Quotes and Conundrums


"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."

Euripides


"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."

Milton Friedman


"If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won't."

Admiral Hyman Rickover


"The standard of intellect in politics is so low that men of moderate mental capacity have to stoop in order to reach it."

Hillaire Belloc


"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

Ayn Rand


"If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."

Steven Wright


"It is a commonplace that the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak."

George Orwell


"Leftism at its heart holds that a small percentage of humans have a vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people. The point of leftism is to empower these superior individuals to impose their superior understanding upon society by the force of the state. Leftists must be viewed by themselves and others as superior human beings if they are to have a claim to power and status."

Shannon Love


"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow... For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding."

Jeff Snyder


"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin



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