Slogans & quotations Archives

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Just because you have a Self doesn’t mean you should express it.
- Amy Alkon

Sunday, June 08, 2003

We can't change the way that newspapers are written but we can sure change the way people read them.
- Perry de Havilland

Friday, June 06, 2003

Sir, If Tony Blair is seeking a weapon of mass destruction he has only to read the proposed European constitution.

(From today's UK Times letters page)

Monday, June 02, 2003

I always thought Burke's metaphor of the English oxen ignoring the buzzing political insects was a good thing, however in the present situation placidity in the doorway of the abattoir may not be a virtue.
- Doug Collins

Sunday, June 01, 2003

As a general rule of thumb, when two non-government organisations, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and the New York Times agree that the whole powder keg's about to go up, it's a safe bet that things are going swimmingly.

-Mark Steyn, reporting in the Telegraph about the lack of a humanitarian crisis in post-war Iraq.

Actually, the whole article is terrific, particularly his explanation of why the NGOs need to be sent home.

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

There are just as many guns as there were before, except now people are angry that they have become criminals if they try to protect themselves, when American soldiers are more interested in protecting themselves than us.
- a trader selling weapons covertly in Sadr City, a Shia slum about the effect of sending the trade underground after the drive against gun markets in Baghdad last week.

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

A Message to the British People:

Jacques Chirac wants to thank you
for saving France on the beaches of Normandy
by giving you
10% unemployment
the Napoleonic code
a Franco-Belgian style military defense

vive le UK

- Clio

"I'll tell you why people find it "hard" to give up smoking: they don't really want to do it, is why. Using force against yourself is a bad idea. It sets you up for magnificent failure later on, as anyone with bulimia will tell you. What I say to people who don't 100% completely absolutely and totally actively want to give up smoking, actually enjoy the idea of living without smoke, anticipate with joy the thought of nurturing their health and becoming energised breathing human beings, is: don't bother. Carry on smoking, because if you don't want to give up, you're only setting yourself up for failure. Anyway, the rest of us aren't interested in your self-sacrificial whining. It's your life you're saving, not ours, don't expect us to be grateful!"
- Alice who is back from her camping expedition

[Editor's note: apropos the second link, as usual the blogger.com/blogspot archives are not working correctly]

Saturday, May 24, 2003

"My song is a hymn for individualism and against collectivism. I am also for balls and against circles, for corners and against edges, for trees and against the forest. In my performance it is not so much the song that counts but the moral attitude behind it. Whoever votes for me is against being standardized and cemented in by 'European Banality'."

Alf Poier, Austrian entrant to the European Song Contest.
(Via Michael Jennings.)

(In the end, Mr Poier got a respectable 94 points. It seems Britain got no points at all. Politically, this is all to the good.)

Sunday, May 18, 2003

British academic communists suffer from ideology, which is a brain virus. It takes every natural, logical and honest thought and turns it into a version of itself. So everything becomes political. A person is either good (communist) or bad (capitalist), poor and trodden-upon (good), white and privileged (bad) and so on. American communists, however, live in an intellectual and informational vacuum. So they make it up as they go, creating the most marvelous conspiracy theories as they go along.
- An insightful observation by a friend of Gabriel Syme...

Saturday, May 17, 2003

"This week it cost me 2,750 dollars to airmail a letter to Britain containing three A4 sheets of paper."
- Jan Raath in yesterday's Times reporting from what remains of Zimbabwe

Thursday, May 15, 2003

I don't know if I'm more impressed by these people's tenacity in defending their position even as it circles the drain, or horrified that they're willing to grab up weapons like these in order to avoid having to admit they were wrong.
- Brian Tiemann commenting over on Cold Fury regarding comments on Gabriel Syme's recent post.

Saturday, May 10, 2003

I have to pay 40% tax and everything. Which I don't agree with. I can't vote, why should I pay to a government I don't necessarily agree with?
- Charlotte Church, chairing BBC2's Have I got News for You. Out of the mouths of babes and children

Friday, May 09, 2003

Government departments are named after whatever it is they are trying to put a stop to, hence 'Department of Education'
- David Carr

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

In the short term, foundation hospitals will worsen inequalities, as they would have easier access to capital than other hospitals, enabling investment in better facilities and more advanced services.

- Labour MP David Taylor explains "Why I'll defy party line over reforms" and vote against foundation hospitals, in today's Evening Standard (print edition only)

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

"To exist without enemies is to be a miserable jellyfish that stands for nothing."
- Carter Laren, Capitalism Magazine

Saturday, May 03, 2003

The chaps who dismiss Bush as a moron forget that what counts is what a guy does when he's not talking.
- Mark Steyn

Thursday, April 24, 2003

Respecting the sovereignty of Iraq was nothing more than respecting the sovereignty of Saddam Hussein, at the expense of the people who would have been tortured and killed for not voting for him!
- Alice Bachini

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Classical conservatives publicly despair of progress, but in their hearts they secretly believe in it. The Left seemingly talks of nothing else but progress, but will go to nearly any lengths rather than believe in it.
- Joe Katzman at windsofchange.net today

Sunday, April 13, 2003

… Realists are quite right to point to the centrality of the contest for power in international relations, and also to the dangers of imprudence and immoderation that can arise from the pursuit of intangible goals like honor. But dangers of a no lesser seriousness attend the competition for power itself, however rationally calculated. Moreover, power is never pursued for itself, but always for the sake of some value or values.

In modern democratic states, those values tend to be moral in nature, and to involve a peculiarly democratic conception of honor. To attempt to exclude them from consideration is the height of phantasy, and the opposite of realism.

- the concluding sentences of Donald Kagan on national honor (from a list of Iraq related readings supplied by
Oxblog and linked to by Instapundit)

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

"Thank you Mr Bush!! We very like Mr Bush!!!"
- celebrating Baghdad citizen just shown on ITV news

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West's servicemen as a subject for disapproval.
- John Keegan, Telegraph

Monday, March 31, 2003

There is an old Arab saying I'm hearing more and more from Iraqis, I will side with my brother against my cousin, but with my cousin against the foreigners.
- Paul Wood on BBC Reporters' Log, 11:51GMT

Saturday, March 29, 2003

So while the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It’s a bloggers’ world. We only link to it.
- Steven Levy in his article Bloggers' Delight, MSNBC

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Getting shot at was not that bad, just the getting shot part sucked.
- Sgt. Villafane, via The Command Post

Monday, March 24, 2003

[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage - he had no responsibility - he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Our present day military commanders probably think in private that Old Nosey had it about hundred times easier on the PR front than they do.

Last Friday, the Mises Institute published a special edition of their daily article containing nothing else but quotes by von Mises on the subject of war.

The quotes are hard to disagree with, apart from their mistaken application to the current situation. No distinction is made between using war as a means of conquest, expanding one's power and using war as a defensive measure, protecting one's security, freedom etc. For those who believe the US and the UK are engaged in the former, I shall leave them to their struggle against the neo-imperialists...

For the rest, I retaliate with a small collection of quotes that make such a distinction:

We make war that we may live in peace.
- Aristotle

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
- John Adams

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
- John Stuart Mill

That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.
- G.K. Chesterton

I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called "the sacred right of insurrection." Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death.
- G.K. Chesterton

OK, this is not going to win the war, but it will have to do while we are waiting for our logins for The Command Post warblog!

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.
-Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991

Sunday, March 16, 2003

The Parliamentary Conservative Party is filled with people who despise principles too much even to see the value of pretending to have any.
- Sean Gabb in Free Life 43

Monday, March 03, 2003

More than half a century of experience shows that the U.N. is a theater of hypocrisy, a sink of corruption, a street market of sordid bargains and a seminary of cynicism. It is a place where mass-murdering heads of state can stand tall and sell their votes to the highest bidder and where crimes against humanity are rewarded.
- Paul Johnson in Five Vital Lessons From Iraq [via Instapundit]

Sunday, March 02, 2003

Michael Moore is just like P. J. O'Rourke, only without the wit, the humour and the insight
- Tom Burroughes

Saturday, March 01, 2003

The government announced today that it is changing its emblem to a condom because it more clearly reflects the government's political stance. A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks and gives you a sense of security while you are actually being screwed. Damn, it just doesn't get more accurate than that!
- Anonymous

Friday, February 28, 2003

I don’t fault Dan Rather for going to Baghdad. If someone had interviewed Hitler in ‘39 for three hours, we'd prize the tapes as an invaluable historical document.
- James Lileks from his Bleat this morning

Thursday, February 27, 2003

Everyone is reactionary about subjects he understands.
- Robert Conquest, quoted in the Guardian, and then quoted again in The Week

Monday, February 24, 2003

There will be no war on Iraq. There will be a liberation of Iraq. There will be an end to the war that the Ba'ath Party has been waging on the people of Iraq through its policies of racism, persecution and genocide. Liberation will bring hope to enslaved Iraqis and justice for the dead, for the hundreds of thousands of Kurds murdered during such campaigns as the Anfal, for the Assyrians who were "disappeared," for the Shi'a Arabs slaughtered for rising up against the regime, for the deported Turkomans and the Sunni Arab officers shot for plotting to overthrow the regime
- Dr. Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, in the region controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Friday, February 21, 2003

As we await the Budget in March and the rise in National Insurance rates in April, you'll be glad to know that Gordon Brown is responding to criticism that he's made the tax system too complicated. The new tax form will have only two lines: 'How much do you earn?' and 'Hand it over'.
- Eamonn Butler from yesterday's Adam Smith Institute Bulletin

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It is much easier to tolerate a dictator when he is dictating over somebody else's life and not your own.
- Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga in response to Jaques Chirac's outburst.

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty
-Thomas Paine

Sunday, February 16, 2003

If "International Law" is more important than saving the lives of innocent people now and in the future, by:

1. Liberating the Iraqi people,
   
2. Preventing Saddam from invading and attacking any other places in the future,
   
3. Making sure he can't develop nukes, not even in secret, and can't give them to international terrorist organisations...

... then all I can say is, fuck International Law.
- Alice Bachini

Saturday, February 15, 2003

The French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, had visited Baghdad in December 1974 amid much pomp. Vice President Saddam offered to take care of Chirac’s visit and in their several meetings the two men enjoyed an unexpected rapport, much to the surprise of the traveling French entourage. At the end of the visit the French prime minister warmly embraced Saddam, calling him ‘a personal friend’, a returned home with a sheaf of lucrative contracts (for weaponry) worth 15 billion francs. One of them was the deal to supply the brand new reactor.
- Brighter Than the Baghdad Sun,” published in 1999, page 74

[Thanks to The Invisible Hand for the quote]

Friday, February 14, 2003

All I can say is that the comments confirmed to me what I had to keep to myself all semester: that most of you mental midgets are the most immature, sheltered, homophobic, sexist, racist, lying sacks of s—t I have ever met in my life. ... Seton Hall may be kissing you're a—es now, but out here in the real world, brats like you will be eaten for breakfast.
— Professor Mary Ann Swissler — responding to some complaints from her students about her Promotional Writing course — for more go here and here

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Here are four pieces of advice. The first two are evil, the last is prudent
and the third is, um, British I suppose.
- James Knowles

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Good theories are sticky, but they still need advocating. Slowly, slowly the low-fat mantra is being replaced by acknowledgement in public places that constant blood-sugar swings mightn't be very good for us. Slowly, slowly, free-market capitalism and libertarianism will stop being the standard butt of establishment sneers.
- Emma, in a comment on a posting by Alice Bachini

Monday, February 10, 2003

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
- Tom Stoppard in his play Artist Descending a Staircase

Friday, February 07, 2003

We shall know what we go to Mars for, only after we get there. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep-farming. It is lucky that the U.S. government like Queen Isabella is willing to pay for the ships.
- Freeman Dyson, letter to his parents, 19 May 1958

though it is a pity the US and other governments also crowd out private space business alternatives

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Sir Humphrey: "Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it's worked so well?"

Jim Hacker: "That's all ancient history, surely."

Sir Humphrey: "Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it's just like old times."

- Yes, Minister, British comedy series

Monday, February 03, 2003

Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
- Dr Cruces, head tutor of the Guild of Assassins in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

Sunday, February 02, 2003

THIS is a tragedy, too. What makes the Columbia's loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It's not that astronauts' lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it's what they do, and what it stands for.

- Glenn Reynolds yesterday

Saturday, January 25, 2003

If money does not matter to you, you do not have much imagination
- Tania Emery

Friday, January 24, 2003

A little anti-fascist sentiment brought to you by Samizdata.net

Sic semper tyrannis

Thursday, January 23, 2003

"I hate Uncle Sam - I'm so over older men."
- Jack (Sean Hayes) in Will and Grace, discussing his income tax situation.

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

"...it rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea."
- Ronald Reagan in Human Events, February 1979

(Quote via Nolo Consentire)

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong
- W. S. Churchill

Monday, January 20, 2003

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves
- W. S. Churchill

Thursday, January 16, 2003

It is certainly true that modern civilization has created environmental problems, but the key enviromental issue is addressed in this one question. Is our technology's ability to solve environmental problems advancing faster than are the environmental problems themselves?
- Michael Jennings

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

You may find me one day dead in a ditch somewhere. But by God, you'll find me in a pile of brass.
- Trooper M. Padgett

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

We are not going to put our players in a situation where they have to shake hands with the president of Zimbabwe.
-Tim Lamb - chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)

Monday, January 13, 2003

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.
- Winston Churchill

Sunday, January 12, 2003

"You teach people that it's wrong to care. You tell them that the right course of action is to "not get involved". When they see a crime being committed, then if they try to stop it they may end up in prison, but there's no punishment for looking the other direction and not seeing. And thus fewer people will get involved."

- Steven Den Beste writing on what happens when you punish people for killing robbers. Emphasis added by me.

I quit about ten years ago. I was getting sick of it and Hillary was going to finance her health plan with taxes on cigs. I went cold turkey and being mad at Hillary helped me over the rough spots. Maybe you could think of all your money that will NOT be going to the government.
- Commenter 'Spacer' on how to motivate a libertarian to give up smoking

Saturday, January 11, 2003

When I hear the words "new push" I always think of a) the First World War, and b) the Soviet Union. It's what people do when their systems aren't working – apply more mindless force. So, no surprise to find that schools are being instructed to do more new pushes. Next they will be going over the top and introducing Five Year Plans.
- Alice Bachini (in her new blog Rational Parenting yesterday)

Thursday, January 09, 2003

One of the reasons people used to pay so much attention to politics was that it offered cheap entertainment at a time when entertainment was scarce. Now entertainment is plentiful, and much of it is more entertaining than politics.
- Glenn Reynolds

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

There is no margin for error about a monstrosity that was created for the alleged purpose of preventing wars by uniting the world against any aggressor, but proceeded to unite it against any victim of aggression. The expulsion of a charter member, the Republic of China [Taiwan]—an action forbidden by the U.N.'s own Charter—was a 'moment of truth,' a naked display of the United Nations' soul. What was Red China's qualification for membership in the U.N.? The fact that her government seized power by force, and has maintained it for twenty-two years by terror. What disqualified Nationalist China [Taiwan]? The fact that she was a friend of the United States. It was against the United States that all those beneficiaries of our foreign aid were voting at the U.N. It was hatred of the United States and the pleasure of spitting in our face that they were celebrating, as well as their liberation from morality—with savages, appropriately, doing jungle dances in the aisles.
- Ayn Rand (at the top of the UNisEvil.com website)

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

I hope that this won’t be a surprise to the reader, but a whole generation has grown up in which lying, deception, and manipulation are just part of the game; a generation where too many people think that responding to a question with, "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" under oath is a sign of cleverness.
- Clayton Cramer (in his article What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed for History News Network yesterday, about the Michael Bellesiles affair – link via Instapundit)

Saturday, January 04, 2003

One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. Baxter agreed with him. It went against all his instincts to sit up in this fashion, but it was his duty and he did it.
- P. G. Wodehouse (in Something Fresh: A Blandings Story, 1915)

Thursday, January 02, 2003

"A convoy of anti-war activists, likely to include dozens of British volunteers, will leave London next month to act as human shields protecting strategic sites in Iraq."

Oh please not again.
- Salam Pax

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous
- Ludwig von Mises

Monday, December 30, 2002

...if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers
- Rudyard Kipling, from Kim

Saturday, December 28, 2002

...But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist - and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger
- Frederick Hayek

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

And by the way, gun rights supporters are frequently mocked when they say it deters foreign invasion - after all, come on, grow up, be realistic: Who's nuts enough to invade America? Exactly. It's unthinkable. Good. 2nd Amendment Mission 1 accomplished.
- Bill Whittle (in his essay Freedom – at his new blog Eject! Eject! Eject!)

Sunday, December 22, 2002

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
- P. J. O'Rourke (from the rabble rabble rabble list of choice quotes at the top left)

Saturday, December 21, 2002

Gender is too important an issue to be left to people who think it’s more important than anything else.
- James Lileks (yesterday)

Friday, December 20, 2002

Blogging is better than college.
- Michael Blowhard (yesterday)

Thursday, December 19, 2002

Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.
- Herman Melville (Pierre - 1852)

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
- George Bernard Shaw (in the Preface to John Bull's Other Island - 1904)

Friday, December 13, 2002

A lie told often enough becomes the truth
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

I suspect Vladimir is more widely read in Broadcasting House (The BBC) than Hayek, Rand, Mises, Bastiat, Friedman and Popper added together

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

When a woman marries a wealthy man for his money, she is often described as having 'married well'. Yet when a woman merely rents herself to a man, she is called a prostitute and threatened with legal sanction.
- Perry de Havilland

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

You don't stop violent crime by devoting resources to making excuses look less reasonable.
- Alice Bachini

Monday, December 09, 2002

I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS¹.
- Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism

¹ = for non-US readers, IRS is the Infernal Internal Revenue Service, the United States' theft enforcement arm

Sunday, December 08, 2002

Admissions are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.
- Mr Justice Darling, Scintillae Juris, 1889

Saturday, December 07, 2002

Brotherhood, solidarity, unity, love: they all mean these but not those, you but not them.
- Michael Frayn, Constructions, 1974

Friday, December 06, 2002

Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is, in some sense, more than merely the aggregate of all individuals, their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that, in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded, it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind.
- F. A. Hayek

Thursday, December 05, 2002

The man who prefers his country before any other duty duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.
- Lord John Acton

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

It was futile to argue with politicians, I realized, to try to persuade them that your scepticism concerning their views might be well founded. Politicians developed habits of self-justification and certitude which were immune to logic or emotion: their rhetoric was like a blanket which they wrapped around themselves to keep out the bracing air of dissent.
- Princess Catherine, in Aztec Century by Christopher Evans

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

A young black man can be murdered by a gang of white thugs at a bus stop¹. The result? Senior politicians and police in front of the cameras; public inquiries; new phrases such as 'institutional racism'; sweeping reforms; a trust set up to help others from 'similarly disadvantaged backgrounds'. A young white man gets murdered by a gang of four black men and a black woman in Lewisham, South East London; it makes a one-inch high column at the bottom of page two. Why?
- Ian Wells, London E18, today in readers' comments section of Metro newspaper (a daily distributed for free on the London Underground).

¹ = Reference to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Monday, December 02, 2002

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
- Frédéric Bastiat

Sunday, December 01, 2002

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
- Frédéric Bastiat

Sunday, November 24, 2002

The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.
- Michael Oakeshott

Monday, November 18, 2002

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?
- Terry Pratchett

Sunday, November 17, 2002

When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty
- Confucius

For example the term 'liberal'... once meant (& to some, prefaced by 'classical', it still does) a supporter of individual liberties against both force backed custom (paleo-conservativism) and force backed allegedly rational planning (socialism). It is now generally used as a euphemism for 'democratic socialism'.

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Long live freedom and Secularism
- From the Movement of Iranian Students, who are right now the fighting forces of ignorance and darkness.

Friday, November 15, 2002

Rousseau's reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.
- Paul Johnson

Thursday, November 14, 2002

That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"
-Terry Pratchett

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

This is truly terrifying. It's almost as if, in addition to the Fabian socialists, a parallel group of Fabian fascists was loose in Europe - except they actually found a way into the bureaucracy to steer it.
- Brad Ems

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle one, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
- C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters

Monday, November 11, 2002

I am never in favour of war... but the fact is we are now in a war, so the question is, do we win it?
- David Carr

Sunday, November 10, 2002

I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it.
-Terry Pratchett

Saturday, November 09, 2002

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.
-The many and varied advantages of philosophy (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

Friday, November 08, 2002

Dream on. British TV Is The Best In The World is on a par with the statement about how British Justice Is The Envy Of The World ("Hey, Miguel, how come we can't convict innocent people so quickly and expensively?")
-Terry Pratchett

Thursday, November 07, 2002

I must confess the the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occured to him.
-Terry Pratchett [Lord Vetinari is the rather Machiavellian ruler of the fictional city in Pratchett's books]

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.
-Lord Vetinari (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.
- Frédéric Bastiat

Monday, November 04, 2002

In a real democracy, the relationship between the media and the governing elite is that of a pack of rottweilers maintaining surveillance on a gang of burglars. In Scotland, it more closely resembles the relationship between the Brigade of Guards and the sovereign.

- Gerald Warner in yesterday's Scotland on Sunday quoted in Freedomandwhisky.

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
- Frédéric Bastiat

Saturday, November 02, 2002

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder
- Frédéric Bastiat

Friday, November 01, 2002

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul
- George Bernard Shaw

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem.
- G.K. Chesterton

Saturday, October 26, 2002

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
-Jeff Cooper

Friday, October 25, 2002

The world knows it as Silicon Valley, a name coined in 1971 by the editor of a microelectronics newsletter; but on the Rand McNally Atlas it is the Santa Clara Valley, a 40-mile by 10-mile strip running from Palo Alto to the southern suburbs of San Jose, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. It constitutes just over one-third of the 1312-square-mile Santa Clara County. In 1950 it was the prune capital of America.

The opening sentences of Chapter 14 ("The Industrialization of Information – San Francisco/Palo Alto/Berkeley 1950-1990") of Peter Hall's Cities in Civilization

Thursday, October 24, 2002

Thank God Stalin antedated Photoshop.
- Alex Kroll Jr in a comment on this posting last Sunday.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

".....in order to restore international peace and security"
Draft of the US-British Resolution on Iraq. Peace and Security. Ha.
Bomb us already, stop pussyfooting.

- Salam Pax

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
- H. G. Wells

Monday, October 21, 2002

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
- Adam Smith, 1755

Sunday, October 20, 2002

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
- P. J. O'Rourke

Saturday, October 19, 2002

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.
- Benjamin Disraeli

Friday, October 18, 2002

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.
- Margaret Thatcher

Thursday, October 17, 2002

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
- Vaclav Havel

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack. One defends when his strength is inadequate; he attacks when it is abundant.
- Sun Tzu

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.
- Conor Cruise O'Brien

Monday, October 14, 2002

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
- Margaret Thatcher

Sunday, October 13, 2002

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Saturday, October 12, 2002

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
- Judge Gideon J. Tucker

Friday, October 11, 2002

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
- Dennis Wholey

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say that he values civilisation. The history of the two cannot be disentangled
- Henry Sumner Maine

We do not wish our ancient freedom and the decent tolerant civilisation we have preserved in this island to hang upon a rotten thread.
- Winston Churchill, September 1935

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

"Socialism in its contemporary watered down form is little more than envy disguised as principle."
-Martin Pot, the Institut Héraclite

Monday, October 07, 2002

It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the human mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man distinguished in one or even more departments of science, is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.
- Wilfred Trotter

Saturday, October 05, 2002

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
- Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) in classic TV show The Prisoner

Thursday, October 03, 2002

The debate over guns is a clash of cultures, a confrontation of different kinds of character, a disagreement over social philosophy and even, though few notice this, over free will and determinism. The contending factions don't need guns to detest each other. They would anyway.
- Fred Reed

Wednesday, October 02, 2002

All hail the Web. And power to the people - at least those I approve of.
- Michael of 2 Blowhards, Aug 17, in a posting about the artistic significance of amazon.com

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

"I don't mind keeping the bunny-huggers happy so long as it doesn't cost me a penny."

- Brian Aldridge, the Sage of Ambridge. Pity he's such a John Major.

A few honest men are better than numbers
- Oliver Cromwell

Monday, September 30, 2002

If the UN adopts the kind of resolution authorizing force to enforce the kind of inspections that they should have a resolution adopted for, then I believe this resolution should say: In the event the UN adopts a resolution authorizing member states to use force to enforce the inspections, I believe this resolution should say that under those circumstances we should authorize force to enforce that UN resolution.

Carl Levin, chairman of the USA's Senate Armed Services Committee, summing up the current Democrat position on attacking Iraq, reproduced by Mark Steyn in his Chicago Sun-Times column yesterday

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Delectable! Her derriere is the very apogee of nadirs
- Overheard recently by Samizdata Illuminatus

Saturday, September 28, 2002

They have an engine called the Press, whereby the people are deceived.
- C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 292

Friday, September 27, 2002

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual
- Thomas Jefferson

Thursday, September 26, 2002

What's the point of going out? We're just gonna wind up back here anyway.
- another slice of The Wisdom of Homer Simpson

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Hey, just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
– a slice of The Wisdom of Homer Simpson

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
- G. K. Chesterton

Monday, September 23, 2002

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
- Hillare Belloc

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Beware the wrath of a patient adversary.
- John C. Calhoun

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Labour takes money from Sun readers and gives it to Guardian readers, who then decide how best it should be spent.
- Richard Littlejohn

Friday, September 20, 2002

Everyone wants peace - and they will fight the most terrible war to get it.
- Miles Kingston

Thursday, September 19, 2002

In the Victorian era a curious belief was prevalent that sovereign states ought to have governments that were reasonably efficient and solvent.
- Byron Farwell

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Peace - in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
- The Devil's Dictionary, 1911 edition.

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid best. He said: ransom notes.
- Harry Zimm (struggling film producer played by Gene Hackman in Get Shorty, shown on Channel 4 last night)

Monday, September 16, 2002

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points to a career in politics.
- George Bernard Shaw

Sunday, September 15, 2002

There are five Great National Delusions. The first is that there are solutions to all the problems. The second is that only a strong centre can solve the problems. The third is that the strong centre must embody one's own views exclusively. The fourth Great Delusion is that heroic surgery is required, and the fifth, that the heroic surgeons must be oneself and one's cronies armed with scalpels as big as machetes.
- Louis de Bernieres

Saturday, September 14, 2002

You liberals thinks that goats are just sheep from broken homes
- Anon

Friday, September 13, 2002

It is always a pleasure to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being one day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be the quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.
- Sherlock Holmes, as reported by Dr. Watson (from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Noble Bachelor)

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Are you guys ready? Let's roll!
- Todd Beamer, Flight 93, 11^th September 2001

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.
-Voltaire

Saturday, September 07, 2002

Leather trousers should be tight because they are to men what 'Wonderbras' are to women
- Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblog fame, at the 2B3 tonight.

"Sometimes fate hits you with the Clown Hammer of Circumstance and there's nothing to do but sit there and watch the little birds fly around your head."

- Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz

Friday, September 06, 2002

Rydell has a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website.
- William Gibson, All tomorrow's parties

Thursday, September 05, 2002

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known -
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
When deciding how best to be blown
- Winner of a limerick contest on Long Island - the requirements were to use the two words, Lewinsky and Kaczynski (the Unabomber), in a limerick

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

From time to time, the Lima newspapers publish stories about such and such a community's having "invaded" properties of latifundists or miners. The informed reader knows what is happening. Disgusted with being dispossessed, lacking official justice, the Indians have decided to take through their own efforts what has always belonged to them.
- Sebastian Salazar Bondy, Whither Latin America

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

He whose desires have been throttled,
who is independent of root,
whose pasture is emptiness –
signless and free –
his path is as unknowable
as that of birds across the heavens
- Dhammapada

This passage, to me, is about a free cosmopolitan, freed from imposed ties, much of his life seemingly empty but in fact intellectualised and indeed virtualized, his actions seemingly random to those who look on from outside but, like the birds, actually quite purposeful

Monday, September 02, 2002

Continental intellectuals see analytical thinking as something to be endured, but certainly not courted!
- Adriana Cronin

Sunday, September 01, 2002

No matter how one measures welfare, there's more of it where governments refrain from causing poverty by curtailing markets
- Leon Louw

Saturday, August 31, 2002

A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter
- G. K. Chesterton

Friday, August 30, 2002

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
- G. K. Chesterton

Thursday, August 29, 2002

They preach that if you see a man flogging a woman to death you must not hit him.
- G. K. Chesterton, writing about pacifists

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged.
- G. K. Chesterton

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
- Jacob Bronowski

Monday, August 26, 2002

Hey you over in Johannesburg:

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
-Thomas Paine

Friday, August 23, 2002

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
-Albert Camus

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Human society is probably "sustainable" only in a very low-tech mode, or a very high-tech mode. Anything in between is necessarily transitional, in one direction or the other. We must either move forward, or die in large numbers, and face miserable stagnation afterward. Personally, I'm against the latter.
- Glenn Reynolds

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

What kind of world is it when, in sheer self-defence, you have to Fisk your own newspaper articles?
- Brian Micklethwait (in an article earlier today)

Sunday, August 18, 2002

You don't need a government to tell you when you've gone too far. There's no greater deterrent for a comedian than stone silence.
- Mike Myers

Saturday, August 17, 2002

A man in New York City is suing McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's and KFC, saying they have made him fat. He is also suing Victoria Secret for making him play with himself.
- Jay Leno

Thursday, August 15, 2002

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it?
- Snibril of The Carpet People by Terry Pratchett

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Never become mired in defending an unworkable idea out of some misguided ego or machismo motivation. Cut your losses and move on.
- James C. Freund

Monday, August 12, 2002

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
- Bertrand Russell

Friday, August 09, 2002

"Cleanse The State With The Blood of Martyrs", rumbled Three Yoked Oxen. Rincewind spun around and waved a finger under Three Yoked Oxen's nose, which was as high as he could reach. "I'll bloody well thump you if you trot out something like that one more time!" he shouted, and then grimaced at the realisation that he had just threatened a man three times heavier than he was. "Listen to me, will you? I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave commrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"
- Rincewind, the Wizard from Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times

Thursday, August 08, 2002

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
- Alan Corenk

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a gun"

(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke. This one came up on a computer newsgroup discussing open-source projects that would let anyone bypass censorship limitations such as Yahoo has imposed in China.)

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Indeed the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my Credit in men's Eyes much wrong:
Have drown'd my Honour in a shallow Cup,
And sold my Reputation for a Song
- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 69, First Edition

Monday, August 05, 2002

The constant expansion of the market, both in extensiveness and in intensity, was the result of an absence of a political order extending over the whole of Western Europe
- Jean Baechler, The Origins of Capitalism

Sunday, August 04, 2002

When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
- H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You'll pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins.
- Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, Mafia hit man

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside...Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...
- Thomas Paine, Thoughts on Defensive War in 1775

Monday, July 29, 2002

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.
- James Burgh from Political Disquisitions: or, an Enquiry into Public
Errors, Defects, and Abuses, London, 1774-1775

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

The mind cannot foresee its own advance
- F.A. Hayek

            No, not that Hayek...                     this one!

Princes and democratic majorities are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law.
- Ludwig von Mises, Human action: A Treatise on Economics

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Political revolutions do not often accomplish anything of genuine value: their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another
- H.L. Mencken

Sunday, July 21, 2002

If you had bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now
be worth $49. With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.
With Worldcom, you would have less than $5 left. If you had bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214. Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink beer and recycle.
- Unknown, (via Alexander Baron)

[Editors comments: My only trouble with this advise, oh wise Illuminatus, is the choice of Budweiser. To quote 'Spike' from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer': "Many American beers are under-rated... this ain't one of them"]

Saturday, July 20, 2002

You see those dictators on their pedestal, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police, they are afraid of words and thoughts
- W.S. Churchill, referring to 'book burnings'

Friday, July 19, 2002

It is best to act with confidence no matter how little right you have to it.
- Lillian Hellman

Thursday, July 18, 2002

Saddam Hussein promised us the "mother of all battles" but in the event produced something like the daughter-in-law of an obscure cat fight. His soldiers quit, his air force flew to safety in Iran and in the end he only did a little of what he does best, the murder of innocents, mostly women and children, with a few Scuds lobbed into Israel.
-Wesley Pruden

(via Boris Kupershmidt on the LA-F)

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Carter said to the Cuban people that the most important right is the freedom of assembly. The place where most Cubans assemble? Miami!
- Jay Leno, on ex-President Carter's visit to Cuba

Saturday, July 13, 2002

These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valour.
- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 30

Friday, July 12, 2002

He who understands neither judges nor offends.
-Anonymous

Monday, July 08, 2002

This charter has been forced from the king. It constitutes an insult to the Holy See, a serious weakening of the royal power, a disgrace to the English nation, a danger to all Christendom, since this civil war obstructs the crusade.
-Pope Innocent III (Papal Bull of August 1215 - referring to Magna Carta)

Sunday, July 07, 2002

I order you to hold a free election, but forbid you to elect anyone but Richard my clerk.
-Henry II (in 1173, to the electors of the See of Winchester regarding the election of a new bishop)

Friday, July 05, 2002

Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
- Alfonso X, Spanish king, cca 13th century

Thursday, July 04, 2002

The war is inevitable -- and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death.

- Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775, Richmond Virginia

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valour.
- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 30

Monday, July 01, 2002

Sex doesn't interfere with the tennis. It's staying out all night trying to find it that affects your tennis.
-Andre Agassi

(Agassi, now happily married to Steffi Graf, didn't make it to the last sixteen in the men's singles at this year's Wimbledon, and nor did any other Americans, the first time this has happened since nineteen twenty something. Maybe they should get out more.)

Sunday, June 30, 2002

It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.
-William Connor Magee (1821-1891), clergyman, speech on the Intoxicating Liquor Bill, House of Lords, May 2, 1872

Friday, June 28, 2002

"Hey, Yutz! Guns aren't toys! They're for family protection, hunting dangerous or delicious animals and keeping the king of England outta your face!"
- Krusty the Clown from 'The Simpsons'

Thursday, June 27, 2002

It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.
-Felix Frankfurter

Friday, June 21, 2002

The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness.
- Robert A. Heinlein

Thursday, June 20, 2002

That government being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
- Article I Section 2 of the Constitution of Tennessee

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Amongst other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.
- Nicolo Machiavelli

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

Or: We must preserve our freedoms or the bad guys win.
- P.J. Connolly, InfoWorld Magazine

Monday, June 17, 2002

Are you going to come quietly, or do I have do use ear-plugs?
-Spike Milligan in The Good Show

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Being young in those times meant suppressing the sound of one's own breathing.
-Akira Kurosawa, describing pre-WWII Japan

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

We live in a litigious society - everybody running off to court. It's stupid. It's up to the judge to make them feel stupid. I can do that.
-newly appointed Judge Ling in last night's episode of Ally McBeal
(Judge Ling, played by Lucy Liu, immediately began to settle cases in seconds, and by the end of the episode had been offered a nationwide TV deal.)

Sunday, June 09, 2002

The Moving Finger blogs; and, having blogged,
Moves on: fortunately my Piety and Wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a Line,
and all my Tears wash out a Word of it
Thank goodness for delete functions
-The Rubaiyat of Samizdata Illuminatus

Saturday, June 08, 2002

Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow...
- Ludwig von Mises

Thursday, June 06, 2002

It is impossible to save souls by coercing bodies. There is no such thing as a forced conversion. Men can behave morally only when they have the option of behaving immorally.
-Marc Glendening (one of the speakers at the Liberty Conference, see below, in his contribution to The New Right Enlightenment, Economic and Literary Books, 1985)

Monday, June 03, 2002

So. Okay. Like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all: "What about the strain on our resources?" But it's like, when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right, I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not R.S.V.P. So I was like totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government can just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. [Applause] Thank you very much.
-Cher (Alicia Silverstone) in the movie Clueless

Sunday, June 02, 2002

"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 our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis

[Courtesy of St.Andrews Liberty Log ]

Saturday, June 01, 2002

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away
-Phillip K. Dick

Friday, May 31, 2002

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Perry: "Have you read Orwell's 1984?"
Adriana: "No, I don't need to, I used to live in it."

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

"If you aren't a part of the solution, you're part of Europe"

(Courtesy of Eristic)

No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself.
-King Lear (King Lear - Act IV Scene 6)

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Freedom works. You know that from your own life. Give it a chance to work for everyone else as well.
-Charles Murray in What It Means To Be A Libertarian

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Believers, show discernment when you go to fight for the cause of Allah, and do not say to those that offer you peace: "You are not believers," – seeking the chance booty of this world; for in the world to come there are abundant gains. Such was your custom in days gone by, but now Allah has bestowed on you His grace.
-The Koran 4:93

This is typical, absolutely typical … of the kind of ARSE I have to put up with from you people. You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, well I'm trying to run a hotel here. Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not, you're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren't you. Well, let me tell you something – this is exactly how Nazi Germany started, you know. A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do that cause trouble. Well I've had fifteen years of pandering to please the likes of you and I've had enough. I've had it. Come on, pack your bags and get out!
-Basil Fawlty, to a group of Fawlty Towers guests.

Saturday, May 25, 2002

World trade could be a powerful motor to reduce poverty, and support economic growth, but that potential is being lost. The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich.
-Oxfam, from the Introduction to their Report Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalisation, and the Fight Against Poverty. See their Make Trade Fair campaign website (but don't expect the rules to be any less rigged by the time they've finished with them).

Friday, May 24, 2002

When Dr Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word Reform.
-US Senator Roscoe Conkling

Thursday, May 23, 2002

Harold Wilson said Labour was a crusade or it was nothing. I try not to think about his assertion. The logical implications are too painful.
-Roy Hattersley, 1997

Wednesday, May 22, 2002