"Wise and discipled men refuse to indulge in immediate pleasures when the indulgence seems only too likely to lead in the long run to an overbalance of misery or pain."
— Henry Hazlitt
"Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible’s and Rome’s. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one of its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbours—the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks—invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalised the plundering of its commercially minded neighbours, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar."
— Matt Ridley
"The answer to constraining rent-seeking expendtures is to constrain the ability of government to create rents."
— Allen Dalton
Rent Seeking
- Brain: We must prepare for tomorrow night.
- Pinky: What are we doing tomorrow night?
- Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky—seeking out some rent!
"In scholarship it is not perhaps necessity, but prejudice, that is the mother of invention."
— Mancur Olson
"Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here [the Fed] with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths, and four-legged rats."
— Robert Wenzel
"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk’"
"In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all."
— C. P. Cavafy
"For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen."
— Philostratus
"Suppose the tax were levied by the town … and the full value on the amount were to be returned the next day to each payer in bread. Would it not be a sacred duty in every man, in the virtuous integrity of his nature, to deny such a proceeding? Doubtless it would. All but the meanest souls would thereby be raised to dis-annex themselves from the false and tyrannous assumption, that the human will is to be subject to the brute force which the majority may set up. It is only tolerated by public opinion because the fact is not yet perceived that all the true purposes of the corporate state may as easily be carried out on the revolutionary principle, as all the true purposes of the collective church. Every one can see that the Church is wrong when it comes to men with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other. And is it not equally diabolical for the State to do so? The name is of small importance. When Church and State are divorced by public opinion, they may still carry on an adulterous intercourse."
— Charles Lane
"Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined."
— Henry David Thoreau
"Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many—they are few."
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away
Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many—they are few."
— Percy Shelley
"Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for … anyone."
— Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
"An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something."
— Benoit Mandelbrot (via likeagswift)
