Commonplace Book

‘If you spend your whole life solving well-defined problems with well-defined solutions, you’re unlikely to suddenly pose interesting problems or find startling solutions.’ — Andy Matuschak

‘The Primer also recognizes that learning is an act of identity construction. When I learn about a topic, I’m not just learning facts and abstractions. I’m becoming, at least partially, the kind of person who practices that discipline. I’m taking on some of that domain’s values and perspectives. I’m changing the way I view myself and the world.’ — Andy Matuschak

‘If you can laugh in the face of adversity, you’re bullet-proof.’ — Ricky Gervais

‘Hope is not a strategy.’ — Andy Ihnatko

‘Often linguistic analysis clarifies ambiguities.’ — Palo Belardi

‘If you can’t explain it to a five-year-old, you don’t really understand it.’ — Richard Feynman

‘There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.’ — Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield

‘Meritocracy produces the most insufferable ruling class in history.’ — Eugene McCarraher

‘Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.’ — David Mamet

‘If you hear the shot, it wasn’t meant for you.’ — Samuel L. Jackson

‘Management is a skill, like negotiation, interviewing, database management, UX, or a thousand other skills. It’s not a role.’ — Daniel B. Markham

‘America – we’re the only country in the world afraid of our food.’ — Frankie Machine

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” – Albert Einstein

‘The only people who are bothered by inequality are rich liberals.’ — Carol Graham

‘Mainstream ideas are mainstream for a reason.’ — Jame Brandon

‘Simulated emotions are bad, kids. Just be you. When you’re just you—you’ll discover that you love your family more than your neighbors, your neighbors more than random fellow citizens, random fellow citizens more than random humans, random humans more than random dogs, and random dogs more than random lizards.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘We all come in at the end of something, but we don’t realize it until we look back later.’ — James Lileks

‘Clichés are important, or they wouldn’t be clichés.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘It is always essential to understand those who do not understand.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘Everything Woke turns to shit.’ — Donald Trump

‘When we ask human beings to tell their stories in a safe space where everyone who shares will feel heard, and no one at all will feel judged, we are creating a machine to nourish narcissism. We are asking people to discover themselves—a hard problem. Instead they will invent themselves—which is much easier. So what if the image and the reality diverge? All that matters is the image, anyway.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘Do not try to make your brain perfect – try to keep it clean.’ — Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

‘Even smart people are dumb about the future.’ – ZMan

‘A lone fanatic is just a weirdo.’ – Severian

‘The only easy day was yesterday.’ — Marine Corps aphorism

‘Politics is a special case of war; war is a human universal; the military mind is a default feature.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘The success of any trap lies in its fundamental simplicity. The reverse trap by the nature of its single complication must be swift and simpler still.’ — Jason Bourne

‘If you wanna get ahead, you gotta hump ‘n’ git it.’ — Merle Haggard

‘Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.’ — Kurt Vonnegut

‘We’re happier if we don’t have too much free time.’ — Fumio Sasaki

‘If you want to do good, you actually have to help people. Merely attempting to help people is not enough.’ — Evan J. Conrad

‘There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts–the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘Saying stupid things in public doesn’t help anybody.’ — Scott Adams

‘Pay enough for anything and it passes for taste.’ — Sue Grafton

‘What can be phrased and expressed in a clear narrative that convinces suckers will be a sucker trap.’ — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

‘Just because an outcome is easily measurable does not make it meaningful.’ — Jason Fung

’What cannot be done with honour cannot be done at all.’ — Henry Fox, Lord Holland

‘Fair is a word for children and idiots.’ — Scott Adams

‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.’ — Dante

‘Everyone knows that habit becomes character.’ — Theodore Dalrymple

‘No one would live as a knight and role-play as a marketing consultant.’ — Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

‘I don’t know of anybody who complained their way to success.’ — Scott Adams

‘One of the difficulties about great thinkers is that they so often think wrong.’ — Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury

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

‘Everyone starts out life as a gamer.’ — Sid Meier

‘Agriculture sits at the foundation of every other form of production.’ —Brett Devereaux

‘Just because we can measure something doesn’t mean that it matters.’ — Peter Schryvers

‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ — William Bruce Cameron

“Any educational system aiming at a complete adjustment between education and society will tend to restrict education to what will lead to success in the world, and to restrict success in the world to those persons who have been good pupils of the system.” — T. S. Eliot

“Never use a long word when a short one will do.” — George Orwell

”True history is not a set of facts. It is a true story made from facts.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.’ — Calvin Coolidge

‘Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.’ — Winston Churchill

‘The fact is, winning is about avoiding error.’ — ZMan

‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Than quit. No use being a damned fool about it.’ — W. C. Fields

‘Comfort is a beautiful garden but careers won’t grow there.’ — Nick Caldwell

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ — Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury

‘Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.’ — Adam Smith

‘I don’t think we should build any more nuclear weapons until we’ve used the ones we’ve got.’ — Joe Sobran

‘Watching people try to kill each other teaches important economic lessons.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘One of the defining characteristics of bad art is that it sends the opposite message from what’s intended.’ — Severian

‘Chance favors only the prepared mind.’ — Pasteur

‘Smart people spend money to solve problems, not just to get stuff.’ — ZMan

‘The best luck is the luck you make for yourself.’ — Douglas MacArthur

‘In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.’ – Paul Harvey

‘Feminism is always a lecture, never a debate.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘The self-righteous make the best killers.’ — ZMan

‘The deadness of machine work causes us to prize the spirited and varied touch that can only be imparted by the hand.’ — Mrs Caddy

‘Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.’ — Lord Bacon

‘In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.’  — Benjamin Franklin

‘Liberals ruin things.’ — Rush Limbaugh

‘Thanks to the Great Society and its endless ramifications, our “poor” people while away their hours in front of plasma tvs and keel over from diabetes and heart disease .  They’re not poor because they lack money and opportunity; they’re poor because they lack IQ and impulse control.’ — Severian

‘Think about what you’re trying to teach, and design drills for it.’ — James Koppel

‘When worlds collide, it’s mostly inside.’ — Donald Maass

‘In the face of uncertainty, buy options.’ — Eric S. Raymond

‘The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choices of all meaningfulness.’ — Joseph Heath

‘You should never, ever argue with your spouse about anything that could be solved with a proper application of money or ingenuity.’ — Megan McArdle

‘You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.’ — Al Capone

‘I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.’ — John Adams, describing the Crustian cursus honorum.

‘But I think that, as a general rule, we should be very careful about overthrowing long-standing practices.’ — Jared Taylor

‘The starting point of any sane society must be freedom of association. No one has the right to be around you or have easy access to your culture.’ — ZMan

‘Context is the enemy of idiots.’ — Scott Adams

‘A fight is not won with one punch or one kick. Learn to endure, or hire a bodyguard.’ — Bruce Lee

‘If your idea for creating a better world is by raising taxes, then you haven’t thought it through.’ — Scott Adams

‘Everything looks difficult if you don’t know how to do it.’ — Scott Adams

‘Gold sinks but poop floats.’ — John Derbyshire

‘People are not plants and rights are not needs.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘Republicans aren’t good for much other than cutting taxes and freeing slaves.’ — Charles C. W. Cooke

‘The sign that points to Boston doesn’t have to go there.’ — Max Scheler

‘If you’re going to lose one of your senses, definitely lose your sense of smell. You won’t miss it as much as you might think.’ — Scott Adams

‘Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.’ — Ann Landers

‘It is said that a speech is like a skirt, it should be short enough to hold people’s attention but long enough to cover the subject.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘If you’ve made a deal with the Devil, it’s because no one else has made you more favorable terms.’ — M. E. Thomas, CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH

‘Women tend to write about three things: Themselves, other women, and their plumbing.’ — ZMan

‘All you have to do is disagree with the Left and automatically you’re a bully. … That’s how they co-opt the language.’ — Rush Limbaugh

‘The freedom of nations is of little human value.  It is only the liberty of the individual that counts.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘According to the nature of things, the law cannot grant a benefit to any, without, at the same time, imposing a burden on some one else.’ — Jeremy Bentham

‘Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice.’ — William Zinsser

‘You cain’t fix stupid.’ — Ron White

‘Nothing empowers a polity more succinctly than its armed forces; no act more clearly defines its ultimate interests than a decision to fight.’ — Hew Strachan

‘We humans make every decision based on our own subjective backstory, aka our past experience. Our brain is wired to instantly rip through our mental Rolodex (remember those?) in order to figure out the one thing we’re all striving for every minute of every day: what to do in order to survive. Every action we ever take is driven by what our backstory assures us is the right thing to do. We never stop acting based on backstory. We can’t. And so our past is continually woven into our present, ever defining it.’ — Lisa Cron

‘There’s no trick to being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.’ — Will Rogers

‘When the light bulb was invented, no one complained that it was too dim.’ — Steve Jobs

‘In problem-solving, a solution must address the actual root causes of the problem, not simply screen for the defect; but in government, problems are simply opportunities to do whatever you wanted to do already.’ — Mike Flynn

‘The Left has always defined itself as standing between an imaginary bogeyman and some imaginary victim group.’ — ZMan

‘If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help.’ — Matthew B. Crawford

‘I early learned that the root cause of panics was Democrats.’ — Whittaker Chambers

‘The work a man does forms him.’ — Matthew B. Crawford

‘Libertarianism works fine as long as your society is composed of high IQ sociopaths, who can manage on their own. Once you have people like those working for the state, and getting services from the state, libertarianism collapses. The people in the waiting area not only need rules, they need help following the rules. That’s not going to happen through voluntary association. Unless you have genocide in your heart, libertarianism cannot survive outside the lab.’ — ZMan

‘Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.’ — Whittaker Chambers

‘If you have ever worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work.’ — John Kenneth Galbraith

‘Declaring a right is different from securing a right.’ — Steven Hayward

‘If you operate every day in favor of Future You, you’ll eventually achieve your goals.’ — Steven Pressberg

‘Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation.  In light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilisation, socialists in fact incite people to break the law.’ — F. A. von Hayek

‘There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.’ — Steve Rogers, Captain America

‘Protectionism is theft, on two fronts.  First, it robs consumers of freedom.  Second, it robs consumers of some of their wealth – their property – by compelling them to pay higher prices for protected goods and services.’ — Don Boudreaux

‘There is a difference between emotional response (evolved stimulus-response adaptations) and the ideologies that elevate human emotion to a metaphysical state (emotionalism).’ — Rollo Tomassi

‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.’ — Padraic Pearse

‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ — William Morris

‘Nature never draws a line without smudging it.’ — Winston Churchill

‘The characteristic activity of friendship is conversation.’ — Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

‘I never want to belong to any club that would have anyone else as a member.’ — Kathy Shaidle

‘Medical science is like nuclear weapons, which once invented can’t be uninvented.’ — Allan Massie

‘People who take life seriously need to keep the people who don’t take life seriously at arm’s length.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘If you’re brooding about the future of your country, a former British colony is the wrong place to do it. It suggests too much.’ — Tucker Carlson

‘You wonder how many Words to Live By are really Words to Die By in costume.’ — James Lileks

‘There is much to be said for a democratic system of government, as there is much to be urged on behalf of an autocratic system. There is nothing whatever that can be urged in favour of a constitution which, under the name of democracy, has in effect every faculty of government in the hands of a small clique which has cheated the people of every vestige of effective control over the national policy.’ — F. E. Smith, KC

‘Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.’ — Terrence Deacon

‘He that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.’ -– John Smith, 1609

‘I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind.’ — G. K. Chesterton

‘You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children. Fairness isn’t an objective quality of the universe.’ — Scott Adams

‘Western culture is a derelict, on the corner, who, having snorted too much Marx, keeps stabbing itself in the face with a pen and widdling its pants.’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘One of the most fascist things I have ever heard is the phrase “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”‘ —Jonah Goldberg

‘Politics is downstream of culture.’ — John C. Wright

‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ — Blaise Pascal

‘Politicians would rather do something that makes the problem worse than do nothing at all.’ — William Easterly

‘Never do up two buttons on your suit jacket.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because then you’d look like a newscaster.’ — Charlie Allen, tailor.

No skill is ever wasted.

‘Governments don’t produce jack. All governments do is get in the way.’ — Rush Limbaugh

‘You are what you do. Not what you think.’ — Scott Adams

‘Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.’ — Frank Herbert

‘Everybody wants change but nobody wants to change.’ — Alan Cooper

‘Social media ensures that everyone is watching.’ — Scott Adams

‘Technology breeds anarchy.’ — Frank Herbert

‘Government can hardly ever do just one thing. Its action has repercussions, and these repercussions have repercussions, and so forth. Even when the government’s initial action may seem compassionate or productive, it is highly unlike that the repercussions will prove likewise.’ — Bob Higgs

‘Men are born beasts.  But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well.  Getting an education is like becoming a Marine.  Men need to be made into Marines.  By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide.  The education itself drums that truth into you.’ — Tyler Cowen

‘Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.’ — George Orwell

‘A polite asshole is still an asshole.’ — Rudolf Olah

‘I sell my soul, but at the highest rates.’ — Harlan Ellison

‘When you lay out a picnic, you get ants.  When you hand out more wealth through government, you get lobbyists.  The federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.’ — David Boaz

‘It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you place the blame.’ — Oscar Wilde

The reason to go out on a limb is because that’s where the fruit is.

‘Sometimes the herd needs culling.’ — Domingo Chavez

Democracy is a means, not an end.

‘Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.’ — Gerard Biard

‘Tattoos enjoy high favor among the antisocial population. Something like one quarter of drug addicts and an amazing number of people who are murdered are adorned with them. They are not the sentimental hearts-and-roses kind that were so popular among sailors in World War II. They are homemade, often designed in jail by a friend. They have a smudged quality, and tend to be monochromatic blue-black — the supply of colored pigments in jail is small. “Born to lose” and “I don’t believe in friends” are popular expressions of philosophy, and so is the bravado of “Kill me, I’ve never died before,” with a bullet hole through it. They are helpful in identifying people.’ — Dr. Michael M. Baden, forensic pathologist

‘I got into journalism for the money. I don’t know what happened.’ — Mike Elgan

‘Get a skill. You’re born with talent, but a talent is not a skill.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘Progressivism is a facade for rule by the strongest. Nationalism is still the way the world works. What ultimately matters in terms of political power is employing armed men to collect tax revenue.’ — Steve Sailer

‘The thing about a murder case is that you have one less witness to worry about.’ — Murray Richman

‘Loving something does not set you apart.’ — James Lileks

‘Lady Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” She might well have added, the problem with feminism is that eventually you run out of other people’s daughters.’ — Robert Stacy McCaine

‘It is not desire that leads to knowledge, but necessity.’ — Jose Ortega y Gasset

‘I enjoy reminding people that I am actually a vegan. I just allow a cow to do the work first.’ — Steven Hayward

‘Unemployment is mostly an information problem in disguise.’ — Scott Adams

‘A theory is simply a story we tell to make sense of observed reality.’ — Don Boudreaux

‘Not all rabbit holes are worth going down.’ — Evan Kindley

‘Doing unnecessary work is more likely to hurt your career than help it. No one knows what to do with work product they didn’t ask for. Asking for more work is only going to leave you overburdened and stressed out, and then when someone gives you another assignment you won’t have time to get to it and you’ll be known as the guy who can’t complete assignments.’ — Lion of the Blogosphere

‘Who works for free but nobodies? And who needs to stop yakking about her trip to the Bahamas in order to listen to a nobody? Lesson learned.’ — Ammo Grrrll

‘We have to mature to a certain level to admit nature doesn’t care what we think.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘If you follow the money, you’ll always get to the truth eventually.’ — Greg Ferro

‘Conservative society values memory because its members account experience a particular weight and pedigree.’ — Michael Bentley

‘All change is for the worse, even change for the better.’ — R. A. Sayce

‘… it is not the point of being a Conservative to make the world fair.’ — Michael Bentley

‘Conservatives always know that their country is going to the dogs. What is interesting about them across time is the particular route by which they judge the national catastrophe will be reached.’ — Michael Bentley

‘I’ve never seen a dumb person become smart, an evil person become good, or a lazy person become ambitious. I’m sure it happens to some degree, but generally speaking, it isn’t a thing.’ — Scott Adams

‘An asset is something that puts money in my pocket. A liability is something that takes money out of my pocket. This is really all you need to know. If you want to be rich, simply spend your life buying assets. If you want to be poor or middle class, spend your life buying liabilities.’ — Richard Kiyosaki

‘Economies need two things in order to function. They need resources, and they need an optimistic mindset. Optimists with access to resources invest in new ventures, and they spend for consumption. That’s all you need for a robust economy, so long as you have an educated citizenry, no natural disasters, no big wars, and the government stays out of your way. I realize that sounds like an oversimplification of economics, but it isn’t. If you have optimism and resources, (and no huge outside problems) almost everything else takes care of itself in time. Capitalism does the rest.’ — Scott Adams

‘A dollar doesn’t buy what it used to.’ — Everybody You’ve Ever Met In Your Life

‘Talk is cheap, but it can have costly consequences – consequences that are likely to be negative if those who do the talking do not themselves bear the costs of their words.’ — Don Boudreaux

‘A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.’ — American College of Pediatricians

‘People see patterns where there are none.’ — Scott Adams

‘In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.’ — Rollo Tomassi

‘I don’t want to ride a got-damned bicycle to work.’ — James Lileks

‘Capitalism is NOT a system. It’s simply the way humans trade, as natural to us as trading shiny pebbles is to some penguins. Even in the deepest, darkest communism, free trade appears in the form of a black market. Sometimes the ONLY flourishing thing in the whole d*mn mess.’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires.’ — Rollo Tomassi

‘Andrew Breitbart always said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” If conservatives will not fight on the level of culture, we will always lose on the level of politics.’ — Robert Stacy McCaine

‘You don’t pay taxes. They take taxes.’ — Chris Rock

‘The roulette table pays nobody except him who keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette wheels is unknown.’ — George Bernard Shaw

‘There’s a thin line between the original and the asinine.’ — Dan Piepenbring

‘People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.’ — Steve Jobs

‘Most markets work well, but the market for ideas doesn’t. Why not? Because ideas have massive externalities. The market for pollution works poorly because strangers bear almost all the cost of your pollution. The market for ideas, similarly, works poorly because strangers bear almost all the cost of your irrationality.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘A university is not a “safe space”. If you need a safe space, leave, go home, hug your teddy & suck your thumb until ready for university.’ — Richard Dawkins

‘A dependable tell for a systems-thinker as opposed to a goals-thinker is lots of failures along the way and lots of big wins too. Every time Trump ran for president and lost, he gained experience, name recognition in a new field, and important connections. Observers who see life from a goals perspective saw a three-time loser on his way to losing a fourth time. Systems thinkers saw a systems thinker acquiring experience and power in exactly the right way to maximize success.’ — Scott Adams

‘In my line of work, I meet a lot of billionaires and hundred-millionaires. So far, every one of them seems deeply interested in how they can be useful to the world, and not so interested in new toys. Sure, they like the toys, but I don’t see any of that as motivation. No one claws their way to billionaire status just to have better transportation options. The biggest motivator I see in the rich (after a certain age) is that they want to make the world better.’ — Scott Adams

‘Men think little about things of which they cannot speak.’ — Albert Venn Dicey

‘Jean Jacques Rousseau should be burned in effigy every year, for crimes against humanity’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.’ — Milton & Rose Friedman

‘In crowds it is stupidity rather than mother wit that is accumulated.’ — Gustave Le Bon

‘We tend to see comfort in relative, rather than absolute, terms. We’ll sacrifice just as much for flavored syrup in our coffee as a colonial-era farmer might have sacrificed for his children to survive a smallpox epidemic. We care not how much comfort we already have, we always want a little more. Comfort eventually grows into a new meaning. It becomes the absence of surprise or disruption; the absence of LIFE. And ultimately, we demand life itself be exchanged for the next shot of comfort. We think this hasn’t happened, because we see no fresh open grave. We think wrong.’ — Morgan K. Freeberg

‘There’s more to being Santa than putting on the red suit.’ — Steven Pressfield

‘When your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re only 40% done.’ — David Goggins, Navy SEAL

‘Progressive taxation creates a government-to-citizen relationship that is purely parasitic, and no longer symbiotic. The host must live within its means, whereas the parasite is in a position to simply demand more, and — should a shortfall continue to ensue from any newer arrangement — blame the host. In the end, nobody prospers except for opportunistic politicians with careers built on the creation of new jealousies, and the further aggravation of existing ones.’ — Morgan K. Freeberg

‘As Blum and Kalven noted, “It is the very nature of majority rule that the majority can vote distinctive burdens for the minority.” It is, however, the nature of reality that burdens imposed on the wealthy minority can injure the majority by impairing economic incentives, thereby suppressing growth. Progressive taxation reduces the rewards of investments and the real rate of return on savings, thereby encouraging consumption over saving and hence over capital formation. When progressive taxation slows economic growth, it makes inequalities of wealth more durable by retarding the accumulation of new fortunes. And by encouraging constant tinkering with the tax code to perfect equity, progressive taxation gives a patina of altruism to rent-seeking by economic factions, whereby government enriches those sophisticated at manipulating it.’ — George Will

‘I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn’t the life they were designed for.’ — Paul Graham

‘Getting rich takes the sting out of a lot of things.’ — Scott Adams

‘Every time you get dressed, remember that, if you die, that’s your ghost outfit forever.’ — Jennifer Wright

‘Money is a very sincere form of voting.’ — David Freer

‘Influencers do not say, “The data is inaccurate.” Influencers say, “Do you want to be a gullible loser?” Influence is about you, not data.’ — Scott Adams

‘If we were happy here in our world, we would not dream of other worlds, and if we are not happy here, then this is not our home.’ — John C. Wright

‘Always wear shoes that are good for running or fighting.’ — Joe Strummer

‘Reasons aren’t excuses. At some point we all make ourselves.’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘Art, including popular art like genre fiction, is an attempt to put one’s view of the world into a succinct or concrete example or image.’ — John C. Wright

‘Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple’. — Bobby Flay

‘If you want to see a real king at work, you need to watch an American president: his powers are modeled on those of an eighteenth century English king.’ — Jeremy Paxman

‘The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility.’ — Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher

‘The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.’ — Herbert Spencer

‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ — L. P. Hartley

‘There are dimensions to the human imagination that we don’t fully understand.’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘I’ve always felt that what you wear is the first step towards being the person you want to be.’ — Rick Owens

‘Once again the United Nations proved more of a sounding board for conflicting national policies than a forum of international decision.’ — Randolph S. Churchill, The Six Day War

‘To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the impossible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, the present laughter to the utopian bliss.’ — Michael Oakeshott

‘This is just for fun. Truth is at a different URL.’ — Scott Adams

‘It’s like bacon — you put it into something and it just makes it more awesome.’ — Andy Ihnatko

‘Primitive tribes need totems, and even the great civilizations of the West have periodically felt the need of heroes who could be elevated far above the ranks of ordinary criticism or clamour. It seems necessary for the salvation or preservation of some creed or cult or policy to grant quasi-royal or sacerdotal mysticism to some individual who enshrines the often half-expressed cravings of a cause.’ — Randolph S. Churchill

‘I’m not your mom (or your grandmother). I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t have to watch as you ignore all the signs that say Beware! as you drive your car off a cliff.’ — Kristine Kathryn Rusch

‘Every revolution is born of resentment and insecurity.’ — James Lileks

‘Being unable or unwilling to absorb new or unwelcome information, is not a strength. It isn’t precious either. It’s common and cheap, like pigeon shit on top of a statue. We’re born with that. Toddlers have that.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘If you can get people to pay you for what you love to do, that’s success.’ — Greg Barbanell

‘A central principle of economics is revealed preference. What people do provides more reliable information than what they say.’ — David Director Friedman

‘It seems to me, and I shall here contend, that all the known facts lie flatly against it–that there is actually no more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue, than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘Aristotle and Confucius would be dumbstruck by today’s conventional wisdom that the competent should not upbraid the incompetent.’ — Steve Sailer

‘I grew up expecting to see the first man on the moon. It never occurred to me that I’d see the last one.’ — Sir Terry Pratchett

‘Truth is hate to those who hate truth.’ — Taki Theodoracopoulos

‘We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and, if possible, the good guys win.’ — Sir Terry Pratchett

‘Sitting in front of a keyboard and a screen is work. Thousands of offices operate on this very principle.’ — Sir Terry Pratchett

‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.’ — Eric Hoffer

‘Addiction is not, except in very rare circumstances, something that happens to you, but something that you do; and if its “clutches” were really as the constriction of the Dormidera, very few indeed would escape. But in boring old fact this is not so.’ — Theodore Dalrymple

‘Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes. — H. L. Mencken

‘Somehow we have arrived in the 21st century with a ruling class so bereft of imagination they cannot conceive that anyone would wish to be less educated than themselves.’ — John Derbyshire

‘As a fairly secular Jew I cannot and will not speak to the theological questions, in part because I do not want to. But mostly because I do not have to. The core problem with those who glibly invoke one cliché after another about the evils of organized religion and Catholicism is that they betray the progressive tendency to look back on the last two thousand years and see the Catholic Church — and Christianity generally — as holding back humanity from progress, reason, and enlightenment. They fault the Church for not knowing what could not have been known yet and for being too slow to accept new discoveries that only seem obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight. It’s an odd attack from people who boast of their skepticism and yet condemn the Church for being rationally skeptical about scientific breakthroughs. In short, they look at the tide of secularism and modernity as proof that the Church was an anchor. I put it to you that it was more of sail. Nearly everything we revere about modernity and progress — education, the rule of law, charity, decency, the notion of the universal rights of man, and reason were advanced by the Church for most of the last two thousand years.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours.  It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘Real communities involve extended networks of trust and goodwill. Fake communities have regulations, fees, subsidies, and checklists.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘Maybe I’m being a bit of a writer about this, but to me, memory is self. It’s one thing to destroy the parts of the body that let you walk, or wipe your ass, or sit upright. It’s something else to destroy all the memories that make up your life.’ — Harry Connolly

‘Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.’ — Paul Graham

‘The precept “Know Thyself” includes knowing the scales with which one weighs actions and attitudes in the great world of work outside oneself.’ — Jane Jacobs

‘True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.’ — Kurt Vonnegut

‘The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.’ — David Director Friedman

‘My mom was a 15-year old single mother when she had me, a few months before Roe v. Wade was decided. I don’t like thinking that my life is optional.’ — Kevin Williamson

‘Mobsters were great clients. They always paid in cash.‘ — Martin Greenfield

‘What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘The problem with the loser worldview is that in many cases the only person who CAN fix the problem is you, even if you had nothing to do with causing it. A winner in that situation fixes his own problem. A loser sits indefinitely waiting for others to solve it for him, even knowing that won’t happen.’ — Scott Adams

‘People who don’t know what’s going on, have influence on what’s going on, that is not shared by people who do know what’s going on.’ — Morgan K. Freeberg

‘Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. Without this, say they, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of any constitution, and shall find, in the end, that we have no security for our liberties or possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have no security at all.’ — David Hume, Of the Independency of Parliament

‘If you start at 6 A.M., whenever you go to bed is a day.’ — Gary de Mercurio

‘Idiots are everywhere: fixing their idiocy is not your problem (unless it really really is — which is seldom the case).’ — Charles Stross

‘Ayn Rand portrayed a world I wanted to live in, not because I would be rich or powerful in it, but because it consisted of people I wanted to be around.’ — Alex Tabarrok

‘Regardless of the kind of society you think we have, there should be little dispute that the school system intended to support an industrial autocracy isn’t really suited to a post-industrial republic.’ — Kevin Trainor

‘The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is managing your own headspace.’ – Nikki Durkin

‘Reality is always more complex than concepts and models. We may be fond of our analytic prowess, but we cannot count on the world to fit our designs and prejudices. — Robert Rubin

‘If one sups with sorrow, one need not invite the world to see you eat.’ — Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria

‘What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.’ — Steve Sailer

‘Everyone has ghosts. You can let them haunt you forever or you can make them your bitches. Consider the latter.’ — Scott Adams

‘We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.’ — Ronald Reagan

‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. — Clay Shirky

‘You could not ask for a better coffin for a rodent than an iPhone box.’ — Andy Ihnatko

‘I don’t trust any sort of Justice that needs to be modified, because it is arbitrary, subjective, not codified or subject to appeal, and assumes a prima facie good that trumps objections.’ — James Lileks

‘The disconnect between names and the named becomes most pronounced in totalitarian societies where words become weapons of the State. When language ceases to be a tool for labeling reality and higher truths and becomes one for upholding the agenda of a regime, the society rots and invites revolt. Try as they might, tyrants rarely have much success at persuading miserable people they are happy or hungry people they are full. As a result, regimes feel required to tighten their grip on society even more. Use of the wrong word — or the right word the wrong way — becomes ever more damning evidence of disloyalty or treason. And you know what? The tyrants are right: It is disloyalty and treason to an evil regime to accurately tell the truth.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘If you’re good at something, never do it for free!’ — Yossi Kreinin

‘Feminism appeals to the least feminine and the most angry.’ — Steve Sailer

‘Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.’ — Theodore Dalrymple

‘That’s the hard thing about hard things–there is no formula for dealing with them.’ — Ben Horowitz

‘Not working is a full-time job and you need to be hustling from 9 AM on Monday morning until 5 PM Friday evening.’ — Gavin McInnes

‘Foreign aid is a phenomenon whereby poor people in rich countries are taxed to support the life-styles of rich people in poor countries.’ — Peter Bauer

‘This was when it first was driven home to me that some readers were orcs — that is, beings to whom fair is foul and foul is fair — in terms so strong and plain that they could not be denied. There were people who claimed to be science fiction fans who had absolutely no interest in science fiction at all, but merely in the news of the day and in the long-dead abortive philosophy of the Victorian crackpot Karl Marx.’ — John C. Wright

‘I am so outraged! Yes. And you know what? No one gives a damn.’ — Bob Mayer

‘Conservatives argue as conservatives. Liberals tend to argue not so much as liberals, but in a variety of disguises, each of which tries to draw on authority unearned by liberalism itself. Indeed, the history of American liberalism can be understood as a series of costume changes.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘Literary fiction: An extended stylistic wank in which the author continually mistakes either the fine details of the emotional lives of imaginary persons or his own meta-expressive language games for interesting subjects.’ — Eric S Raymond

‘The justification for free enterprise is not that it’s more efficient, but that it’s free.’ — Robert A. Heinlein

‘No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed.’ — Tim Parks

‘Bottom line: Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.’ — Larry Elder

‘These love goddesses are not what they seem, especially if you’re married to one. They all think they want a traditional marriage, but they aren’t made for that sort of thing. Somebody’s got to get the coffee in the morning, and Ava Gardner is not going to do that.’ — Artie Shaw

‘Today’s pop culture is not Marshall McLuhan’s global village but a global housing project of warring ghettos.’ — Mark Steyn

‘One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.’ — H. L. Mencken

‘A useful way to think about the scope of government is to ask what would happen if a particular government power were exercised by someone with whom you disagree.’ — Arnold Kling

‘Your use of terminology reflects on your knowledge. Therefore, you should make an effort to understand and use correct terminology.’ — Itzik Ben-Gan

‘If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.’ — ADM William H. McRaven, USN, Navy SEAL

‘Democracy as we know it is bad enough.  Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.’ —Thomas Sowell

‘… he writes sentences you want to remember. And that, in the last analysis, is the only measure of a writer.’ — William Giraldi

‘… the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.’ — J.R.R. Tolkien

‘You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil.’ — J.R.R. Tolkien

‘This neat idea of hurting people whom you envy and taking their stuff is not futuristic or new. It’s old as sin. Which is why I don’t call progressives progressives. I call them vileprogs, because captures the depths of the depravity they have perpetrated on the human race.’ — Sarah Hoyt

‘He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.’ — Cyprian of Carthage

‘If you volunteer to be a doormat, you can’t complaint about the footprints on your back.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘An economic system based on private enterprise and private property of the means of production can work only as long as the security of private property and of income derived from property and from enterprise is maintained. The very existence of a government bent on introducing socialism is a constant threat to this security. Therefore, the capitalist economy cannot function under a socialist government unless the government is socialist in name only. If the socialist government socialises the coal mines to-day and declares that the textile industry is going to be socialised after five years, we can be quite certain that the textile industry will be ruined before it will be socialised. For the owners threatened with expropriation have no inducement to make the necessary investments and improvements and to manage them efficiently. And no government supervision or administrative measures can cope effectively with the passive resistance and sabotage of the owners and managers.’ — Oskar Lange

‘If you’re an atheist and a Jew, you’re still a Jew. If you’re an atheist and a Catholic, you’re just an atheist.’ — Tom Smith

‘One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class.’ — George Orwell, 1941

‘Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.’ — Peter Thiel

‘Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.’ — Cicero

‘International law has never existed in the full meaning of the words because there has never been a sanction to enforce it. Christendom imposed a certain code of behaviour on princes, an those who, like Cesare Borgia, defied it, incurred universal odium. When the Reformation split the Church, and religion began to lose authority, ruling families, closely connected with one another, and populations believing in the progress of humanity and all subscribing to the Christian ethic, continued to uphold a certain standard of conduct between Governments. But in the age of the dictators jungle law among the nations has revived, and in the jungle the first sign of weakness provokes attack.’ — Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich

‘Everyone is in favor of science—except when he isn’t.’ — David Director Friedman

‘TIP: Always join a company before the lawyers do.’ — Meaghann O’Connell

‘Things don’t have to change the world to be important.’ — Steve Jobs

‘Peace is the time of waiting for war.’ — Karnadas

‘Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour.’ — Alexis de Toqueville

‘If you want to create art, you need to make judgments about human behavior and take a side. How well you convey and support your point of view is a measure of your skill.’ — Steven Pressfield

‘Evil, one may recall, is defectus boni, a deficiency of a good. In a sense, it is something that isn’t there rather than something that is.’ — Michael Flynn

‘Liberals love diversity. That’s why they love to punish anyone who doesn’t think, act, eat, drink, drive and speak exactly like them.’ — Steve Stockman

‘Modern liberalism is the valorization of mediocrity. It’s the participation-ribbon society, where just showing up is some kind of heroic act.’ — M K Freeberg

‘No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.’ — William Howard Taft

‘To live is to maneuver.’ — Whittaker Chambers

‘If someone helps me feed my family, they are a friend for life. If someone takes money out of my pocket, they are out of my life. Never break this rule.’ — James Altucher

‘Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses.’ — Joel Kotkin

‘Liberalism has no respect for fences it doesn’t understand. No appreciation for the law of unintended consequences.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘A liberal is someone who is determined to reach into your shower and adjust the water temperature for you.’ — William F. Buckley Jr.

‘If you have a choice, success is better than failure.’ — Scott Adams

‘Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice president.’ — Johnny Carson

‘College ruins you for the real world.’ — James Lileks

‘Look, it’s always possible that eventually they’ll get all the kinks out and make this thing work well enough to avoid a total disaster. But every day it looks more and more like this thing is a Big Government onion. Liberals think the outer layer is bad but that if they just peel that away it’ll be great. But the thing about onions is they’re onions all the way down. You can peel all you want, you’ll never find a prize in the center, but you just might find yourself crying in the middle of a big mess.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.’ — Bruce Lee

‘Much of history is made by men whose manic phases happen to coincide with eras of opportunity.’ — Steve Sailer

‘Political promotion of economic development is inherently futile, for it invariably rewards incompetence; if incompetence is rewarded, incompetence will be the produced; and when incompetence is the product, politicians will insist that increased planning and increased regulation is the appropriate remedy.’ — Forrest McDonald

‘If there’s any distinction between the beliefs of reform Jews and unitarians, I certainly am not perceptive enough to detect them.’ — Foseti

‘Life isn’t about figuring out what to do.  The real challenge is (not so) simply doing the things we know we should be doing.’ — Jason Nazar

‘Much of modern liberalism consists of people trying to get revenge on the football players they felt inferior to in school.’ — Steve Sailer

‘Being a mass of mediocre shitheads for the sake of equality doesn’t improve the common good.’ — J. D. Bentley, on public education

‘When knowledge is mature, the mind forgets about the hand, the hand forgets about the sword.’ — Bugei no jo

‘I love that whole swabbing the arm before lethal injection. Because of course you wouldn’t want that thing to get infected.’ — Mark Davis

‘Money is the root of all civilization.’ — Will Durant

‘Let’s face it, our government does a lot of stupid things. I mean, there’s a reason that there are libertarians in the world.’ — Ed Wallace

‘As anyone who has ever been in combat will tell you, the last thing you want is a fair fight.’ — Mark Bowden

‘If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.’ — Anil Dash

‘Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.’ — Roger Price

‘We are not so nasty that we need to be tamed by intrusive government, nor so nice that too much government does not bring out the worst in us, both as its employees and as its clients.’ — Matt Ridley

‘You can enjoy your life right now. You just need to spend less money on shit that you don’t need.’ — Alex Warren

‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.’ — F.A. von Hayek

‘If you’re here for the revolution, you’re not a reactionary.’ — Foseti

‘Every nation ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of subsistence habitation clothing and defence. The possession of these is necessary to the perfection of the body politic, to the safety as well as to the welfare of the society.’ — Alexander Hamilton

‘The process is the result.’ — David Wong

‘You are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills. Your “job” — the useful thing you do for other people — is all you are.’ — David Wong

‘A cliché isn’t necessarily a bad idea; it’s actually a good idea that has been overused.’ — Charlie Stross

‘This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.’ — Bull Durham

‘The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power.  That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs.  Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people.  It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.’ — Charles Murray

‘Becoming a conservative doesn’t require you to stop hating Republicans.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘Reality is not optional: the greater the power of government to use discretion to do what is thought to be good for society, the greater and more intent are the rent-seekers who scramble in and scheme to have government use discretion to do what in fact is harmful to society and good only for the successful rent-seekers.’ — Don Boudreaux

‘The advantage of monarchy is that often the King is able to study his job rather than spend his life learning how to get the job.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ — Mike Tyson

‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.’  — Oscar Wilde

‘Only so many blackhearted villians in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.’ — Ebenezer McCoy

‘Health should manifest itself as a means to an end. We want to be healthy so we can get something practical done—or better still, something divine, something celestial. But now, since we do not know what we are doing here, do not know what we want or need, health has become an end in itself. People pursue health for its own sake. Why do you want to live? we ask the compulsive exerciser. The answer is not So that I can finish the work; so that I can make the discovery; so that I can find enduring love. The answer now—implicit, but to me, alas, unmistakable—is that I want to live simply to go on living. With the disappearance of tenable ideals, life, simple life, has become the great goal.’ — Mark Edmundson

‘The reward for work well done is more work.’ — Dr Jonas Salk

‘You are never rule-free. If you abandon one set of rules, then you must invent another with the same ratio of arbitrary content to noise, because the essences of rules is redundancy; they enable you to predict the world and live forward in time, which is what the neocortex is for in the first place. We do not respond like lower animals to immediate emotional demands; we mediate them with rules; our neocortex controls our limbic brain. And like rhyming, it is all about anticipation and predictability.’ — Robin Fox

‘The logic of embracing free trade unilaterally, that is, no matter what policy any other national government adopts, is well expressed in an adage attributed to the economist Joan Robinson: Even if your trading partner dumps rocks into his harbor to obstruct arriving cargo ships, you do not make yourself better off by dumping rocks into your own harbor.’ — Lawrence White

‘Parents are supposed to learn from the mistakes they made–not teach their kids to repeat them.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘Whoever says that money can’t buy happiness doesn’t know where to shop.’ — Gertrude Stein

‘So then, our job is not to lead religion where we wish it to go, but to follow it where it leads, and not to give that which is our own to our heirs, but to guard that which has been given to us.’ — St Vincent of Lerins

‘You have to get good before you get good work. There are no shortcuts.’ — Vivek Haldar

‘Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.’ – Paulo Coelho

‘We live in a one-party state, adrift on an ocean of clichés.’ — John Derbyshire

‘After a shooting spree, they always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it.’ — William S. Burroughs

‘Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave them all over everything you do.’ — Elvis Presley

‘I scorn to do anyone a Mischief, when it is not for my Advantage.’ — Pirate Captain Sam Bellamy

‘When it comes to extremes, our status system breaks down altogether. We have no intelligible method for relating a world-ranking pop musician and a cardinal-archbishop. We know that they are both influential people, and must be treated with due deference, but we cannot relate them satisfactorily one to another.’ — Peter Laslett

‘When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren’t the kind of institutions I had in mind.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘In business, as in high school, just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.’ — Kristine Kathryn Rusch

‘Every day God is addressing us, and we do not hear; and yet He does not leave off speaking.’ — St John Crysostom

‘Doing nothing is often better than doing the wrong thing.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘If your idea of expensive is not hers, probably you need a different girlfriend.’ — Tom Smith

‘Fairness, on the other hand, is usually just a rationale for some sort of bias.’ — Scott Adams

‘In America, war is not a sport.’ — Walter Russell Mead

‘… every kid knows that “special” really means you’re such a freak that they haven’t invented an actual word for you yet.’ — Stephanie Lucianovic

‘Picky eaters can taste the flavor watermark that every unwanted addition leaves on the surrounding food.’ — Stephanie Lucianovic

‘The dream of progressivism is to make our domestic life like that of a warlike nation without actually going to war.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘It is not enough just to not suck as much as the other side.’ — Glen Beck

‘Rationality is not artifice. It is the floor over the pit.’ — James Lileks

‘The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.  The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.  It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him.  As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper.  To judge whether he is fit to be employed, may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns.  The affected anxiety of the law-giver lest they should employ an improper person, is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.’ — Adam Smith

‘It is only the people who write software who can advise others on how they write software.’ — Aidy Lewis

‘Ethical behavior and sustainability are connected in both directions; the wages of sin are self-damage.’ — Eric S Raymond

‘First thing a bureaucracy does is put the bureaucrats in charge, by tying the hands of the non-bureaucrats. Anyone who doesn’t know that, has never seen one in action.’ — Morgan K. Freeberg

‘Doing good with other people’s money has two basic flaws.  In the first place, you never spend anybody else’s money as carefully as you spend your own.  So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted.  In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people’s money unless you first get the money away from them.  So that force – sending a policeman to take the money from somebody’s pocket – is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.’ — Milton Friedman

‘A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.’ — Oscar Wilde

‘Science explains nothing. It merely formulates observed data.’ — Robert A. Heinlein

‘”Building something useful” and “making money” are close relatives.’ — Yossi Kreinin

‘I often get exhausted with the anarcho-libertarian argument about how all government action boils down to force. But that doesn’t mean it’s not, you know, true.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ — Upton Sinclair

‘One of the downsides of being special is that you feel out of place wherever you go.’ — Gavin McInnes

‘I believe it’s foolish to deny that we are human, which we do when we embrace nonhuman behavior.’ — Michael Ruhlman

‘The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.’ — John Adams

‘Unfortunately, it does not follow from the existence of immense waste in the public sector that budget cuts will target that waste. After all, most of the excess is in wages, precisely the element of government spending that those in charge of proposed reductions will be most anxious to preserve. It is therefore in their interest that any budget reduction should affect disproportionately the service that it is their purpose to provide: cases of hardship will then result, the media will take them up, and the public will blame them on the spending cuts and force the government to return to the status quo ante. Another advantage of cutting services rather than waste, from the perspective of the public employee, is that it makes it appear that the budget was previously a model of economy, already pared to the bone.’ — Theodore Dalrymple

‘No matter what time it is, it’s always now.’ — Johannes Borchardt

‘It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well.’ — Ernest Hemingway

‘Nothing is impossible to a man who doesn’t have to do it.’ — Anonymous Special Forces Team Sergeant

‘An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you’re not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.’ — Paul Graham

‘In the final analysis I could only conclude that we simply do NOT know. And when in doubt, the safest moral road is to refrain from an action that can’t be undone.’ — Dymphna, on abortion.

‘I very much oppose the death penalty for people who do not deserve to be put to death. I phrase it this way because so many opponents of the death penalty love to point to innocent men who were sentenced to die as if proof of error in the system invalidates capital punishment in principle. I don’t know if an innocent person has ever been executed, but even if one were that outrage (and it would be an outrage) no more invalidates the death penalty than an instance of friendly fire invalidates the need for a military.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘When you remove law — and law enforcers — from society, you don’t usher in an age of liberty, but an ecosystem of bullying. This is a very, very dark (and probably accurate) view of anarchy.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘It is certainly possible to have too little government. That is not America’s problem.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘There is not a man in the country can’t make a living for himself and his family. But he can’t make a living for them and his government too, the way the government is living. What government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.’ — Will Rogers

‘If you took down every Mission Statement in the country and put up a picture of the Queen, we’d be better off.’ — Don Watson

‘At least 99 percent of the things we know are things other people figured out first.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘Perhaps it is an inner need that impels the socialist to his ideology, for I have never met an advocate of government intervention who did not admit, inadvertently, his own capacity for commissariat functions.  He always has a plan, to which others must submit, and his certainty that the plan will produce the contemplated results does not permit him to brook criticism.  Always he is the fanatic.  If you disagree with him it is not because you are in error; it is because you are sinful.’ — Frank Chodorov

‘If global warming is a problem, there’s very little Earth can do to stop it — right now. But what seems like an insurmountable problem today is often a trivial problem a few decades later. That doesn’t mean you can’t research the issue, indeed you almost surely should. But the trick to solving most of the world’s problems lies in getting rich as quickly as possible so as to make insurmountably expensive problems trivially inexpensive problems. Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well off as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.’ — Richard Hooker

‘The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.’ – Fred Astaire

‘We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.’ — C. S. Lewis

‘Evil is normal. America is abnormal.’ — Dennis Prager

‘The government never wastes an opportunity to get its nose into another tent.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘Justice is a key ingredient for economic growth. People will not invest if they fear that their life, liberty and property may be subject to arbitrary seizure and destruction. The rule of law and limited government provide a sphere of liberty within which individuals can make decisions with confidence that the fruits of their labor will not taken by the more powerful.’ — Alex Tabarrok

‘There is no such thing as “capitalism”.  An “ism”, as usually understood throughout the rest of the English language, would be a belief system and/or specific well-defined arrangement of some sort, but there is simply no such “ism”.involving “capital” (or something) to which one could meaningfully attach the label “capitalism”.  Instead, “capitalism” is simply the term applied to – basically – freedom(may I give Joe X in exchange for Joe giving me Y?  yes or no?  yes?  that’s “capitalism”!) by people who don’t like freedom for one reason or another.  An obvious byproduct of this basic fact is that unpleasant features of human society are  attributed to “capitalism” by the term’s/epithet’s users; this is easy to do and hard to rebut since, again, “capitalism” doesn’t exist as a coherent “ism”, just as an epithet.’ — Sonic Charmer

‘It’s neither the sheriff nor the priest that keeps the first auto mechanic honest in a small town; it’s the second mechanic.’ — Tim Nerenz

‘There isn’t a proper policy response for every need.’ — Robert Samuelson

‘Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.’ — Andy Rooney

‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.’ — Shirky

‘It is sheer illusion to think that when certain needs of the citizen have become the exclusive concern of a single bureaucratic machine, democratic control of that machine can then effectively guard the liberty of the citizen.’ — F. A. von Hayek

‘People like to idolize the “ideas” and “inspiration”, but in the end, almost anybody can have an idea. Getting things actually done is where people stumble.’ — Linus Torvalds

‘Call it The Godfather rule: Never read something a second time that didn’t make its point the first time around.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.’ — Ted Nugent

‘Middle class jobs will no longer require college only after middle class kids can no longer afford college.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘As many have warned in the past, freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly.  It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.’ — Morgan Freeberg

‘There is no margin for error in the lives of the working poor.’ — Megan McArdle

‘There’s a difference in principle between intervening with dictatorships to protect dissidents from being tortured and intervening in democracies to prevent voters from choosing the laws they live under.’ — John O’Sullivan

‘I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.’ — D. H. Lawrence

‘We can be few and savage, or many and civilized.’ – Friedrich A. von Hayek

‘Democracy is the crude leading the crud.’ — Florence King

‘When somebody is determined to whup your ass, without regard to any concern for what is “fair,” you must recognize that the only alternative is to whup his ass by whatever means or methods are available.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘America’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.’ — Bryan Caplan

‘One of the things we have to guard against is that we may not recognize rational conduct when we meet it.’ — P. W. S. Andrews

‘Why are airplane pilots so much more focused on avoiding error than doctors? Because doctors don’t go down with their patients.’ — Jim Manzi

‘When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place.’ — Bruce Schneier

‘You can make a religion out of anything. That doesn’t mean it won’t be a stupid religion.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘It has been said that the worst part about being poor in the U.S. is having to live next to other poor people.’ — Jehu

‘Education is wisdom wrung from failure.’ — Jonah Lerer

‘The job of the American voter, is to reject socialism. If we do that, all the pieces fall into place; if we don’t do that, all is lost.’ — Morgan K. Freeberg

‘Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.’ – J. M. Barrie

‘Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency — which we mostly resist — towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.’ — John Derbyshire

‘An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.’ — Andy Warhol

‘Bad craft kills good stories.’ — Chuck Wendig

‘What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. The President of the United States can’t buy a better Coca-Cola than a poor person.’ — Andy Warhol

‘For whenever Men consult for the Publick Good, as for the advancement of Trade, wherein all are concerned, they usually esteem the immediate Interest of their own to be the common Measure of Good and Evil.  And there are many, who to gain a little in their own Trades, care not how much others suffer; and each Man strives, that all others may be forc’d, in their dealings, to act subserviently for his Profit, but under the covert of the Publick.’ — Sir Dudley North

‘If any business has a term for something, that means the something is common.’ — Kristine Kathryn Rusch

‘If you can’t measure it, it’s not science.’ — Robert A. Heinlein

‘My friend Ronald Bailey always used to say that if socialism worked, he’d probably be a socialist, but since it doesn’t, what’s the point in being a socialist? ‘ — Jonah Goldberg

‘A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship…’ — Sir Alex Fraser Tytler

‘But let’s be clear about one indisputable fact: capitalism vigorously pursued has never produced the atrocities – starvation, tyranny, and genocide – that are produced by statism vigorously pursued.  Nothing remotely close.’ — Don Boudreaux

‘Like so many liberal icons, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty. As Schlafly says, no wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs.’ — Ann Coulter

‘The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.’ — Steven Pressfield

‘Consider what we want a president to be: a visionary who can articulate a common purpose that unites fractious interest groups; a master negotiator who can advance America’s interests in the world, as well as push his policies past the combined resistance of lobbyists and his congressional opponents; a bold, decisive leader who can shepherd the country through crises; and a master manager who can keep his vast staff of experts—and the world’s largest employer—operating smoothly.’ — Megan McArdle

‘We give birth. You pick up the check.’ — Kelly Ripa

‘A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.’ — Thomas Babington Macaulay

‘Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.’ –   T.S. Eliot

‘If government ownership of land and natural resources was the best way to protect the environment, then we should have found a Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain came down.  Instead, there was one environmental horror story after another.’ — Malcolm Wallop

‘Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’ – C.S. Lewis

‘A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.’ — Milton Friedman

‘Aside from everything else, there’s never been a Communist regime that didn’t have to build a fence, staff it with guards with guns and permissive ROEs, and set up a vast system of snitches and informers in order to keep its population under control.’ — Moe Lane

‘Thus, it is cool to destroy yourself. That has been the essence of cool since America had the luxury for it to be after winning World War II.’ — David Swindle

‘Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.’ — Walker Percy

‘You can get all “A”s and still flunk life.’ — Walker Percy

‘It is therefore our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs in our nature. To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget we are gentlemen.’ – Edmund Burke

‘There is little reason to own a Glock unless you intend to kill people.’ — Barbara Miner

‘No public official, far less the president of the United States, can campaign against unpopular groups that have broken no law, without undermining the fundamental principle that the rule of law shall prevail over political lynch mobs, and that the rights of the least popular or powerful are an essential component of the rights of all.’ — Benjamin Zycher

‘Reading books means you’re not lonely.’ — George W. Bush

‘Nothing gives a person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.’ — Thomas Jefferson  (although cutting out his liver and eating it in front of him is a strong contender. Just sayin’.)

‘My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems.’ — Scott Adams

‘Whenever you have a hundred thousand psychotherapists talking about being life-affirming, and a million books about life enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around.’ — Walker Percy

‘No beast is more savage than man, when possessed of power equal to his passion.’ — Plutarch

‘Work, and respect for work, creates a culture. Disrespect for work creates a culture too.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise. As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so.’ – C.S. Lewis

‘The first requirement of the American Dream is Americans.’ — Mark Steyn

‘Nothing makes people madder than saying what’s obviously true.’ — Steve Sailer

‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.’ – Nietzsche

‘As I have told anti-circumcision activists on my radio show, you have to be pretty bored with life to be preoccupied with not having foreskin.’ — Dennis Prager

‘The goal of trumpeting is to obtain power, and the means of power is violence. To denounce violence is to renounce power. To renounce power is to surrender.’ — Mencius Moldbug

‘It seems more reasonable to suppose that there is no ruling class, that we are ruled, rather, by a myriad of quarreling gangs, constantly engaged in stealing from each other to the great impoverishment of their own members as well as the rest of us.’ — David Director Friedman

‘Nothing that was ever worth reading was ever written at 1 p.m.’ — James Lileks

‘When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book.’ — Mrs Farebrother, from Middlemarch by George Eliot

‘One political sticker on your car states your case; twenty stickers says you’re imbalanced.’ — Paul Ibbetson

‘When called on to make a choice between our beliefs and our well being, we have a strange tendency to choose our beliefs. … The moral is clear. Don’t believe everything you think.’ — Greg Satell

‘Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.’ — Flannery O’Connor

‘Islam is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog.’ — Winston Churchill, 1898

‘Fundamentally, all you need to know about managing your money is this: Spend less than you earn. That’s it. If you spend less than you earn, you’ll do fine. Everything else is details. Those details are important, I know, but most of them are common sense and widely known.’ — J. D. Roth

‘Calculus destroys self-esteem on contact.’ — James Lileks

‘So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.’ — George Orwell

‘I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.’ — Stephen Hawking

‘To be clear, running a business requires hard decisions and a focus on execution.  Sometimes the leaders of a company just need to be pricks in order to get the job done.’ — Quist

‘Never, literally never in recent years, have I met anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he was of cancer?’ — George Orwell

‘People want to help other people who are in need, but there’s a big difference between helping the local widow and helping the town drunk.’ — Morgan K Freeberg

‘I’m just not ready to have my wealth redistributed. I’m not ready to pay more tax money than the next guy because I provide jobs and because I work a 60-hour week and I earn more than $250,000 a year.’ — Jerry Della Femina

‘Childhood belongs in a storage locker you can visit when you please, not a backpack you carry around every day.’ — James Lileks

‘A government is not a man made in God’s image. It has functions, not a life. It is a necessary evil that undergirds and secures the liberty in which man can best find the universal love and be redeemed. Government is necessary because man is flawed; it is evil because it corrupts men and usurps liberty. That is why the American framers took such pains to limit and check its powers. Love and mercy are not bound by borders, but they are the attributes of people, not functions of government. Governments are restricted by national boundaries and national interests.’ — Andrew C. McCarthy

‘When you feel agitated, try eating some carbs. They’re like a miracle drug. I suspect that anger is evolution’s way of telling you to go kill something so you can eat.’ — Scott Adams

‘Just because socialism is evil doesn’t mean capitalism isn’t scary.’ — Tom Smith

‘”Natural” is not synonymous with “better for you”.’ — Megan McArdle

‘The secret of success of every person who has ever been successful lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.’ — Alfred E. N. Gray

‘The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.’ — Peter Drucker

‘Envy is the root of the egalitarian ethos.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘Conservatism, properly understood, is an attitude toward life, in general, and the role of government, in particular; it is not a political ideology.’ — Michael Oakeshott

‘Understanding what people really want to know—and how that differs from what you want to tell them—is a fundamental tenet of sales. And you can’t get good at making money unless you get good at selling.’ — Jason Fried

‘No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.’ — Nora Ephron

‘We all participate in communities. If you choose not to participate in a community, you are still participating in a community, just not very effectively.’ — Andy Leonard

‘A pro shows up for work every day; a pro is patient; a pro endures adversity. A pro doesn’t take success or failure personally; a pro accepts no excuses; a pro plays hurt.’ — Steven Pressfield

‘There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable from mental illness.’ — Scott Adams

‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ — Mike Tyson

‘Grow yourself and your career will follow.’ — Trent Hamm

‘A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be.’ — Wayne Gretzky

‘Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the fuck happened.’ — Freeberg’s girlfriend’s brother-in-law

‘Broken gets fixed, but shitty lasts forever.’ — James Golick

‘It’s the work that justifies the day. Add something to the world every day, somehow, somewhere. It’s what we’re here to do.’ — James Lileks

‘Having daughters tends to help a guy get in touch with his inner social conservative.’ — Robert Stacy McCain

‘The best working definition of a conversation, according to liberals, is “Shut up while I explain how awful you are.”‘ — Jonah Goldberg

‘A man should read as his fancy takes him, for what he reads as a chore will do him little good.’ — Samuel Johnson

‘What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.’ — Amy Chua

‘It seems ridiculous for the national elite to propose to supervise and instruct the gustatory habits of the lower orders, when the same elite determinedly refrains from intruding into their sex lives, marital condition (or lack thereof), and work habits.’ — David Zincavage

‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ — Mike Tyson

‘Life occasionally consists of experiencing things you cannot otherwise afford.’ — James Lileks

‘Fables are often more interesting than facts.’ — Stephen Bayley

‘Quite simply, yesterday’s royalty would not make it into today’s middle class.’ — Victor Davis Hanson

‘The further backward you can look, the further forward you are likely to see.’ — Sir Winston Spencer Churchill

‘In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace, and kindly care, but one of will-to power. Any other reading of it is illusory.’ — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

‘When people say they are going to wipe the slate clean, it’s your slate they mean to wipe.’ — P. J. O’Rourke

‘It’s long been known that the only thing that Communism is good at is in turning large numbers of live peasants into large numbers of dead ones.’ — Moe Lane

‘One of the things about being disabled is that you are disabled every damned day, and have to deal with it.’ — Lois McMaster Bujold

‘In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.’ — Mark Suster

‘Sometimes it takes a bull in a china shop to effect a change in inventory.’ — Devin Coldewey

‘If might makes right, order becomes indistinguishable from chaos.’ — M. K. Freeberg

‘When activists say we need to move past the partisan divide, what they mean is: Shut up and get with my program. Have you ever heard anyone say, “We need to get past all of this partisan squabbling and name-calling. That’s why I’m going to abandon all my objections and agree with you”? I haven’t.’ — Jonah Goldberg

‘If God didn’t intend us to eat meat, he would have made pigs taste bad and cows move faster. End of discussion.’ — Roy Johnson

‘When it comes to toting up the things for which an American can be thankful, you can just go on forever.’ — James Lileks

‘Whatsoever He sayeth unto you, do.’ — Mary of Nazareth, Theotokos

‘There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.’ — Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Cotesworth Slessor

‘Teach your kid to fight back and fight smart. Protect the weak. Be hell and misery to bad people. Pacifism only works if there’s someone else that’s strong around to keep things together – someone who’ll stick up for you. If everyone goes pacifist except the bad people, eventually one bad person with no conscience winds up ruling.’ — Sebastian Marshall

‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.’ — Friedrich A. von Hayek

‘Have you ever noticed that Feminist Studies don’t make people any more feminine, any more than Black Studies make people more black?’ — Rush Limbaugh

‘Tryin’ don’t get the job done.’ — John Wayne

‘Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.’ — Thomas Sowell

‘It’s often surprising how many problems can be solved by repealing a bad law rather than enacting a new one.’ — Peter J. Wallison

‘Many a temptation looks tiny from the outside. “The first one’s free…“‘ — Roger Pearse

‘Boys and girls are fundamentally different even before they get to Farmville.’ — Penelope Trunk

‘I believe there is no point to life, but I try not to let the belief bother me. Blithe Nihilism has its roots in the grand English anti-intellectual tradition — in the conviction that life is to be got on with and not thought about too much.’ — John Derbyshire

‘Monogamy is a huge time-saver.’ — Steve Sailer

‘Luck is not a business model.’ — Anthony Bourdain

‘God save us from getting the government we deserve.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘The disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts is a very attractive sport.’ — Winston Churchill

‘If the commercials are loud, that is the television network’s way of telling you they think you’re stupid.’ — Mark Freeberg

‘Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him; because evil is but a chance misfortune, an illness, a devilish reverie. But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement.’ — St. John of Kronstadt

‘A lot of good strategy and being a successful generalist is about picking up obscure skills.’ — Sebastian Marshall

‘If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state.’ — Kevin D. Williamson

‘Elitism isn’t defined by who benefits; elitism is defined by who decides.’ — Shannon Love

‘The writer’s mortal sin, short of actual child abuse, is that of boring the reader.’ — Michael Ruhlman

‘Big teams do not do simple products.’ — Jason Fried

‘We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘We are animists by instinct.’ — Eric S Raymond

‘I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.’ — Jonathan Winters

‘When the desire to be liked by people who never will like us is the policy, we are hostages to irresponsible people.’ — William A. Jacobson

‘Never do your enemy a small injury.’ — Jerry Pournelle

‘However little the rich may deserve their wealth, the government deserves it even less.’ — Tom Smith

‘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 friend 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.’ — General John Mattis

‘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.’ — Ryan Holiday

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘Crowds terrify intellectuals.’ — Ferdinand Mount

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

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘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.’ — Curtis Yarvin

‘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