Samizdata

When the Mafia offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in dark suits around to pay you a visit.
When the State offers you protection, you pay up or they send some goombahs in blue uniforms around to pay you a visit.
– Samizdata Illuminatus

The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. This is very exciting and has delighted generations of socialist zealots. But it has no more claim to be a scientific projection than an astrologer’s almanac.
– Paul Johnson, discussing Karl Marx

‘Please do not ask for credit as a kick in the bollocks often offends’
– Seen on a notice behind a bar in a less than salubrious part of London last night.

It is good to see the private sector doing its part in discouraging unwise accumulation of debt in this era of absurdly low interest rates

There are two Englands…and Ted Heath is from the other one
– James Bennett

In his book Table Talk Adolf Hitler lamented that German writers had neglected what he saw as their proper business, namely composing paeans of praise of the ancient German kings. He finished off with this comment:

Even Schiller had to glorify that Swiss sniper, Tell.

It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation,
as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man’s head off
-Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers)