; unfortunately, bad governments don't. | Esther Dyson | government | |||
| People who hate cats will come back as mice in their next life. | Faith Resnick | humor | |||
| The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. | Felix Frankfurter | government | |||
| Rule 044: Never confuse wisdom with luck. | Ferengi Rules of Acquisition | advice | |||
| Rule 208: Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer | Ferengi Rules of Acquisition | advice | |||
| Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. | Fletcher Knebel | government | |||
| The difference between Congress and drunken sailors is that drunken sailors are spending their own money. | Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feene | government | |||
| Today, we’re spending like we’re Paris Hilton, regulating like we’re Ralph Nader, nationalizing like we’re Hugo Chavez, printing money like we’re the Weimar Republic and taxing like we’re, well, the Democratic Congress. | Former Sen. Zell Miller, 2009 | government | |||
| The difference between a good movie and a bad movie is getting everyone to make the *same* movie. | Francis Ford Coppola | business | |||
| Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell. | Frank Borman | business | |||
| The government says to the citizen: 'Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.' | Frank Chodorov | government | |||
| TV--chewing gum for the eyes. | Frank Lloyd Wright | education | |||
| Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. | Fred Brooks | philosophy | |||
| Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards. | Fred Hoyle | space | |||
| When I am dictator, anyone convicted of literary criticism will be drawn and quartered, dragged through the streets as a salutary lesson to the wise, and dropped in the public drains. | Fred Reed | humor | |||
| Reporters are easily fooled, intellectually lazy, and combative. It’s a dangerous combination. | Fred Reed | politics | |||
| You can’t fly Chicago-San Francisco on All Nippon Airlines or JAL. If you could, the domestic lines would be out of business in three weeks. | Fred Reed | politics | |||
| Here we see the governmental principle that if you are paid to solve a problem, and in fact solve it, you stop getting paid | Fred Reed | government | |||
| After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood. | Fred Thompson, US senator, lawyer, writer, actor | government | |||
| People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them. | Frederic Bastiat | government | |||
| The plans differ; the planners are all alike... | Frederic Bastiat | government | |||
| When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. | Frederic Bastiat | government | |||
| See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system. | Frederic Bastiat | government | |||
| Committees do harm merely by existing. | Freeman Dyson | business | |||
| Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. | Freeman Dyson | politics | |||
| Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable. As a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. | Friedrich von Schiller | philosophy | |||
| Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong. | F.A. Hayek | government | |||
| Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom. | F.A. Hayek | government | |||
| There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. | F.A. Hayek | science | |||
| The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources -- labor, capital and human ingenuity-- in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner. | F.A. Hayek | government | |||
| From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea--written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo - 'There is no substitute for victory!' | Gen. Douglas MacArthur | history | |||
| Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it. | Gen. Douglas MacArthur | history | |||
| A good battle plan that you act on today can be better than a perfect one tomorrow. | Gen. George Patton | advice | |||
| Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. | Gen. George S. Patton | advice | |||
| I would rather have a German division in front of me, than a French division behind me. | Gen. George S. Patton | history | |||
| If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking. | Gen. George S. Patton | philosophy | |||
| Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. | Gen. George S. Patton | history | |||
| PowerPoint makes us stupid. | Gen. James N. Mattis, USMC | computers | |||
| A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul. | George Bernard Shaw | government | |||
| Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. | George Bernard Shaw | government | |||
| Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. | George Bernard Shaw | government | |||
| When a stupid man is doing something he knows is wrong, he always insists that it is his duty. | George Bernard Shaw | philosophy | |||
| You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that. | George Carlin | humor | |||
| I have never yet met an MBA who cannot analyze a company to the point where it’s clearly not worth investing in. | George Doriot, founder of the first venture capital firm in 1947 | business | |||
| High tax rates don't redistribute income; they redistribute people. | George Gilder | government | |||
| To disarm the people [is] the best and most effectual way to enslave them. | George Mason | 2nd amendment | |||
| People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. | George Orwell | 2nd amendment | |||
| The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. | George Orwell | government | |||
| One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. | George Orwell | philosophy | |||
| The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. | George Orwell | history | |||
| A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. | George Washington | 2nd amendment | |||
| Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. | George Washington | government | |||
| The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference--they deserve a place of honor with all that's good. | George Washington | 2nd amendment | |||
| Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism. | George Will | politics | |||
| Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right — the 'right to be let alone' — that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did. | George Will | politics | |||
| If the Government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have. | Gerald Ford | government | |||
| My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' | Gilbert Keith Chesterton | politics | |||
| So people on the left and right are both worried sick about the election. ... They're right to be worried, of course, at least to a degree. The Presidency is an office of great power. On the other hand, if the federal government were properly limited to its constitutional powers, there would be much less to fear, and elections would be less stressful for all concerned. | Glenn Reynolds | government | |||
| Remember: Under a Republican President, whistleblowers are brave heroes, standing up for accountability and the rule of law. Under a Democratic President, they’re deranged partisans. | Glenn Reynolds | politics | |||
| There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action. | Goethe | philosophy | |||
| Greed is good. | Gordon Gekko | philosophy | |||
| It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people. | Gore Vidal | politics | |||
| Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts. | Greg Benford | humor | |||
| Even if the laws of arithmetic are ignored during campaigns, they provide a real constraint when making actual policy | Greg Mankiw | politics | |||
| I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. | Grover Norquist | government | |||
| If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. | Gus Grissom (who died in the Apollo 1 fire) | space | |||
| Anything worth doing is worth doing for money. | G. Harry Stine | advice | |||
| The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. | Harlan Ellison | humor | |||
| Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid. | Harrison Ford as President James Marshall, _Air Force One_ | politics | |||
| [After World War I] the Allies forced the Germans to promise things that could never be delivered. And using force to exact promises from someone like Saddam Hussein creates about as much security as ordering your cat to guard your home. If the demands are unnatural (as expecting a country in the Middle East to disarm certainly is), you can expect a backlash. | Harry Browne | history | |||
| There always will be thugs like Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein in the world. But those thugs aren't dangerous to us until we create real grievances that cause millions of people to support the thugs with money, networking, and connections that allow the thugs to threaten us. | Harry Browne | history | |||
| If U.S. politicians had minded their own business in 1917, instead of plunging America into a war that didn't threaten us, an armistice would have occurred, and the existing governments in Russia and Germany most likely would have remained in power -- meaning no Soviet Union and no Hitler. But do-gooders always believe they know what's best for the world -- and they claim that some simple act of force will settle matters once and for all. It never does. | Harry Browne | government | |||
| Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.' | Harry Browne | government | |||
| Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. | Harry Emerson Fosdick | government | |||
| When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. | Harry S Truman | government | |||
| Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA. Ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State. | Heinrich Himmler | 2nd amendment | |||
| No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. | Helmuth von Moltke the Elder | philosophy | |||
| I'm looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity not to know when something can't be done. | Henry Ford | business | |||
| The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the 'voluntary' sector; and...the 'public sector' is, in fact, the 'coercive' sector. | Henry Hazlitt | government | |||
| You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage, you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation. | Henry Hazlitt | business | |||
| When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt. | Henry J. Kaiser | advice | |||
| Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. | Henry Kissinger | politics | |||
| There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. | Henry Kissinger | humor | |||
| I mean, no matter what else happens, look at the competition and it can't help but inspire optimism. | Henry Vanderbilt | business | |||
| The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. | Herbert Spencer | philosophy | |||
| Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along .... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | Hermann Goering | politics | |||
| We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. | Hillary Clinton (scary, huh?) | politics | |||
| The result (of manned space flight) has been stunning technological achievement not only in aerospace, but also in medical technology, communications, energy and other diverse fields that sustain our civilization. We delete human space flight at the risk of stifling a major factor in technological innovation... If human space flight fails, technology fails. And if technology fails, the country fails. | Homer Hickam, a retired NASA engineer | space | |||
| If you are Christians and love peace,' said a New Zealand savage to a civilized Englishman, 'why do you bring us gunpowder and muskets?' | House of Commons, Hansard, 1845 | politics | |||
| 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 | advice | |||
| The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. | Hubert H. Humphrey | politics | |||
| Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind. | Hugo L. Black | government | |||
| 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 | education | |||
| For every complex problem there is a solution which is straightforward, simple, and wrong. | H.L. Mencken | philosophy | |||
| I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. | H.L. Mencken | government | |||
| Most people want security in this world, not liberty. | H.L. Mencken | government | |||
| The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. | H.L. Mencken | government | |||
| The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights. | H.L. Mencken | politics | |||
| The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. | H.L. Mencken | politics | |||
| 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 | politics | |||
| Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. | H.L. Mencken | government | |||
| Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of. | H.L. Mencken | philosophy | |||
| Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. | H.L. Mencken | government | |||
| 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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money. | H.L. Mencken | philosophy | |||
| Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers. | H.L. Mencken | philosophy | |||
| All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. | IBM maintenance manual, 1925 | humor | |||
| At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation | Igor Sikorsky | science | |||
| Anyway, my point is, I just want those protestors to stop for one moment and think that if America really is as evil and imperialistic as they say, then why aren't they dead? If they think we just want oil, hell, we could take over the entire world and have not just all the oil in the world, but all the gold, all the diamonds, all the chimpanzees and orangutans, and all the corndogs. And who could stop us? France? | IMAO | politics | |||
| We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement. | Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan | humor | |||
| If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend. | Irwin Schiff | politics | |||
| Columbus would indeed have had to travel 12,000 miles to reach Asia and would surely have perished--but the American continents were in the way. Nobody had dreamed they existed and Columbus, who was completely wrong, won immortal fame by accident. | Isaac Asimov | history | |||
| Even a rather poverty stricken American of today has at his disposal more energy of more kinds than any Alexander or Caesar of the past can possibly have had. And while energy does not, of itself, bring happiness, lack of energy is very likely, of itself, to bring misery. | Isaac Asimov | science | |||
| It is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. | Isaac Asimov | space | |||
| The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' | Isaac Asimov | science | |||
| The truth is that no government is ever at a loss for methods of controlling its population. No computer is needed, no codes, no dossiers. The history of mankind is a history of tyranny and of government by repression, and some of the most repressive and efficiently despotic governments have had very little in the way of technology at their service. | Isaac Asimov | government | |||
| There are some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole. | Isaac Asimov | space | |||
| There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death. | Isaac Asimov | philosophy | |||
| To the television program we need only bring an empty mind and sit torpidly while the display of sound and image fills us, requiring nothing of our imagination. The book, on the other hand, demands cooperation from the reader. It insists we take part in the process. | Isaac Asimov | education | |||
| 1: What has happened in the past will happen in the future.<br>2: Consider the obvious seriously, for few people will see it.<br>3: Consider the consequences. | Isaac Asimov, Three Laws of Futurics | history | |||
| There are only four ways for a venture investor to exit a deal: IPO, M&A, redemption, or bankruptcy. You can divorce your wife, but you can't divorce us! | Jack Kelly | business | |||
| It just doesn't matter how horrible the Windows experience is to any given employee, because in the vast majority of cases, that employee is forced to use it anyway. The same goes for Office, and Outlook. If you don't like it, you can always quit and get a job being forced to use Windows and Office and Outlook somewhere else. | Jack Miller | computers | |||
| The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so. | Jacques Barzun | education | |||
| Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. | James Bovard | government | |||
| The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true. | James Branch Cabell | philosophy | |||
| When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. | James Dale Davidson | politics | |||
| The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose. | James Earl Jones | 2nd amendment | |||
| The point of terrorism is not to 'destroy.' It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. | James Fallows | politics | |||
| It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny. | James Fenimore Cooper | government | |||
| A politician thinks of the next election -- a statesman of the next generation. | James Freeman Clarke | politics | |||
| As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I would love to live in an age when the globe was united in peace and prosperity, but I am unwilling to endure the paradigm-wrecking nation-shattering nuclear war and eugenic-master-race tyranny required to get to that point. | James Lileks | humor | |||
| Any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. | James Lovelock | space | |||
| A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. | James Madison | government | |||
| Americans have the right and advantage of being armed--unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. | James Madison | 2nd amendment | |||
| Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. | James Madison | government | |||
| The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. | James Madison | government | |||
| The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. | James Madison | government | |||
| There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation. | James Madison | government | |||
| The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state government, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. | James Madison | government | |||
| It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood. | James Madison | government | |||
| I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. | James Madison, 1794 | government | |||
| Every rooster likes to think it brings the sun up. | James Oberg | philosophy | |||
| Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 10,000 deaths annually in the U.S., for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal is now would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks. | James P. Hogan | science | |||
| The [radioactive] emission from the granite that Grand Central Station is built from exceeds the permissible limit set for [the nuclear power] industry. Grand Central Station wouldn't get a license as a nuclear plant. | James P. Hogan | science | |||
| Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. | James Thurber | humor | |||
| The president said today he would go along with Congress' request to establish benchmarks regarding Iraq. For example, the Iraqi government would have to show results by certain dates before they are given any more money. Forget Iraq. Why don't we try that here? | Jay Leno | government | |||
| Spending your way out of a recession? Isn’t that like drinking yourself out of alcoholism? | Jay Leno | politics | |||
| Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself. | Jean Francois Revel | history | |||
| It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life. | Jean Luc Picard | philosophy | |||
| Democracies don't make great products. | Jean-Louis Gasseé | business | |||
| Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. | Jed Babbin, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense | humor | |||
| If you decide that you are only going to do things that you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. | Jeff Bezos | business | |||
| In all history the only bright rays cutting the gloom of oppression have come from men who would rather get hurt than give in. | Jeff Cooper | 2nd amendment | |||
| The First Rule in a Gunfight: Have a gun. If you violate this rule, no other rules apply. | Jeff Cooper | 2nd amendment | |||
| The American West had to be subjected to massive civil engineering works before more than a small community of pioneers could live there. What you consider to be habitable is a function of your level of technology. | Jeff Greason | space | |||
| You can always get more money, you can never get more time. | Jeff Levy | advice | |||
| The only way to make money from university tech transfer is through gifts from grateful alumni. | Jeff Levy | advice | |||
| At the highest levels, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality, followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate. | Jeffrey Finckenor, resignation letter from NASA, 2008 | space | |||
| Lawyers are the only persons for whom ignorance of the law is not punished. | Jeremy Bentham | humor | |||
| Once you have a national government with no limits to its powers, you will find that you have created an engine that can be restrained only by force. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even KNOWS all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| I always knew I'd live to see the first man walk on the Moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last. | Jerry Pournelle | space | |||
| The surest way to civil war is to begin prosecuting policy differences as criminal. There is no faster way to destroy a republic than to give the loser great fear of losing the election. | Jerry Pournelle | politics | |||
| Government by the votes of illiterate and uneducated people isn't guaranteed to be good government or even rational government. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| The Regulatory State seems determined to restrict America to two kinds of companies: those with fewer than 50 employees, and giant corporations with thousands of employees. | Jerry Pournelle | politics | |||
| There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| The attempt to see that every child gets a world-class university prep education is a great way to ensure that no child gets a world-class university prep education. | Jerry Pournelle | education | |||
| This is not Lake Wobegon. Half the children are below average. [But]... our education system is designed by smart people who don't spend a lot of time with people who aren't smart. The result is disaster. | Jerry Pournelle | education | |||
| We now seek to establish a centralized national state with socialist principles, but not formal nationalization of industries and the means of production. The social classes will be required to work together. We will not call it a Fascist state, but Huey Long would have. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| Congress, which has the undoubted right to run the [Washington] D.C. school system any way it wants to, should make that the shining example of how schools ought to operate. THEN we might listen when the Department of Education tells the rest of the country what to do. But for the moment I believe the D.C. school system is actually the worst in the US. Of course the Washington educrats still assert the right to tell the rest of the country what to do. | Jerry Pournelle | education | |||
| Nationally we have opted for [educational] equality over excellence. That means that nationally we ignore bright students... Since bright students tend to have bright parents, and many understand what's going on, they tend to take the bright students out of the public school system. | Jerry Pournelle | education | |||
| The normal state of mankind is subsistence poverty with a layer of rich oligarchs above it. I think we're headed there again. | Jerry Pournelle | government | |||
| More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time. | Jim McCarthy | computers | |||
| It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great. | Jimmy Dugan | philosophy | |||
| Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | philosophy | |||
| Fear is the foundation of most governments. | John Adams | government | |||
| I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, two men are called a Law Firm, and three or more are called a Congress. | John Adams | government | |||
| It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience. | John Adams | government | |||
| Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. | John Adams | government | |||
| The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. | John Adams | history | |||
| Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. | John Adams (1814) | government | |||
| When money is delivered in expectation of results, rather than for the results themselves, the decision makers have an obligation to put the money where they think it will likely accomplish something. This almost guarantees that nothing too far outside the norm will be funded, because it could make the decision-makers look very foolish. | John Carmack | government | |||
| The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things. | John C. Dvorak, Feb. 1984 | computers | |||
| What we do is bring foreign nationals to the world's greatest universities. We train them, invest in them and make them go home. What kind of national strategy is that? | John Doerr | politics | |||
| Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe. | John D. Clark, 1972 | computers | |||
| An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. | John F. Kennedy | government | |||
| It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low--and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. | John F. Kennedy | government | |||
| Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. | John F. Kennedy | science | |||
| Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain. | John F. Kennedy | government | |||
| Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process. | John F. Kennedy | politics | |||
| When taxes are too high, there will never be enough jobs or enough revenues to balance the budget. | John F. Kennedy | government | |||
| An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. | John Gardner | philosophy | |||
| Any space expedition, public or private, that accepted the casualty rates of the early American settlers, would be tied up in criminal and civil court indefinitely. | John Hare | space | |||
| Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. | John Hasnas | politics | |||
| The people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment. | John Hasnas | government | |||
| For the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe. | John Hasnas | politics | |||
| If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. | John Kenneth Galbraith | humor | |||
| Economics exists to made astrology look respectable. | John Kenneth Galbraith | politics | |||
| Power corrupts; absolute power is kind of neat. | John Lehman | humor | |||
| The use of extraordinary power in extraordinary times, soon becomes the ordinary use of power in ordinary times. | John Locke | government | |||
| An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation. | John Marshall | government | |||
| The power to tax is the power to destroy. | John Marshall | government | |||
| The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. | John Maynard Keynes | business | |||
| We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. | John Maynard Keynes | government | |||
| He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. | John McCarthy | science | |||
| Of the various fundamentalist belief systems I encounter, absolute atheism may be the most blindly sure of itself. | John Perry Barlow | philosophy | |||
| [The] costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree… this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. | John Robb | education | |||
| Students often ask what can be done about the 'problem' of young people who don't care enough to vote. I always say that I don't see it as much of problem 'because most of you don't know anything yet. I'm OK with you not voting!' The students laugh, but I'm not joking. ... I only started to think I knew what ought to be done after years of reporting and reading voraciously to absorb arguments from left and right. The idea that most voters vote without having done much of that work is, frankly, scary. | John Stossel | government | |||
| Voting is serious business. It works best when people educate themselves. If uninformed people stay home on Election Day, good | John Stossel | government | |||
| The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. | John Stuart Mill | government | |||
| War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. | John Stuart Mill | government | |||
| Life is tough. Life is tougher if you're stupid. | John Wayne | advice | |||
| Never mistake activity for achievement. | John Wooden | advice | |||
| The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. | John Wooden | advice | |||
| History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells 'Why can't you remember anything I tell you?' and lets fly with a club. | John W. Campbell | history | |||
| I’m old enough to remember when going to the moon was science fiction and not nostalgia. | Jon Callas | space | |||
| Leadership is not about telling the public what they necessarily want to hear. Leadership is standing up and telling the public how things really are. | Jon Corzine | politics | |||
| We can't simply make things up because we don't like the consequences of the laws we created. Just like we simply can't make up numbers and say the budget's balanced. We can't give the public false impressions that answers are both easy and painless. | Jon Corzine | government | |||
| The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. | Jon Hammond | advice | |||
| Ideas are more powerful than guns. If we don't let our people have guns, why should we let them have ideas? | Josef Stalin | 2nd amendment | |||
| The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do. | Josef Stalin | government | |||
| [After 1776] ...the term 'democrat' originated as an epithet and referred to 'one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.' | Joseph Ellis, "Founding Brothers" | government | |||
| I don't mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don't even mind using someone's reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles. | Joseph Newcomer | humor | |||
| Excessive laws are worse than useless. Many new laws confer legitimacy on what common sense would recognize as crimes. | Joseph Sobran | government | |||
| It says a lot about the state of hypersonic airbreathing propulsion that when the X-43 was boosted from Mach 0.8 to Mach 10 by a rocket, and then managed to briefly not slow down using a scramjet, this was considered a landmark accomplishment for the scramjet, and utterly unremarkable for the rocket. | Josh Hopkins | space | |||
| Assuming you can never lose your freedom is a mistake a free people get to make only once. | Judge Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit | government | |||
| All bad precedents begin as justifiable measures. | Julius Caesar | philosophy | |||
| And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch... the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | Julius Caesar | government | |||
| Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. | Julius Caesar | government | |||
| Conservatives are just as willing to distort the Constitution as liberals are. I say a pox on both their houses. | Justice Antonin Scalia | government | |||
| It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself. | Justice Casey Percell | government | |||
| It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. | Justice Robert H. Jackson | government | |||
| Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk. | J. C. Penney | advice | |||
| A man may fail many times but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. | J. Paul Getty | advice | |||
| It isn't a very long step from a conformist society to a regimented society. Although it would take longer to create an Orwellian nightmare through voluntary surrender of individuality -- and thus of independence -- than through totalitarian edict, the results would be very much the same. | J. Paul Getty | government | |||
| We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism... We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert. | J. Robert Oppenheimer | government | |||
| Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on. | J.M. Roberts | philosophy | |||
| My formula for success? Rise early, work late, strike oil. | J.P. Getty | advice | |||
| If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. | J.R.R. Tolkien | advice | |||
| If an armed lunatic takes over my airplane, I am fundamentally not interested in handgun-control rhetoric. What I am concerned with is just one thing: stepping over a dead hijacker as I exit my safely-landed airplane. | Kathleen Parker | 2nd amendment | |||
| If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops. | Kelvin Throop | government | |||
| We divide business plans into three categories: candy, vitamins, and painkillers. We throw away the candy. We look at vitamins. We really like painkillers. We especially like addictive painkillers! | Kevin Fong | business | |||
| My government's got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. | Kurt Vonnegut | government | |||
| There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. | Kurt Vonnegut | government | |||
| That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. | Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle | computers | |||
| In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car. | Larry Summers, president of Harvard | philosophy | |||
| Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself. | Leo Tolstoy | philosophy | |||
| The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. | Leo Tolstoy | philosophy | |||
| To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. | Leonard Bernstein | advice | |||
| Only a complete economic ignoramus would believe that Americans would for some reason be better at socialism than Russians. | Lew Rockwell | government | |||
| No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up. | Lily Tomlin | humor | |||
| If it's a hobby for us and a job for you, then why are you doing such a shoddy job? | Linus Torvalds to Microsoft | computers | |||
| Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards. | Lois McMaster Bujold | advice | |||
| More battles have been won or lost by quartermasters than by any general staff. | Lois McMaster Bujold | history | |||
| Never, ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. | Lois McMaster Bujold | advice | |||
| The first and last battleground is the mind. All else is just maneuvering. | Lois McMaster Bujold | philosophy | |||
| It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. | Lord Acton | government | |||
| There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement | Lord Kelvin, 1900 | science | |||
| Buy to the sound of cannons, sell to the sound of trumpets. | Lord Rothschild | business | |||
| Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. | Louis D. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice | government | |||
| National health insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS and the cost accounting of the Pentagon. | Louis Sullivan | government | |||
| Save me, oh God, from people who have no sense of humor. | Ludlow Porch | philosophy | |||
| Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics. | Ludwig von Mises | government | |||
| If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. | Ludwig von Mises | politics | |||
| The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot. | Ludwig von Mises | philosophy | |||
| If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. | Lyall Watson | science | |||
| You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered. | Lyndon Johnson | history | |||
| But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. | Lysander Spooner | government | |||
| All that is needed to give rise to a mighty nation is a simple, irrevocable guarantee that individual members of the productive class be permitted to keep whatever they create. | L. Neil Smith | government | |||
| Considering all the consequences, the invention of agriculture may just be the worst mistake humanity ever made. | L. Neil Smith | history | |||
| Everybody knows that nuclear fusion can only take place at tremendously high temperatures and pressures, in the presence of billions of dollars. | L. Neil Smith | science | |||
| If all the money spent on ramps, bus elevators, and the like in an attempt to make the world 'wheelchair accessible' had been spent on neurological research, no one would need ramps and elevators. | L. Neil Smith | science | |||
| People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. | L. Neil Smith | government | |||
| The police are like parents. They're not really interested in justice. They simply want *quiet*. | L. Neil Smith | government | |||
| There is no 'balance of nature.' Ask the dinosaur. | L. Neil Smith | history | |||
| You are what you eat... which kind of accounts for vegetarians, I guess. | L. Neil Smith | humor | |||
| ...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. | Machiavelli, The Prince | philosophy | |||
| Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. | Mahatma Gandhi | 2nd amendment | |||
| Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right. | Mahatma Gandhi | government | |||
| The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated. | Mahatma Gandhi | philosophy | |||
| You may think your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act. | Mahatma Gandhi | advice | |||
| Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. | Mahatma Gandhi | philosophy | |||
| The best social services program is a job. | Maine Gov. John Baldacci | politics | |||
| A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything. | Malcolm X | advice | |||
| Statesmen, therefore, will do well to abstain from a form a liberality which robs one man to enrich another. Their first care will be to secure the rights of property by the equity of the law. | Marcus Tullius Cicero | government | |||
| A lack of consensus is no excuse for a lack of leadership. | Margaret Thatcher | advice | |||
| Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. | Margaret Thatcher | advice | |||
| You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him but you will not conquer his spirit. | Margaret Thatcher | philosophy | |||
| The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. | Margaret Thatcher | government | |||
| People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation. | Margaret Thatcher | government | |||
| Too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it... They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. | Margaret Thatcher | government | |||
| If everything's under control, you're going too slow. | Mario Andretti | advice | |||
| A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns. | Mario Puzo | politics | |||
| As a general proposition, when told by unanimous elites that a particular course of action is urgent and necessary to avoid disaster, there’s a lot to be said for going fishing. | Mark Steyn | politics | |||
| Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them. | Mark Steyn | government | |||
| Right now, if you don't like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you're sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don't like 'global governance'? What polling station do you go to to vote it out? | Mark Steyn | politics | |||
| Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. | Mark Twain | advice | |||
| Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. | Mark Twain | advice | |||
| Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. | Mark Twain | philosophy | |||
| Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. | Mark Twain | humor | |||
| The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either. | Mark Twain | philosophy | |||
| The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so. | Mark Twain | philosophy | |||
| There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights. | Mark Twain | philosophy | |||
| Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. | Mark Twain | advice | |||
| We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read. | Mark Twain | humor | |||
| If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare. | Mark Twain | advice | |||
| There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. | Marshall McLuhan | space | |||
| It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. | Martin Luther King | government | |||
| The future of manned spaceflight lies in waiting till it can be done by private enterprise, or through private sponsorship. | Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society | space | |||
| Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker. | Mar's Law | science | |||
| Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual. | Mason Cooley | business | |||
| We could have done Apollo with a lot fewer people, but we couldn’t have done it with any more. | Max Faget | space | |||
| Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc^2. | Michael Crichton | science | |||
| There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. | Michael Crichton | science | |||
| Let's be clear: 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. | Michael Crichton | science | |||
| Perfect is the enemy of good, but better is the enemy of done. | Michael Mealling | advice | |||
| The fervent belief that saving money and making money are somehow equivalent is the great innovation delusion. | Michael Schrage | business | |||
| Washington D.C.: What happens when Congress has complete control of a society. Take that as a warning. | Michael Z. Williamson | government | |||
| A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will wind up with neither. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions. | Milton Friedman | philosophy | |||
| Every economist knows that minimum wages cause unemployment. That's not a statement, that's a definition. | Milton Friedman | politics | |||
| What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| In a poorer and less socialist era, we produced a nationwide network of roads and bridges and subway systems that were the envy of the world. Today we are unable even to maintain them. | Milton Friedman | politics | |||
| Take any three letters of the alphabet — it doesn’t matter, pick three at random — put them in any order you want, it doesn’t matter — you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. | Milton Friedman | government | |||
| There are many better ways of flying than standing on a pillar of fire. | Mitchell Burnside Clapp | space | |||
| If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong. | Mo Udall | advice | |||
| It takes more man-hours in this country to pay federal income taxes than it does to build every car, van and truck produced in this country during the same year. | Money Magazine | government | |||
| Confidence is the sweet spot between arrogance and despair. | Moss Kanter | advice | |||
| It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost. | Murray N. Rothbard | politics | |||
| The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation. | Murray Rothbard | government | |||
| Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. | Napoleon Bonaparte. | advice | |||
| ...for every failure mode someone can envision, someone else must provide a solution... The proven costs of such solutions are money, schedule delays, and additional unknowns. I believe that many of our solutions to problems create more serious problems through added complication, dilution of effort, and increased time compression on already over-stressed work loads... Unless management and program personnel develop a sense of proportion, we will forever be trying to chase things to the last decimal point, frittering away limited resources on insignificant issues. | NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, 1990 | space | |||
| Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for... a Nobel [Prize] or a private jet. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | advice | |||
| Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | government | |||
| Nothing is more permanent than 'temporary' arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; nothing is more temporary than 'permanent' ones. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | history | |||
| A lot of people out there pay good lip service to the idea of personal freedom--right up to the point that someone tries to do something that they don't personally approve of. | Neal Boortz | politics | |||
| I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be. | Neal Boortz | government | |||
| I have a basic rule about art. If I can duplicate it, it ain't art. | Neal Boortz | humor | |||
| If the Constitution becomes a 'living document' then it will mean whatever the ruling majority wants it to mean, and we will have a true democracy: a government of mob rule | Neal Boortz | government | |||
| Remember, if two people agree on everything, one of them isn't necessary. | Neal Boortz | advice | |||
| The primary role of government is to increase the size of government. | Neal Boortz | government | |||
| The principal purpose of the Democratic Party is to use the force of government to take property away from the people who earn it and give it to people who do not. | Neal Boortz | government | |||
| The quality of education in this country has gone down steadily since the formation of the Department of Education. | Neal Boortz | education | |||
| We are creating a nation of pussies and candyasses who can't tell you the difference between a legislature and a ligature. | Neal Boortz | politics | |||
| I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street. | Neil Armstrong | humor | |||
| Even Intel doesn't know quite why some chip manufacturing processes work better than others. In the late 1990's it instituted a program called 'Copy EXACTLY!,' which required that new plants use equipment and procedures replicated from existing plants, right down to the color of paint on the wall. | New York Times | computers | |||
| An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. | Niels Bohr | philosophy | |||
| Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river. | Nikita Khrushchev | politics | |||
| The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. | Nolan Bushnell | philosophy | |||
| The two things that excite my grandchildren the most are space and dinosaurs—and we're very short on dinosaurs. | Norm Augustine (retired chairman, Lockheed-Martin) | space | |||
| When you go into court, you are putting your fate in the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. | Norm Crosby | humor | |||
| One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy. | Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize winner) | government | |||
| The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. | Norman Thomas, Former Presidential Candidate, U.S. Socialist Party | politics | |||
| DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form. | NY Times, 1991 | computers | |||
| It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it. | Oliver Cromwell | government | |||
| The human race is divided into two classes--those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?' | Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | advice | |||
| Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it has always been hushed up. | Oscar Wilde | humor | |||
| When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice. | Otto von Bismarck | politics | |||
| The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA. | Page 191, Columbia Accident Investigation Board report | space | |||
| Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. | Patrick Henry | government | |||
| The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government. | Patrick Henry | government | |||
| The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. | Paul Ehrlich | history | |||
| Few arguments in international diplomacy are so convincing as a convincing victory. | Paul Greenberg | history | |||
| They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here? | Paul Harvey | 2nd amendment | |||
| Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you. | Paul Williams | advice | |||
| A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire. | Peggy Noonan | politics | |||
| History is more likely to repeat itself when you ask it to. | Peggy Noonan | history | |||
| Right now the Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the voter. | Peggy Noonan | government | |||
| As long as we think that 'nation building' is part of our destiny, no amount of independence from foreign oil is going to stop us from getting into meddling, expensive, immoral foreign wars. | Penn Jillette | politics | |||
| Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. | Pericles | politics | |||
| Always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. Then allow them to take the credit for successes, while you take the blame for their failures. | Pete Peterson | advice | |||
| Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with never having their desk clear at the end of the day. | Pete Petit | business | |||
| Visionaries make good things happen. Managers keep bad things from happening. For your company to be successful, you need both. Unfortunately, you rarely find them in a single person. | Pete Petit | business | |||
| Leaders are born; managers can be trained. | Pete Petit | business | |||
| The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. | Peter Brimelow | politics | |||
| The best way to predict the future is to create it. | Peter Drucker | advice | |||
| While capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one. | Peter Saunders | government | |||
| We trained hard . . . but it seemed everytime we were begining to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to treat any new situation by reorganization and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiences, and demoralization. | Petronius Arbiter, 66 A.D. | business | |||
| Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. | Phillip K. Dick | philosophy | |||
| One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. | Plato | politics | |||
| The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. | Plutarch | politics | |||
| No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. | President Barack Obama, July 2009 | government | |||
| We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans. | President Bill Clinton (USA Today, 3/11/93, Page 2A) | politics | |||
| I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. To approve such spending would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded. | President Franklin Pierce | government | |||
| 'Necessity' is the excuse for every infringement of freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant; it is the creed of the slave. | Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) | government | |||
| ...In the United States alone, approximately 25 million chickens are killed and eaten every day. It has been said that the difference between chicken hawks and people is that when chicken hawks eat more chickens, there are fewer chickens, but when people eat more chickens there are more chickens. The more fundamental difference is that people establish private property rights and, as a result, take the future into consideration; chicken hawks don't. | Prof. Dwight R. Lee, Univ. of Georgia | politics | |||
| Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| I try to *only* ridicule people whose efforts are sincere. Very little trouble has been caused in the world by insincere efforts. An occasional seduction maybe. There were very few insincere Stalinists or Nazis. | P.J. O'Rourke | history | |||
| The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it. | P.J. O'Rourke | science | |||
| The liberal is continually angry, as only a self-important man can be, with his civilization, his culture, his country and his folks back home. His is an infantile world view. At the core of a liberal is the spoiled child--miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. | P.J. O'Rourke | politics | |||
| The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| There is something more horrible than hoodlums, churls and vipers, and that is knaves with moral justification for their cause. | P.J. O'Rourke | politics | |||
| There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car-wreck and descended from a stock-market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together, and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack, the original giant, economy-sized new and improved butt-kickers of all time... And we've got an American Express credit card limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. | P.J. O'Rourke | humor | |||
| Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent not to say toddlerlike idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.' | P.J. O'Rourke | politics | |||
| If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it's free. | P.J. O'Rourke | politics | |||
| Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, 'Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook.' | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. | P.J. O'Rourke | humor | |||
| For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like 'stakeholders' in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. 'Jeeze, 230 pounds!' But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We *pay* them to be in it for the money. | P.J. O'Rourke | business | |||
| America wasn't founded so we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased. | P.J. O'Rourke | government | |||
| Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations. | Ralph Charell | advice | |||
| A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds | Ralph Waldo Emerson | advice | |||
| It's not NASA's job to send a man to Mars. It's NASA's job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send a man to Mars. | Rand Simberg | space | |||
| In response to the Soviet socialist state enterprise for space, we created one of our own. | Rand Simberg | space | |||
| [A] state enterprise for space... worked fine for a short moon race, but we made the mistake of thinking, in utter defiance of our nation’s historic tradition of individualism and free enterprise, that this could be a successful model for the sustained opening of a new frontier. | Rand Simberg | space | |||
| Immigration, multi-culturalism, democracy. Pick any two. | Rand Simberg | politics | |||
| Anybody who wants to be President badly enough to go through everything that it takes is intrinsically not to be trusted. | Rand Simberg | politics | |||
| If extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. | Rand Simberg | space | |||
| I hope we win the war on terrorism in time for people to remember what freedom was like... | Randall Clague | government | |||
| There's a reason it's almost impossible to figure out what NASA programs cost: NASA doesn't know. If they knew, they'd have to report that to Congress, and they'd lose some of the money. So they hide the money, they hide it so well they themselves don't know where it is, and then they truthfully tell Congress, 'We don't know what it costs, but here's our estimate.' It's a hell of a way to run a space program, but the alternative is to shut the thing down. | Randall Clague | space | |||
| If the climate science reviewers didn't see the background information, raw data, or source code, what exactly was peer reviewed? Did they just check the spelling? | Randy Lea | science | |||
| By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that, no matter how bad things are, Congress could always make it worse. | Rasmussen Reports, Aug 2009 | politics | |||
| I fear FASB is beginning to stand for 'Flatten All Startup Businesses.' | Representative Richard H. Baker (R-La.) | business | |||
| It's good to have an open mind... but not so open that your brains fall out. | Rev. Kennedy Schultz | advice | |||
| That government is best which governs someone else. | Rex F. May | government | |||
| The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer. | Richard Fernandez | politics | |||
| The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. | Richard Feynman | advice | |||
| To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. | Richard Henry Lee | 2nd amendment | |||
| ...far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system. | Richard Mitchell | education | |||
| Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system. | Richard Mitchell | education | |||
| I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. | Richard Muller | science | |||
| The past shows unvaryingly that when a people's freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all. | Richard Weaver | government | |||
| Politicians and government bureaucrats are not good at recognizing the unintended consequences of their own actions. ...Most people, most of the time, will behave in a relatively rational manner, and thus government should leave them alone unless they are a clear and present danger to others. | Richard W. Rahn | government | |||
| Everybody wants the government to 'do something!' until it does it to them. | Rick Gaber | government | |||
| Hope is not a strategy. | Rick Page | advice | |||
| Windows XP on the Internet amounts to a car parked in a bad part of town, with the doors unlocked, the key in the ignition and a Post-It note on the dashboard saying, 'Please don't steal this.' | Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post | computers | |||
| A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it--it keeps him upright. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| An armed society is a polite society. | Robert A. Heinlein | 2nd amendment | |||
| Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| But an invention is something that was 'impossible' up to then--that's why governments grant patents. | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| Death is the lot of all of us and the only way the human race has ever conquered death is by treating it with contempt. By living every golden minute as if one had all eternity. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| Does history record any case in which the majority was right? | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad--but not before. | Robert A. Heinlein | science | |||
| Fifty-odd years ago [circa 1930] astrology was commonly regarded as a ridiculous former superstition, one all but a tiny minority had outgrown. It is now the orthodoxy of many, possibly a majority. This pathological change parallels the decay of public education. | Robert A. Heinlein | education | |||
| How you behave towards cats here below determines your status in Heaven. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| I suspect that our race's tragedy has been played endless times. It may be that an intelligent race has to expand right up to its disaster point to achieve what is needed to break out of its planet and reach for the stars. It may always--or almost always--be a photo finish, with the outcome uncertain to the last moment. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| If all of us tried to go back-to-nature, most of us would starve rather quickly. These back-to-nature freaks can't do arithmetic. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| If Columbus had waited for decent ships we'd all still be in Europe. A man has to take some chances or he'll never get anywhere. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| If the horse can't jump the hurdle, shoot the horse. Keep on doing this and eventually you will find a horse that can clear the jump--if you don't run out of horses. This is the sort of plausible pseudologic that most people bring to political affairs. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning--it's never free. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| My first grade class had 63 kids in it, one teacher, no assistant. Before the end of the second semester all 63 could read. | Robert A. Heinlein | history | |||
| NASA has two remarkable records: first, a space program far more successful than anyone had dared hope; and, second, the most incredibly bumbling, stupid, inept public relations of any government agency. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| 'One World' means a concept in which the United States is not sovereign, any more than one of our states is truly sovereign. That means that the United States would be outvoted... which just as certainly means that they would swarm over us immediately after counting the votes. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti-intellectualism, our almost total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the shambles of public education throughout most of our nation... cause me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find. The ape escaped a fifth way. | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects,"this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| That's the beauty of this business. You don't have to know anything; you just have to know where to find out. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they--' is almost always, 'Money.' | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. | Robert A. Heinlein | science | |||
| The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. | Robert A. Heinlein | philosophy | |||
| The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| The licensing of weapons is subversive of liberty and self-defeating in its pious purpose. | Robert A. Heinlein | 2nd amendment | |||
| The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment: good, but not good enough to win. | Robert A. Heinlein | history | |||
| There are a lot of good, kindly people who are internationalists these days. Nine out of ten of them are soft in the head and the tenth is ignorant | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| 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 A. Heinlein | government | |||
| There is nothing so permanent in this world as a temporary emergency. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| There may be no candidates and measures you want to vote for... But there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills. | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms. | Robert A. Heinlein | 2nd amendment | |||
| We are not liked, we have few friends; therefore we should quit being afraid, stand up and assert ourselves. The only friends we will lose thereby are those we never had. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| We can't make the world safe for children, nor for men either--and God didn't appoint us to do it. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| We did not want it that way--but if somebody has to be boss, I want it to be us. Disarm them and don't turn them loose. We can treat the individual persons decently in an economic sense, but take away their sovereignty. | Robert A. Heinlein | politics | |||
| We remain strong in science and engineering but even students in those subject are handicapped by failure of our primary and secondary schools and by cutback in funding of research both public and private. Our great decline in education is alone enough to destroy this country. | Robert A. Heinlein | science | |||
| What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what 'the stars foretell'--what are the facts and to how many decimal places? | Robert A. Heinlein | advice | |||
| What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| What would you say to high pay, steady work, unlimited expense account, your own boss on the job, and lots of variety and adventure? I'd say, 'Get those goddamn reindeer off my roof!' Shove it, Pop--there's no such job. | Robert A. Heinlein | humor | |||
| When I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. | Robert A. Heinlein | space | |||
| While the rest of the human race are descended from monkeys, redheads derive from cats. | Robert A. Heinlein | humor | |||
| You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| ...almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| What I fear most are... actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. | Robert A. Heinlein | government | |||
| Our race will spread out through space--unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain. But I am not certain that the working language will be English. The people of the United States seem to have lost their nerve. | Robert A. Heinlein, Congressional testimony, 19 July 1979 | space | |||
| The education of a man is never complete until he dies. | Robert E. Lee | education | |||
| The consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of the ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. | Robert E. Lee | government | |||
| What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. | Robert Kennedy | politics | |||
| Suppose the Second Amendment said 'A well-educated electorate being necessary for self-governance in a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.' Is there anyone who would suggest that means only registered voters have a right to read? | Robert Levy, Georgetown University | 2nd amendment | |||
| The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. | Robert Lynd | history | |||
| The greater the desire to perform humanitarian deeds through legislation, the greater the violence required to achieve it. | Ron Paul | politics | |||
| All those other constitutions are documents that say, 'We, the government, allow the people the following rights,' and our Constitution says 'We the People, allow the government the following privileges and rights.' We give our permission to government to do the things that it does. And that's the whole story of the difference--why we're unique in the world and why no matter what our troubles may be, we're going to overcome. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Our policy is simple: We are not going to betray our friends, reward the enemies of freedom, or permit fear and retreat to become American policies... None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It is weakness... that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control, all of which led us to this state in the first place. ... We must have the clarity of vision to see the difference between what is essential and what is merely desirable, and then the courage to bring our government back under control and make it acceptable to the people. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Play, but cut the cards. | Ronald Reagan | advice | |||
| Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. | Ronald Reagan | politics | |||
| Status quo,' you know, that is Latin for 'the mess we're in.' | Ronald Reagan | humor | |||
| Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere. | Ronald Reagan | advice | |||
| The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| The choice before the American people is the choice between two visions: on the one hand, the policies of limited government, economic growth, a strong defense, and a firm foreign policy; and on the other hand, policies of tax and spend, economic stagnation, international weakness and accommodation, and always, always, from them, 'Blame America first.' | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the blood stream, or genetically. And it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it, or it’s gone and gone for a long, long time. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Never confuse the stock market with the economy. | Ronald Reagan | business | |||
| We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. | Ronald Reagan | government | |||
| Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty. | Ronald Reagan | history | |||
| The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. | Ronald Reagan, Notre Dame (May 17, 1981) | politics | |||
| When we have strong values, decision making is easy. | Roy Disney | advice | |||
| A man can never have too many books, too much red wine or too much ammunition. | Rudyard Kipling | 2nd amendment | |||
| All we have of freedom--all we use or know--This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago. | Rudyard Kipling | history | |||
| And that is called paying the Dane-geld;<BR> but we've proved it again and again,<BR> that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld<BR> you never get rid of the Dane. | Rudyard Kipling | history | |||
| Makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you when you sleep, is cheaper than them uniforms, and they're starvation cheap. | Rudyard Kipling | history | |||
| Whatsoever, for any cause,<BR> Seeketh to take or give,<BR> Power above or beyond the Laws,<BR> Suffer it not to live!<BR> <BR> Holy State or Holy King--<BR>Or Holy People's Will--<BR> Have no truck with the senseless thing.<BR> Order the guns and kill! | Rudyard Kipling, 'MacDonough's Song' | government | |||
| All inanimate objects are scientifically divided into three categories: Those that break down, those that don't work, and those that can't be repaired. | Russell Baker | humor | |||
| Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. | Sallust | government | |||
| When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the people... and... becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression...it is a...sacred obligation to their posterity to abolish such government, and create another in its stead. | Sam Houston | government | |||
| Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. | Samuel Adams | government | |||
| If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms... May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. | Samuel Adams | government | |||
| It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. | Samuel Adams | government | |||
| Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. | Samuel Adams | government | |||
| The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. | Samuel Adams | 2nd amendment | |||
| He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything. | Samuel Johnson | advice | |||
| We often need reminding even if we do not often need educating. | Samuel Johnson | advice | |||
| If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. | Scott Adams | computers | |||
| The difference in opinion between the Political Class and the rest of the nation is larger than the gap between the political parties. | Scott Rasmussen | politics | |||
| The gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century. | Scott Rasmussen | politics | |||
| Murphy's revenge: The more reliable you make a system, the longer it will take you to figure out what's wrong when it breaks. | Sean Donelan | humor | |||
| A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it. | Senator Sam Ervin | government | |||
| Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est. ("A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands.") | Seneca the Younger | 2nd amendment | |||
| You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts. | Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan | philosophy | |||
| Based on the substantial amount of money pumped into the [DC public schools] and the resultant test scores, I do not believe that money alone is going to solve the problem. | Sen. Dianne Feinstein | education | |||
| America is unique, strong, great because of our commitment to personal freedom... We are a free people who consented to be governed. Not vice versa. | Sen. John Sununu | government | |||
| Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean it should be a law--let alone a Federal law. | Sen. John Sununu | government | |||
| If Howard Dean was living back [when Paul Revere came riding through] he would have yelled out the window, 'Shut up I'm trying to get some sleep in here!' It's a disgrace. | Sen. Zell Miller | government | |||
| The genius of a construction lies in its simplicity. Everybody can build complicated things. | Sergei P. Korolev | philosophy | |||
| Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever. | Seth Godin | advice | |||
| Collectivists only revere democracy until it has voted them sufficient power… then democracy becomes a cumbersome inconvenience that allows selfish, ignorant fools and corporate shills to interfere with the brilliant work of great men. | Sherman Logan | politics | |||
| The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other type of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to permit uprising. | Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1558 | 2nd amendment | |||
| Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. | Silas Mitchell | philosophy | |||
| We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy. | Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888 | science | |||
| The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. | Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1906 | space | |||
| When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. | Sinclair Lewis | politics | |||
| Space travel is bunk. | Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik | space | |||
| America sometimes fails to live up to its ideals... So has every nation since history began. But it must be admitted that so far, the United States of America has the most magnificent set of ideals any nation has ever failed to live up to. | Spider Robinson | government | |||
| The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load. | Stephen Hawking | space | |||
| We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. | Stephen Schneider, environmental activist ('Discover', Oct 89) | politics | |||
| Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it. | Stephen Vizinczey | education | |||
| It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, people couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this. | Steve Jobs | computers | |||
| It's not like Windows users don't have any power; I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought. | Steve Jobs | computers | |||
| People think focus means saying yes to the thing youve got to focus on. But thats not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. | Steve Jobs | business | |||
| There will always be skeptics. There will always be disbelievers. And there will always be Apple to prove them wrong. | Steve Jobs | computers | |||
| You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. | Steve Jobs | business | |||
| It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. | Steve Jobs | business | |||
| Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. | Steve Jobs | business | |||
| The bane of our age is not intolerance, but a fuzzy-minded wishy-washy kind of tolerance based upon the notions that there's something good about everyone and deep down everyone is just like us. Well, there isn't, and they aren't. | Steve Stirling | philosophy | |||
| The governmental policies in the United States of America are a damper, a wet blanket. They retard investment; they retard job formation; they retard the creation of a better life for the citizens in spite of the rhetoric of the president. | Steve Wynn | government | |||
| It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power--the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power--American and European perspectives are diverging. | Steven den Beste | politics | |||
| [Robotic] rovers like these accomplish their tasks far more slowly than humans in the same environment would. What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. | Steven Squyres, Principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission | space | |||
| If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. | Steven Wright | humor | |||
| Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off. | Stewart H. Holbrook | history | |||
| Technology is the word given to the stuff that doesn't quite work just yet. | Supercomputer designer Danny Hillis | science | |||
| The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. | Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis | government | |||
| 'Fuzzy' academics is where success is not a matter of finding objective answers, but of convincing peers or superiors that your views are valid... Engineering doesn't work like that. There is no 'consensus' on the tensile strength of aircraft aluminum. If you get it wrong, people die. | TB | politics | |||
| Small businesses are independent thinkers. They know they can't compete by imitating the big guys; they have to innovate. So they are less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. | Ted Turner | business | |||
| Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who don't. | Tench Coxe | 2nd amendment | |||
| 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. | humor | |||
| If financial institutions are deemed too big and too complex to fail, their managers will have an incentive to make them big and complex. | The Economist, August 9, 2008 | business | |||
| All the gold in California Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else's name. So if you dreaming about California, It don't matter at all where you've played before, California's a brand new game. | The Gatlin Brothers | business | |||
| A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. | Theodore Roosevelt | government | |||
| Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| I do not represent public opinion; I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public's opinion of these interests. | Theodore Roosevelt | politics | |||
| In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. | Theodore Roosevelt | politics | |||
| The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is kindled, it burns like a consuming flame. | Theodore Roosevelt | politics | |||
| The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| The point is always to do something quickly, because if you don't, the other fellow will. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. | Theodore Roosevelt | politics | |||
| There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| To sit home, read one's favorite newspaper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men's doing. | Theodore Roosevelt | philosophy | |||
| We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war. | Theodore Roosevelt | philosophy | |||
| When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.' | Theodore Roosevelt | humor | |||
| When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it. | Theodore Roosevelt | advice | |||
| It may be that at some time in the dim future of the race the need for war will vanish: but that time is yet ages distant. As yet no nation can hold its place in the world, or can do any work really worth doing, unless it stands ready to guard its right with an armed hand. | Theodore Roosevelt | politics | |||
| Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success. | Thomas A. Edison | advice | |||
| From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day. From his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce. | Thomas A. Edison | philosophy | |||
| I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. | Thomas A. Edison | advice | |||
| Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. | Thomas A. Edison | advice | |||
| Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. | Thomas A. Edison | advice | |||
| There's a way to do it better. Find it. | Thomas A. Edison | advice | |||
| You will have many opportunities in life to keep your mouth shut: You should take advantage of every one of them. | Thomas A. Edison | philosophy | |||
| One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. | Thomas B. Reed | science | |||
| There are but two ways of paying debt--increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out. | Thomas Carlyle | business | |||
| A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. | Thomas Jefferson | politics | |||
| An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. ... There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. | Thomas Jefferson | advice | |||
| If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. An unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. | Thomas Jefferson | 2nd amendment | |||
| Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people... that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. | Thomas Jefferson | 2nd amendment | |||
| The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. | Thomas Jefferson | 2nd amendment | |||
| The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| This should be a man's attitude: 'Few things will disturb him at all; nothing will disturb him much.' | Thomas Jefferson | advice | |||
| To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? | Thomas Jefferson | politics | |||
| When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of Freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation... the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police... the counties with the local concerns. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. | Thomas Jefferson | government | |||
| Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. | Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782. | government | |||
| I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky. | Thomas Jefferson, 1807, after hearing an eyewitness report of falling meteorites. | science | |||
| The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. | Thomas Jefferson. | 2nd amendment | |||
| If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. | Thomas J. Watson | advice | |||
| The idea of equal natural rights is not only the ground for government by consent, but also sets the limit for what that government may rightfully do. If rights precede the formation of government, the primary goal of government is to secure those rights. It cannot grant them, nor can it violate them. To achieve this, government must protect individuals equally under the law. | Thomas L. Krannawitter | government | |||
| A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle--before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime 'get out of jail free' card, exempting you from responsibility for what you do thereafter. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Democracy might be the most appropriate means of choosing government officials, but that does not imply that democracy equals freedom. Freedom requires more than the right to vote; it requires that each person be as unrestrained as possible from the arbitrary will of others--regardless of whether the others are conquering tyrants, hereditary oligarchs, black-robed judges, or a majority of neighbors or countrymen. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| Envy plus rhetoric equals social justice. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| For evidence that private property rather than democracy is the key to prosperity and freedom, I point to India and Hong Kong. In India the electoral franchise is wide and elections have long been regular, but property rights are weak. For most of the post-World War II era, in contrast, Hong Kong had no democracy, but property rights there have been among the strongest the world has ever seen. Indians are poor and shackled by a massively corrupt state; the people of Hong Kong are wealthy and free. Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication *and* a government bureaucracy to administer 'universal health care.' | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| 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 | government | |||
| Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Much of what are called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Some people believe in limited government as a principle. Others see limited government as simply a fact--that there are only a limited number of things that government can do more effectively than individuals or other organizations can do. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices *down* unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| 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 | politics | |||
| The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| To liberals, 'compassion' means giving less productive people the fruits of the efforts of more productive people. But real compassion means enabling less productive people to become more productive themselves. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| Two questions would destroy at least half the agenda of the political left: 'Compared to what?' and 'At what cost?' | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| What is politically defined as economic 'planning' is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational 'excellence,' I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity. | Thomas Sowell | education | |||
| Whenever you have a couple of hundred thousand human beings involved in any operation, you can rest assured that there will be some absolute jackasses among them--regardless of what country, race, religion or ideology these people come from. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in— power. | Thomas Sowell | politics | |||
| The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward. | Thomas Sowell | government | |||
| The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. | Thucydides | history | |||
| When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all. | Tim Freeman | 2nd amendment | |||
| Never ask a man what computer he uses. If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If it's not, why embarrass him? | Tom Clancy | computers | |||
| What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else. | Tom Clancy | government | |||
| A business plan should be used as an opportunity to sell your company, not your product. | Tom Crotty | business | |||
| The only way to make sure that government doesn't abuse its power is to not grant it in the first place. | Tom DeWeese | government | |||
| When you find a fabulous person, hire him (or her)... then figure out where they fit later. | Tom Engdahl | business | |||
| Government expands to absorb revenue... and then some. | Tom Wicker | government | |||
| A cult is a religion with no political power. | Tom Wolfe | politics | |||
| Pound for pound, forget gold, forget diamonds. There is nothing more valuable on Earth than an inkjet cartridge. | Tricia Judge, Imaging Spectrum magazine | computers | |||
| Institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. | T.B. Macaulay | government | |||
| It is hard for those who live near a Police Station to believe in the triumph of violence. | T.S. Eliot | politics | |||
| Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't want to do harm—but the harm does not interest them . . . or they do not see it . . . because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. | T.S. Eliot | philosophy | |||
| Professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. | USMC Gen. (ret.) Richard E. Hawley | 2nd amendment | |||
| Being against the military because you are against war is like being against the Fire Department because you are against fire. | USMC Maj. (ret.) Jim McDonough | 2nd amendment | |||
| TM2000-25: 118-120 DEMOCRACY: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic- negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy. | U.S. Army training manual, 1928 | government | |||
| TM2000-25: 120-121 REPUBLIC: Authority is derived throughout the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward property is respect for laws and individual rights, and a sensible economic procedure. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy [democracy]. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress. | U.S. Army training manual, 1928 | government | |||
| I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. | U.S. Grant | government | |||
| Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who have found it. | Vaclav Havel | advice | |||
| There is simply no possibility of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. You can leave that out of your thinking. I wish the American people would leave that out of their thinking. | Vannevar Bush, Chairman of NASA's predecessor NACA | space | |||
| An ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the *last* invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. | Vernor Vinge | computers | |||
| Earlier Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why it was at least better than the alternative, and why their culture had to be defended. Later, in ignorance, they forgot what they knew, in pride mocked who they were, and in consequence disappeared. | Victor Davis Hanson | history | |||
| The politics of the left are now about power, ego, status, and the notion of control, rather than genuine concern for the planet, or the creed of egalitarianism or for freedoms of the people. | VIctor Davis Hanson | politics | |||
| The United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. | Victor Davis Hanson | history | |||
| Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what 'better management' looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country. | Virginia Postrel | government | |||
| A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. | Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | 2nd amendment | |||
| It is true that liberty is precious--so precious that it must be rationed. | Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | government | |||
| A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady. | Voltaire | government | |||
| A large bank always tends to become larger, and a small one tends to become smaller. | Walter Bagehot, 1873 | business | |||
| Civilizations fail not because of a single bad mistake, but because of a series of bad mistakes. | Walter Cronkite | philosophy | |||
| The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively. | Walter Lippmann | government | |||
| The war for liberty never ends. One day liberty has to be defended against the power of wealth, on another day against the intrigues of politicians, on another against the dead hand of bureaucrats, on another against the patrioter and the militarist, on another against the profiteer, and then against the hysteria and the passions of the mobs, against obscurantism and stupidity, against the criminal and against the over-righteous. | Walter Lippmann | government | |||
| Helping the poor through the government is like feeding the sparrows through cows. | Walter Williams | government | |||
| If one person has a right to something he didn't produce, simultaneously and of necessity it means that some other person does not have right to something he did produce. That's because, since there's no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, in order for government to give one American a dollar, it must, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. I'd like to hear the moral argument for taking what belongs to one person to give to another person. | Walter Williams | government | |||
| In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists. | Whittaker Chambers | politics | |||
| It is a good thing that we do not get as much government as we pay for. | Will Rogers | government | |||
| The difference between death and taxes is: death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. | Will Rogers | government | |||
| The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office. | Will Rogers | government | |||
| Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it. | Will Rogers | government | |||
| As the modern nation-state has expanded, taking on ever more functions, the powers of the state bureaucracy have come to resemble the powers of an unaccountable aristocracy. Periodic elections merely deliver a somewhat different batch of aristocrats to the throne. | Will Wilkinson | government | |||
| Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing. | William Feather | advice | |||
| I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. | William F. Buckley | politics | |||
| I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies. | William F. Buckley Jr. | government | |||
| Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. | William Goldman | philosophy | |||
| Just imagine what Leonardo Da Vinci could have accomplished if he had had email. | William Hunt | computers | |||
| The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people. | William O. Douglas | government | |||
| A man who is not a liberal by the time he's 20 has no heart, and a man who is not a conservative by the time he's 40 has no brain. | Winston Churchill | politics | |||
| A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. | Winston Churchill | politics | |||
| Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. | Winston Churchill | history | |||
| If you are going through hell, keep going. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. | Winston Churchill | government | |||
| If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. | Winston Churchill | history | |||
| Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon. | Winston Churchill | business | |||
| That is something up with which I will not put. | Winston Churchill | humor | |||
| The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. | Winston Churchill | government | |||
| Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. | Winston Churchill | history | |||
| We contend that 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 | government | |||
| You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| There is no such thing as a good tax. | Winston Churchill | government | |||
| Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. | Winston Churchill | government | |||
| The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | Winston Churchill | politics | |||
| The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. | Winston Churchill | history | |||
| Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. | Winston Churchill | advice | |||
| Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. | Woodrow Wilson | government | |||
| Our liberties are safe until the memories and experiences of the past are blotted out... and our public school system has fallen into decay. | Woodrow Wilson | education | |||
| Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggie!' till you can find a rock. | Wynn Catlin | politics | |||
| Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival. | W. Edwards Deming | philosophy | |||
| If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too. | W. Somerset Maugham | government | |||
| Hire the people you trust, people who are passionate about their job, passionate about what they’re doing. Just leave them alone, and they’ll get the job done. | Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia apparel | advice | |||
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