Commonplace Book

‘Libertarians are people who see the game for what it is and want to change the rules.’ — Arnold Kling

‘In the druidical religion of liberalism, not separating your recyclables is a sin, but abortion is just a medical procedure.’ — Ann Coulter

‘I am a friends to the creatures of the Earth, when I am not eating them or wearing them.’ — John Hodgman

‘Just walking around and paying attention goes a long way towards figuring out opportunities and learning where things are.’ — Sebastian Marshall

‘Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.’ — James Taranto

‘We have to differentiate between forgiving those that undertake evil, to be free of bondage to the past, and retaining a dispassionate recollection of the events, to protect the future from repeats.’ — Smitty

‘Cleverness doesn’t scale.’ — Michael E Driscoll

‘We are what we repeatedly do.’ — Will Durant

‘The problem, of course, is if something allows bad habits, then it might as well encourage them.’ — Alastair McGowan-Douglas

‘Women have a gathering-derived sport, a huge one. It’s called “shopping.”‘ — Steve Sailer

‘A good test of a relationship is, are you happier with her than you are without her.’ — M K Freeberg

‘Just as a strongly flowing fountain is not blocked up by a handful of earth, so the compassion of the Creator is not overcome by the wickedness of his creatures.’ — St. Isaac the Syrian

‘We always ask where the time went. We never ask where it’s coming from.’ — James Lileks

‘Remember: All software is tested; some intentionally.’ — Andy Leonard

‘The poor – simply because they are poor – can only be local. A parish without the presence of the poor is just not local, and therefore not Orthodox.’ — Fr Jonathan Tobias

‘Artists are the elite of the servant class.’ — Jasper Johns

‘No self-respecting car thief would want to be seen driving a hybrid.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘God does not have a plan for your life, and He is not calling you to do anything more glamorous than the dishes.’ — The Ochlophobist

‘In the pyramid of privileged groups that the establishment has erected in modern Britain, Christians are plankton.’ — Roger Pearse

‘The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.’ — Robert Frost

‘Writing what you know is far too limited.’ — Charlene Teglia

‘Almost no one claims to get their best ideas at work.’ — Michael Gelb

‘Please point me to the poor person who provided you with a job?’ — Jason Mattera

‘What is really true in any society is what is worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.’ — Carolyn Marvin & David Ingle

‘Without other people, money management would be easy!’ — J. D. Roth

‘You can’t fix physics with software.’ — Leo Laporte

‘How small, of all that human hearts endure,
The part that laws or kings can cause or cure.’
– Samuel Johnson

‘Much of economics isn’t difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to “prove” that common sense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many common sense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘The easiest way to make noise within a community is to divide the tribe.’ — Seth Godin

‘Islam is not simply a religion. Islam is a socio-political system. It is a socio-political, socio-religious, socio-economic, socio-educational, socio-judicial, legislative, militaristic system cloaked in, garbed in religious terminology. And therefore Islam is not like any other religion…’ — Sam Solomon

‘Indeed, the main difference between the reactionary defenders of civilization and the “democrats” appears to be that the former understand the fragility of civilization and the barbarism always just below the surface, while the latter think only in terms of progress. However, those who actively work to destroy civilization know very well what it is, and they hate it. I would include in this class the elite, who hate that ordinary middle and working class people make up the bedrock of a nation, and hinder the elite’s globalism.’ — Dennis Mangan

‘Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own, with secret agendas. And, of course, if you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.’ — J. G. Ballard

‘Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.’ — Scott Adams

‘For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.’ — Bob Wells

‘There’s a special stove-top perch in the kitchen corner of hell for witty, urbane, prosperous, and celebrated leftists.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘We don’t aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine.’ — Andy McCarthy

‘Let us not forget that, in the end, democracy is just a form of government–and the only purpose of government (legitimate one, anyway) is to enable the unwashed masses to get about their lives with a minimum of grief and anxiety. That way they can invent, discover, explore and wallow in their own hassles, instead of being saddled with somebody else’s.’ — Eric Flint

‘Islamization is not a threat without large influxes of Muslims, who are alien to all Western countries.’ – El Inglés

‘In America, however, pundit means anyone who is willing to make a political opinion, no matter how banal, outlandish, or unjustified, so long as he’s never held accountable for it and is willing to change his opinion for an open bar and some free shrimp.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.’ -– G.K. Chesterton, 1923

‘Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ -– Viscount Falkland, 1641

‘Heroes understand the vast moral gulf between those who target the innocent and those who target those who target the innocent.’ — John Nolte

‘There is nothing new under the sun, only things we didn’t know about before.’ — Jeff Somers

‘The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from [stuff] is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.’ — Paul Graham

‘Explain stuff. There is no easier way to expose the holes in your own understanding than to try teaching someone else. Or if you really want to go nuts, try writing up the ideas that make you uncomfortable—the process, while painful, will clarify your thinking. The point is to never let ideas cross your mind without being engaged, or debated, or somehow extruded through discourse. When in doubt, hash it out.’ — Jeff Somers

‘If you see a Bulgarian on the street, beat him. He will know why.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘The first rule of freeloading is that you have nothing to gain by being shy.’ — Tim Cavanaugh

‘I’m not under any illusion that progress gives a damn about what I want.’ — Nicholas Carr

‘Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.’ — Mark Steyn

‘Amazing what you can do with a laptop: There is hardly any reason to rise from bed, until it’s time for a sundae. And you can take that back with you.’ — Jay Nordlinger

‘Useless laws weaken necessary laws.’ — Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.

‘We don’t want to know how to make government work. We want to know how to make it stop.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.’ — Ogden Nash

‘Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.’ — George Will

‘Right is right and Left is wrong.’ — Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

‘Conservatives tend to treat as hobbies what liberals treat as occupations.’ — Frank J.

‘History is the story of governments.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Good does not tolerate evil, but drives it out entirely. If you see a process inviting further evil, it may well be compromised itself. Chaos breeds more chaos; order must extirpate it entirely, or surrender to it.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable.’ — Theodore Dalrymple

‘When a project manager asks a developer ”How long will it take to develop feature xyz?” the developer hears “How long will it take to develop feature xyz?” I know. Crazy. What the project manager is often asking is “How long will it take to dissect the customer deliverable expectations; provide feedback to the business analysts until you and they agree on the deliverables; develop the software; perform unit, integration, functional, and performance tests; package the software for deployment; and complete the documentation for feature xyz?” It’s all in how we define the word “develop”.’ — Andy Leonard

‘In software, finding problems is the hard part. Fixing problems is easy.’ — Andy Leonard

‘If your work is evil, stop right now and find another job.’ — Andy Leonard

‘Why does the justice system keep criminal records? Because everyone has an internal list of acceptable actions. A criminal is someone who, ostensibly, has demonstrated they’re capable of breaking the law to obtain what they want. The law isn’t a barrier to their behavior; it doesn’t play into the equation of their acceptable actions. They’ve done it once, they are capable of doing it again. So information about their modus operandi and personal information about the individual (fingerprints, DNA) is kept on file by the authorities. If a similar crime is committed, cops start with people they know have committed this act in the past.’ — Andy Leonard

‘You get what you vote for.’ — Roger Clegg

‘If it’s really easy to get a job, the job probably isn’t worth much.’ — Seth Godin

‘If someone tries to steer you into the bedroom without some conspicuous data gathering, that is a sign of simple horniness.’ — Scott Adams

‘The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.’ — Scott Adams

‘Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.’ — Seth Godin

‘Unity is overrated.’ — Adam Baldwin

‘Fire eats history for lunch.’ — James Lileks

‘Life’s too short to phone it in.’ — Seth Godin

‘Never, ever take out your mood on your family. It’s the easiest thing to do and the least forgivable; they’re the ones to whom you owe your best self. The fact that they’re closest obligates you to be extra careful.’ — James Lileks

‘Conservatives think liberals should be ignored, liberals think conservatives should be incarcerated. Tell me again, who’s intolerant?’ — Martin Rose

‘It is futile to dispute tastes and impermissible to speak ill of forms, yet I would do both. I would say a word against movies and movie-going. It seems to me that an appetite for movies is a sign of bad taste, and ill-nourished is the man who feeds on them.’ — Jason Peters

‘Well, talking to experts does make a difference. Many of the great disasters of our time have been committed by experts.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘I don’t believe our government officials will do the right thing. They will do the right thing for special interests and for some sort of agenda that they’re not bringing me in on.’ — Glenn Beck

‘Human freedom does not legitimate bad moral choices, nor does it justify a stance that all moral choices are good if they are free.’ — Archbishop George H. Niederauer of San Francisco

‘It’s my belief that if you manifest two conflicting deadly sins, they cancel each other out.’ — James Lileks

‘From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.’ — Arnold Kling

‘Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.’  — Winston Churchill

‘I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.’ — Thomas Babington Macaulay

‘The Fun Suckers are a bit too careful, a bit too concerned, a bit too scrupulous. That’s bullshit. They’re evil and they hate us. The motive behind spoiling things for others and then throwing a wet blanket over the rained-on parade is a matter of neither caution nor morals. The Fun Suckers suck the fun out of life in order to gain control. They’ve found a way to achieve power without merit. Nothing requires less information, education, or accomplishment than saying that everything’s wrong. It’s wrong to risk lies, wrong to use up earth’s resources, wrong to pollute air, wrong to support an economic system that heightens income inequalities, wrong to own a big, expensive car, drive it fast, and vote Republican.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘Great code is easy to read.’ — Breck Yunits

‘Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.’ — Richard Rorty

‘First you have to fail, then you can improve.’ — Seth Godin

‘I know many smart liberals for whom no idea is too complex, no concept or organizational flow chart too hard to grasp. They want government to take over this, run that, manage some other things, and in all cases put people exactly like them in charge of pretty much everything. Many are geniuses, with SAT scores so high you could get a bloody nose just looking at them. But you wouldn’t ask one to run a car wash.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘Except as part of work (or in a crisis such as a battle, earthquake, or fire), in the presence of more than two people who are not members of my immediate family I slowly begin to disintegrate. I don’t like that, and what I like even less is when some people put me in such a position despite knowing from experience that I can’t tolerate it. Nonetheless, they do it repeatedly and enjoy and condemn my failure while they are quite willing to make allowance for thieves, murderers, and publishers. They will with weepy compassion forgive someone who beats them silly or kills for cigarettes, but they will not forgive me when all I want is not to be in the room.’ — Mark Helprin

‘Maintainability is the cornerstone of enterprise development.’ — Karl Seguin

‘Making your living with your tongue and fingertips is still cakewalk city compared to making your living with your back and your arms.’ — James Lileks

‘Christ did not come into the world to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.’ — Fr. Stephen Freeman.

‘A royal family is a family business. Not one king in European history can be found who ruined his own country to enrich himself, like an African dictator.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Among the many infirmities of age is omniscience.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.’ — Seth Godin

‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon these, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law teaches us but here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarise or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply laws, or they totally destroy them.’ — Edmund Burke

‘Until you recognize that the whole system has to go, you are a supporter of that system. Period.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘The journey is the destination.  As long as you ain’t goin’ nowheres in particular.’ — Steven Brust

‘I prefer freedom to the nanny state, but we don’t have that.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘As has always been the case, ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.’ — Rush Limbaugh, Undeniable Truth of Life #6

‘When we resent someone, we are beating ourselves up with their sin.’ — Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen

‘Look, I’ve been inside what would be called the right-wing conspiracy for a long time, and there’s no planning. These people couldn’t plan a bake sale.’ — Andrew Breitbart

‘Democracy models the process of mob violence, guesses who will win by counting heads, awards the state to the probable winner and skips the actual rioting.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘It’s an interesting word, demonstration. To demonstrate a gun, for instance, you can shoot a cantaloupe. The demonstration says: this cantaloupe could be your head. A demonstration in the political sense of the word says: these people are standing peacefully and holding signs, but they could be screaming like fiends, sacking offices, and giving GS-15s the Princesse de Lamballe treatment. In other words, every demonstration is an incipient mob. To demonstrate is to overawe and intimidate with the threat of potential violence.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Carlyle tells us: there is no right that is not also a might. Should your rights be violated, to whom will you appeal? If the judge of appeal is also the violator, or there is no judge, there is no law and no rights. More phantoms.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Royal men should know, in any event, that it’s social death to marry a girl who is named after a season, a south-west London borough or a grape variety.’ — George Pitcher

‘My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.’ — G. K. Chesterton

‘Nothing can be more offensive than to be lectured about what you know by someone who clearly does not know.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘Everyone insists on being the star of his own movie, on the Internet.’ — Jay Nordlinger

‘Art might very well be the insides of people’s heads. But there’s the insides of some people’s heads I don’t want to see.’ — Victoria Mixon

‘It’s an annoying habit of economists to hold on to homo economicus as a standard for rationality even after they have conceded that homo economicus is a more or less useless over-idealization.’ — Will Wilkinson

‘This “rugged individual” ideal, the self-sufficient property owner zealously guarding his freedom, is intrinsic to what American conservatism is all about, and it is an ideal quite alien to the urban lifestyle. The city-dweller is inherently dependent on public services. He doesn’t draw his water from a well, doesn’t go out with a chain-saw to supply firewood for the winter, doesn’t augment the grocery budget by hunting deer or growing his vegetables.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘What is of value today is measured on one scale only and that scale is achievement. The problem with this philosophy is that we take our sense of worth from what we do rather than from who we are. If something is good only if it works then we are only good if we work and only as good as the work we do.’ — Fr. James Coles

‘Christianity actually works, if you do it right.’ — Steven H Graham

‘Real things happen. Usually without a plan. They have to be judged as what they are. One can still plan, however. And since we cannot plan the real, we can only plan the ideal.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘All of us are good at a small number of things and suck at most everything else.’ — William Easterly

‘Thirsting for righteousness is all very well, but losing is always and unavoidably a melancholy business.’ — John Derbyshire

‘Idle minds are the devil’s research-and-development department.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so – at least, to those who can handle the truth.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Amateurs talk about tactics. Professionals talk about logistics. Buffy talks about getting it done.’ — Smitty

‘The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.’ — Margaret Thatcher

‘Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.’ — Texas A & M Contest for Best Definition of a Contemporary Term

‘I call this the Law of Inflated Expectations: The main cause of cynicism about business is consumer narcissism.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘Free people are not equal and equal people are not free.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘Obviously, no Christian assumes the Jews are right about everything, but they knew God during tens of centuries during which my ancestors were worshiping trees and eating each other, so when they talk, I listen.’ — Steve Graham

‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ — Vigetius

‘Modern intellectuals are waiting for the end of religion like pious Jews await the coming of the Messiah.’ — Rodney Stark

‘An economy is a network of conscious actors, who desire goods they can produce and exchange.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘It would be an overstatement to say that all fallacies in economics proceed from the error of attributing objective value. But it might not be much of one. Objective value is the luminiferous ether of economics. There is no such thing as value (objective desirability) – there is only price (exchange rate on a clearing market).’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘The worst thing about Depression isn’t the sense that you’re ac-centuating the negative, it’s that you’re seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It’s the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.’ – James Lileks

‘Whoever said torture doesn’t work has never gotten a Brazilian.’ — Scott Stantis

‘Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.’ — George FitzHugh

‘I refuse to recognize the moral supremacy of smelly protesters with nose rings and neck tattoos.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘I think that the main issue with inequality is not the gap between the rich and the poor. It is the gap between the earnings of top business leaders and the salaries of academics and journalists.’ — Arnold Kling

‘But even in our seemingly advanced society, fascism still seethes just beneath the surface - behind a smile, an empathetic word, a good intention.  People like to control people.’ — Charles Winecoff

‘You see, evil doesn’t just show up.  It disguises itself as something nice; so you’ll let it in.  It tricks you.’ — Victoria Jackson

‘A cheat in private is going to be a cheat in public. Someone who lies in private is going to lie in public, and you can’t trust someone who does that.’ — Bill Bennett

‘It takes all kinds to make a world. I just wish sometimes they’d go off and make one of their own.’ — James Lileks

‘Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If they’re any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.’ — Howard Aiken

‘If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.’ — George Bernard Shaw

‘Failure is nature’s way of saying “Don’t do that any more!”‘ — Megan McArdle

‘Unlike voting in an election, cooking a meal is a positive step towards a better world.’ — Martin Regnen

‘I’ve always thought the first duty of government is the security of the governed.’ — Andy McCarthy

‘When you leave the world a better place than you found it, you matter.’ — Seth Godin

‘The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.’ — Marcus Tullius Cicero

‘We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.’ — Walter Mischel

‘When every aspect of your life is in place, from your job performance to your personal finances to your love life to your friendships, you don’t have to screen calls.’ — The Rawness

‘Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.’ — Michael J. Fox

‘The history of civilization can be seen as a continuing conversion of output into structure. This continues until the structure makes growth difficult to impossible. Guilds, mercantile policies, Church rules, and what they used to call “permit Raj” stifle initiative and growth. Historically this has changed when resources suddenly multiply either by discovery – the discovery of the New World, as an example – or by technology, as with the several Industrial Revolutions and the Computer Revolution. Output rises, wealth rises, and the bureaucracies can’t keep up. Eventually they do, of course, and the long term conversion to structure continues and overwhelms the growth.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘Without trust we can know nothing, but trust must always be a product of reason. It can never be automatic. It must always be considered and tested.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Would that those in power began to study Islam, began to ponder what the ideology of Islam, its politics and geopolitics, its Muslim and Arab supremacism, really means for the world’s Infidels, their art, their science, their freedoms, their statues — and even their dogs.’ — Hugh FitzGerald

‘We work and work, and if we win we will have to work at something else.’ — Rick Brookhiser

‘Macroeconomics is mostly ex-post storytelling.’ — Russell Roberts

‘An orderly room is like a beautiful woman. It gives you pleasure just by existing.’ — Steven H Graham

‘The first thing to remember about your market is that there is no just price. Supply and demand are constantly fluctuating, and so must price. The market does not know why buyers buy or sellers sell. It records only the price signal.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘I don’t write for you. I write for me. I write to create the stories I want to read, the stories that I cannot find on bookshelves, the stories that are about more than just a relationship, or just an adventure. I want to read stories written from a coherent, well-thought-out viewpoint, where the worldbuilding has been created and not copied, where the characters are doing things important to them, where the underlying theme is about something important.’ — Holly Lisle

‘What appears to be “stable” is always moving in some direction — so, if it’s not moving in yours, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s.’ — Mark Steyn

‘Life is tough.  It’s tougher if you’re stupid.’ — John Wayne

‘Doing what you’re not supposed to do can save your life.’ — Holly Lisle

‘For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.’ — Thomas Babington Macaulay

‘Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones.’ — Mark Liberman

‘Rules aren’t like shackles, intended purely to deprive you of liberty. They’re like frames that guide tomato plants and help them produce more fruit.’ — Steve Graham

‘Governments can indeed make a difference – but it is not always a difference for the better. Probably everyone has their own example of cases where action by central government, intended to make something better, has actually ended up making it much worse.’ — Alasdair Palmer

‘The politics of the lumpen haut bourgeois elite amount to little more than a series of self-righteous and phony romantic poses designed to justify power grab politics and government by whim.’ — David Zincavage

‘Whenever I see tragedy I immediately look for the economic opportunity it creates.’ — Scott Adams

‘Europeanism is like Communism: the less time you’ve spent living it in practice the better disposed you are to it in theory.’ — Mark Steyn

‘All hardware stores should have a Store Dog, just as bookstores should have a Store Cat.’ — James Lileks

‘To me, hair is either brown or it isn’t, and you either have some or you don’t. The rest is beneath my radar.’ — Scott Adams

‘A conservative is one who, rather than simply rejecting the revolutionary tradition of democracy, finds some effective way to contaminate it with reality, thus producing a weak but somewhat effective simulation of archism out of basically anarchist materials. Conservatism always appears, because it is easy. And it always fails, because it is weak and fraudulent. It is a case of tiling over the linoleum.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can’t really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty.’ — Penelope Trunk

‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’ — John F. Kennedy

‘Mistaking a tree branch for a lurking predator is a less costly mistake than misidentifying a lurking predator as a tree branch.’ — David Friedman

‘The primary purpose of government is to hire and pay government employees.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘There is nothing unlibertarian about giving advice.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.’ — Warren Buffet

‘You can make more money. You can’t make more time.’ — Torley Wong

‘There’s nothing you can do if people don’t know the classics.’ — James Lileks

‘The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a good measure of both.’ — Milton Friedman

‘Real conservatives understand that control of government isn’t the key to making a wonderful world. At best we can get rid of some obstacles and give people opportunities to improve their lives.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘The economic benefits of wealth in a free market quickly overflow the humble vessel that is Paris Hilton, and they do not trickle down, they pour.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.’ — Tom Clancy

‘People tend to become more conservative as they age. That’s because we learn as we get older, and as a result, older people know more than young people.’ — Steven H Graham

‘Sports is to war what pornography is to sex. It gives us an opportunity to practice.’ — Jonathan Haidt

‘Limited government is a perpetual-motion machine: a product axiomatically fraudulent by definition. In any human organization, final authority rests with some person or persons, not with any rule, process or procedure.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘We live surrounded by people who do not hold themselves in high esteem, perhaps with good reason.’ — Jose Ortega y Gasset

‘Passion is the thing you can’t control, by definition.’ — Scott Adams

‘People who are better at producing moral ends are morally better.’ — Will Wilkinson

‘There is no libertarian state of nature in which human beings survived without some form of coercively enforced rules.  All libertarianism can do is maximize the scope for individual action within that framework.’ — Megan McArdle

‘Be friendly to everyone. But have a plan to kill them.’ — attributed to an unidentified Secret Service agent

‘Never do for money what you would not do for love.’ — Holly Lisle

‘Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I cannot possibly imagine reading a book that deals entirely with relationships. There has to be something else. Like ebola, or rockets.’ — James Lileks

‘Friends are easy. Sex is hard.’ — John Scalzi

‘Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.’ — Judge Learned Hand

‘A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘When you have no plan, you can’t say things didn’t go the way you expected, because you had no expectations to start.’ — John Scalzi

‘There is not much point in having brilliant ideas if we cannot persuade people of their value.’ — Paul Sloane

‘To learn to see the real, start by learning to unsee the forgery.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘It’s amazing how much “native talent” looks like sweat when you come right down to it.’ — Elizabeth Bear

‘College is the only place where you can rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell you to do.’ — Steve Graham

‘If you don’t want to be treated like a doormat, stop acting like one.’ — Lynn Viehl

‘You always know you’re doing the right thing if all the right people are in a snit.’ — Andy McCarthy

‘It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.’ — Megan McArdle

‘Here is a fact of life: Nobody will ever be as interested in looking after you as you are.’ – Steven H Graham

‘You should have a life first in order to have anything meaningful to say to others about living.’ — Mike Brotherton

‘It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of social services. There is a tendency to forget the most important social service a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.’ — Sir John Slessor

‘The game is deep, and not for the unwatchful.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Solve a problem, not a class of problems. Only after you’ve thoroughly solved that problem can you work on expanding it. Really, it’s okay to not have your product do everything, as long as it does something well.’ — Jonathan Tang

‘Glocks are boring and ugly, but they work.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘Lots of smart people believe in stupid things.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they go.’ — Joseph Schumpeter

‘Evil is stronger than good, because it is never worried or confused by scruples.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Quite frankly, I find it amateurish to take sides in the past. We study the past so that we can take sides in the present.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Don’t expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth.’ — Edith Hamilton

‘I suspect that the primary emotional motivation for most progressives is that they’re progressives because they think something needs to be done about conservatives.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘You cannot single-handedly accomplish the mission. But you sure can screw it up.’ — Schmedlap

‘I don’t have the enthusiasm for fashionable macro-panics.’ — James Lileks

‘When you die, you can’t take “hip” with you.’ — Steven H Graham

‘Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.’ — Will Rogers

‘The future should never come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.’ — James Lileks

‘The folly of those who persist, as is supposed, without reason, in not taking advice, has been much expatiated upon. But the folly of those who persist, without reason, in forcing their advice upon others, has been but little dwelt upon, though it is, perhaps, the more frequent, and the more flagrant of the two. It is not often that one man is a better judge for another, than that other is for himself, even in cases where the adviser will take the trouble to make himself master of as many of the materials for judging, as are within the reach of the person to be advised. But the legislator is not, can not be, in the possession of any one of these materials.’ — Jeremy Bentham

‘Critics of utilitarianism like to talk about the problem of aggregating utilities between persons; I’m not even sure there’s much hope of aggregating them within persons.’ — Julian Sanchez

‘Your personal beliefs often have nothing to do with whether the people in power regard you as an enemy. You might be just a good target.’ — Harry Erwin

‘I find that when I tell lawyer jokes to a mixed audience, the lawyers don’t think they’re funny and the nonlawyers don’t think they’re jokes.’ — Chief Justice John Roberts

‘Reality doesn’t go away just because you stop believing in it.’ — John Derbyshire

‘The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.’ — John Derbyshire

‘Most of the world’s work is done by people who are not feeling very well.’ — Winston Churchill

”The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.’ — Mark Steyn

‘It may be harder to resist a Totalitarian state which relies on free milk and birth control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and concentration camps.’ — Christopher Dawson

‘I put a very high value on human life — at least $50,000 … plus expenses.’ — Alaric Greythorn

‘It’s not the ideas, it’s what you do with them that matters.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘If you cannot learn to listen, you will not succeed.’ — Holly Lisle

‘Idiot-proof systems fail because they can always build a better idiot.’ — Arnold Kling

‘Assumptions are only useful when messing with the minds of the people who make them.’ — Holly Lisle

‘Fairy tales don’t teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed.’ — G. K. Chesterton

‘It’s odd how often the people who clamor most for respect are among the least deserving.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘If you’re selling something that’s easily copied, you’re selling the wrong thing.’ — Michael Masnick

‘It is manifestly clear and has been proven in practice and by the facts of all revolutions that a struggle for ideals, for improvements of any kind whatsoever, absolutely must be supplemented with a struggle against some social class or caste.’ — Adolf Hitler, 1922

‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.’ — Jonathan Swift

‘Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.’ — Robert M. Pirsig

‘While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what’s more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that’s not what we are about.’ — Robert X. Cringely

‘Are there any psychiatric studies that show how accurate psychiatric studies are?’ — Justice Antonin Scalia

‘One nice thing about being wealthy is that when you’re attacked by the press, you can hire lawyers.’ — Robert Frank

‘It is obvious to anyone with a brain and an AK-47 that the Americans are (a) pussies, and (b) going to leave sooner or later.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.’— Tom Wilson

‘The only country in the world with any meaningful right-wing political element is the US. This is not a coincidence.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Writing is like pooping. At a given instant, you’re either ready to do it or you’re not.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.’ — Peter Drucker

‘The truth is out there. But you have not a thousandth of the time, money, or mind you would need to find it on your own.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘I’m sure there’s a difference between leadership and evil, I just don’t know what it is.’ – Scott Adams

‘I don’t think there’s such a thing as trivia. There are only facts waiting for a narrative.’ — James Lileks

‘The best possible position to be in is you. When you’re you, you don’t have to do any work. All you have to do is wake up each morning and refuse to be defined by other people.’ — RyanHoliday

‘Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.’ — Joss Whedon

‘I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.’ — Lev Tolstoi

‘The people who love you will come and go, but your enemies will stick to you like wet socks in August.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.’ — C. S. Lewis

‘There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know.’ — Ambrose Bierce

‘Every male knows what it’s like to look around his house, see things he wishes he could do, realize he can’t cut it, give up, and go watch TV. The more tools you own and know how to use, the less often that happens.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘It’s hard to enjoy the game if you don’t respect the players.’ — James Lileks

‘Get an automatic transmission. Why make yourself miserable?’ — Steven H. Graham.

‘Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it’s shockingly indulgent of poor people.’ — Michael Lewis

‘Men are animals, but women don’t like animals, so men behave. That’s roughly my definition of civilization.’ — Yuval Levin

‘Vapidity is the one character flaw that comes with its own missile defense system.’ — David Brooks

‘The enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason and not ours. He does not hate us for our faults any more than for our virtues. He sees a different world from ours, and in the world he sees, we are his enemy. This is hard for us to comprehend, but we must if we are to grasp what the concept of the enemy means.’ – Lee Harris

‘I always hate using the word “meme”, because it makes me sound like an asshole, but there’s no denying that it says “received belief” with a lot fewer wiggles of the tongue.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Public-minded people are always such morons and pests. It’s never about common sense and promoting prosperity and freedom. It’s always about telling other people what to do.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘The purpose of empire is to provide political validation for the imperialist party back home.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘We don’t need alternate fuels. We need alternate politicians.’ — Paul Mulshine

‘“Insulation” is another term for spending Other People’s Money. Politicians are predisposed not to see spending Other People’s Money as a problem, because spending Other People’s Money is what politicians do for a living. If politicians thought there were something wrong with it, they would be in a different line of work.’ — Michael F. Cannon

‘I think the time to talk to them is after you’ve beaten them.’ — John Edwards

‘Talking to lefties is like trying to talk to children. Rational argument and facts don’t impress.’ Dennis Byrne

‘Genius is topical. It therefore has to be proved anew in each domain. We even have a fallacy with a Latin name — Argumentum ad verecundiam — to remind us not to think that just because a person is an expert in one field, she’s also to be relied upon in other fields.’ — David Weinberger

‘The road to socialist hell is lined with conservative cheerleaders.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘In standards, complexity is death.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Crowds terrify intellectuals.’ — Ferdinand Mount

‘The whole city of Washington is in the power business, and they don’t screw around.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you’re perceived as intelligent.’ — Steve Wozniak

‘Power is always hard to let go of, even when it’s imaginary.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.’ — Kingsley Amis

‘Perhaps the most important fact about power is that the powerful are almost always sincere. They honestly believe they are doing good. Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘Being able to name an exception or two to a general rule does not invalidate the rule.’ — John Scalzi

‘One notes that all the hippie ideas of the ’60s that involved making the State bigger and stronger have (pretty much) happened, whereas all the others have (pretty much) not.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘The advocates of mass immigration today seek to break the template for American society created by the original settlers.’ — Randall Parker

‘The real problem of democracy is bipartisan agreement on foolish policies.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘The sad truth is that you can have peace processes all you like, but if one side is committed to war, then it’s war.’ — John Podhoretz

‘Contrary to popular opinion, most adults worldwide did not achieve that advanced state of being by skipping the intermediary step of being a teenager. We understand what it’s like to be a teenager just fine.’ — John Scalzi

‘The nice thing about tomorrow is, we can bring the best parts of yesterday along with us.’ — Dean Ing

‘All organized religions codify and enforce restrictions on sexual behavior’ — John Podhoretz

‘He’s an arrogant, ruthless son of a bitch, a power-hungry bully with a mean streak the width of the Asteroid Belt. I like that in a presidential candidate.’ — John Derbyshire

‘The original sin of America’s health-care system is employer-provided health insurance.’ — Arnold Kling

‘The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.’ — Edmund Burke

‘Funny, how immigration invariably flows from Muslim countries to non-Muslim countries. I suppose paradise can be tiresome.’ — Steven H. Graham

‘History – It’s just everywhere.’ — James Lileks

‘You are who you are, not who you say you are.’ — Rush Limbaugh

‘I think there’s a point at which people lose the ability to pretend they have any sort of aesthetic criteria, and embrace whatever’s loud and ugly simply because loud and ugly is the style of the times.’ — James Lileks

‘No commentor in the history of the world ever went broke worrying that today’s kids are immoral swine.’ — Jason Fry

‘In a wealthy society the knottiest problems are usually the consequences of moral choices.’ — Mark Steyn

‘Well, every journey begins with a single step. That always sounds so hopeful and simple, but it could apply to falling down the stairs in the dark too, you know.’ — James Lileks

‘You’re probably aware of the fact that however smart you are you won’t be able to remember what you went into the kitchen to get.’ — Jeremy Wagstaff

‘This idea that intellectuals have a duty to lead the non-intellectual masses is a lot of how we got into this mess to begin with.’ – Mencius Moldbug

‘The key to social prosperity is not employment but production.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘If you can’t annoy somebody there’s little point in writing.’ — Kingsley Amis

‘If you reward bad behavior, you just get more bad behavior.’ — Mark Steyn

‘I generally think folks who say they “don’t believe in labels” have almost always been liberals who are embarrassed or otherwise put off by the prospect of admitting it.’ – Jonah Goldberg

‘If the illegal immigrants are here to do the jobs Americans won’t do, maybe they could come up with a coherent Iran strategy.’ — Andy McCarthy

‘I don’t have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it’s stupid.’ — Dave Barry

‘…the charge of hypocrisy, one of those sins that bothers the adolescent imagination more than any other.’ — James Lileks

‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’ — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

‘The problem with computers is not the worlds they give us instant access to but the world they encourage us to neglect.’ — Roger Kimball

‘At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.’ — Paul Fussell

‘Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.’ — Ross Douthat

‘It is time people realized that “human rights codes” are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual.’ — David Warren

‘Any parent that relies on any law to help him parent is an idiot.’ — Dave Barry.

‘Somehow students think the word “prank” will insulate them from consequences.’ — James Lileks

‘There’s no such thing as off the record any more.’ – Glenn Harlan Reynolds

‘Anyone can become “American,” but they have to want to, first.’ — Peggy Noonan

‘When all you have is bullet-points, your ammunition is pretty quickly spent.’ — Diana Schaub

‘It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.’ — Canada Bill Jones

‘I’ve noticed that most people who romanticize the French Revolution are a little unclear on the details, particularly how it turned out.’ – James Lileks

‘Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.’ — Michael Gerson

‘Americans used to say they wanted their kids to be just like Lincoln: kind, principled, resolute. But what we’ve really wanted is for Lincoln to be like us.’ — Andrew Ferguson

‘On Twitter, everyone knows you’re obsessed with cheese, but no one has to remember it.’ — John Scalzi

‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.’ – Sir Francis Bacon
‘And sociopathy a marketable man.’ — Tim of Angle

‘The thing is that people who went to college mostly don’t know about rednecks, or how many there are, or why they do what they do. What they think they know is usually wrong.’ — Fred On Everything

‘Your mistakes are your own to make – until you expect others to pay for them.’ — Peter Suderman

‘The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.’ — Steven Wright

‘All around us is prose intended not to convey meaning, but to mask and distort.’ — John Leo

‘One of the structural problems of democracies (though having written that, I doubt non-democracies are any better) is that a lot of problems, especially problems that are connected to sensitive or taboo topics, are allowed to grow quietly until they become unmanageably large, the scattered few people drawing attention to them being denounced for political incorrectness. Then the dimwit pols all “wake up one day,” panic, and do something sensationally dumb.’ — John Derbyshire

‘I pretended to be someone I wanted to be, and I finally became that person.’ — Cary Grant

‘The problem with economics these days is not so much the various models as that economists believe that having models lets them get away without knowing much about the real world.’ — Steve Sailer

‘In life’s rich tapestry, there are bound to be questions to which there are no good answers.’ — Mark Steyn

‘The only thing that is “easy” is mediocrity.’ — Harlan Ellison