BIAS

Contrary to the primary “Visuals” section focus of this site, “Quotes” are word centric, much more socio-politically oriented, and to varying degree, subjectively inclined. As a whole, they are inclined to the “opinion” end of the “opinion/fact slider scale”, but individually, quotes vary across that scale, some towards the “fact” end. They are on whole though, categorically what mainstream media once labeled as “opinion”, and now calls “fact driven news”.

VizStuff quotes are selected based on a bias to the ideas that there are truths, that rationality, individual freedom, creativity/innovation, and the prioritization of truth and pro-human long-term results over harmony/appearances are moral, and optimal to long term human happiness/flourishing.

 

That subjective selection of these statements is based solely on the merit of the statements, not the merit of those expressing them or their ideas in entirety.

No source should be trusted automatically …that is an abdication of thinking, or faith.

 

 

 

 

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GOOD QUOTES

 

 

A

 

Mike S. Adams

- "We know from history that any society foolish enough to experiment with Marxism will find that the quest for equality results in the lower standard of living for all.

Similarly, the society foolish enough to embrace cultural relativism will find that the quest for equality results in the lower overall standard of morality."

- "...what is packaged as compassion is often really covetousness in disguise."

 

Phelps Adams

- “Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.' “                 

 

Scott Adams

- “Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.”                                             

 

Rajshree Agerwal

- “Emotions are not tools of cognition. They are barometers of one’s subconscious premises." (Rough paraphrasing of Ayn Rand.)                                   

 

Saifedean Ammous

- “Capitalism is just what happens when people are left to their own devices.                                

 

Hannah Arendt

- “Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians, ...We call them children.”                                  

 

Aristotle

- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

- " ‘In sum’, says Aristotle, ‘pride is a crown of the virtues; it is not found without them, and it makes them greater.  ‘ “ (Paraphrased by unknown)                              

 

B

 

Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy

     “Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know”    

- “ ‘Judgment creep’ is yet another explanation for the prevalence of wrong-headed pessimism. We are misled about the state of the world because we have a tendency to continually raise our threshold for success as we make progress, argue Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues. ‘When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all,’ explains Gilbert. ‘Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself.’ Social, economic, and environmental problems are being judged intractable because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them. More than 150 years ago, political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville noted a similar phenomenon as societies progress, one that has since been called the Tocqueville effect.”

Ronald Bailey

    “The End Of Doom”

- “There is one way to make sure that humanity runs out of resources-by slowing down the rate of technological progress. As it happens, lots of environmentalists advocate a policy that could in fact drastically slow down the rate of technological change - implementing the precautionary principle.”                                             

- “Environmentalist advocates...claim that when it comes to evaluating technological risks they merely want society to be guided by the wisdom of the ancient aphorism ‘Better safe than sorry.’                                               

But ... the precautionary principle as formulated by environmentalists goes much further and presumes that better safety lies in banning or restricting the development of new technologies.                                              

Consequently, implementing the strong version of the principle will instead make us ‘more sorry than safe,’ as Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler has cogently argued.                                               

‘Why? The central issue is that proponents of the precautionary principle tend to focus on hypothetical dangers while generally failing to consider fully the power of new technologies to reduce risk.  “                                           

- “Contemplate for a moment this question: Are there any human endeavors of which some timorous person cannot assert that it raises a “threat” of harm to human health or the environment?”                                             

- “The strong version of the precautionary principle requires that the creator of a new technology or activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof with regard to allaying fears about threats of harm allegedly posed by a new technology.”                                              

- “Boston University law professor George Annas, a prominent bioethicist who favors the precautionary principle, clearly understands that it is not a value-neutral concept. He has observed, ‘The truth of the matter is that whoever has the burden of proof loses.’ “

- “Harvard law professor and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration Cass Sunstein agrees: ‘If the burden of proof is on the proponent of the activity or processes in question the Precautionary Principle would seem to impose a burden of proof that cannot be met.’ Why can’t it be met? ‘The problem is that one cannot prove a negative,’ notes Mercatus Center analyst Adam Thierer. ‘An innovator cannot prove the absence of harm, but a critic or regulator can always prove that some theoretical harm exists. Consequently, putting the burden of proof on the innovator when that burden can‘t be met essentially means no innovation is permissible.’ ”                                              

- “ ‘The precautionary principle, for all its rhetorical appeal, is deeply incoherent,’ argues Cass Sunstein. ‘lt is of course true that we should take precautions against some speculative dangers. But there are always risks on both sides of a decision; inaction can bring danger, but so can action. Precautions, in other words, themselves create risks  - and hence the principle bans what it simultaneously requires.”                                              

- “Sunstein argues that five different common cognitive biases distort how people view precaution when considering novel risks.                                              

First, recent news about hazards come more easily to mind, distracting people’s attention from other risks.                                               

Second, people attend far more credulously to worst-case scenarios, even if they are very unlikely to occur.                                               

Third, rather than risk a loss, people tend to prefer the status quo even when there is a high probability that a new activity or product will bestow significant benefits.                                                

Fourth, a common belief in a benign nature makes technological risks look more suspect.                                               

Fifth, people focus on the immediate effects of their decisions and ignore how competing risks play out over the longer run.”

 

Ben Bayer

    "Ayn Rand on the Welfare State’s Real Villains" – New Ideal   https://newideal.aynrand.org/ayn-rand-on-the-welfare-states-real-villains/

- "Rand opposed welfare transfer payments because they violate the rights of those whose property is transferred.”                                

- "She dismissed as a distortion the idea that one could have a ‘right’ to welfare: an ‘impossible ‘right’ to economic security,’ she wrote, ‘is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights.’ "                                 

- " ‘It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t.’ ”                             

- "...the welfare state ‘divorces achievement from rewards, or production from distribution, and redistributes a country’s wealth, penalizing the more productive in favor of the less productive.’ ”                             

- "In opposing this sacrifice of the more productive to the less, Rand opposed the altruistic ethic that equates sacrifice with virtue, the idea that productive people are their (unproductive) brothers’ keepers.”                                

- "But the productive people who are to be penalized by this philosophy are not simply the capitalists, who are to be sacrificed to the workers. They include the poor people willing to work to better themselves.”                                 

- "Far from adopting the conventional critique of welfare that regards welfare recipients as viciously selfish, Rand bemoaned policies that erected arbitrary barriers to anyone’s pursuit of happiness.”                             

- "Indeed, Rand thought that the broader demands of the altruistic welfare state sacrificed the pursuit of happiness of the poor.”                                

- "Rand emphasizes how this power-lust makes the bureaucrats behind the welfare state far more dangerous than sundry welfare recipients:                                  

‘The welfare recipients are not the worst part of the producers’ burden. The worst part are the bureaucrats — the government officials who are given the power to regulate production. They are not merely unproductive consumers: their job consists in making it harder and harder and, ultimately, impossible for the producers to produce. (Most of them are men whose ultimate goal is to place all producers in the position of welfare recipients.)’ "                            

- “In her essay ‘The Age of Envy’ Rand extensively analyzed this motivation. It isn’t the desire for values that another person has achieved, but the hatred of another person because of his achievements, which one cannot be bothered to work toward oneself. She regarded this motivation, which she dubbed ‘hatred of the good for being good,’ as fundamentally evil: the motivation of ‘an enemy . . . of all values, . . .  an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, . . .  an enemy of life as such and of everything living.’ ”                                

- “The caricature of Rand as a welfare critic is that she is a misanthrope who denies the reality of the misfortune of others. Rand’s actual critique of the welfare state gives the lie to this caricature and turns the tables on it. Not only does Rand recognize the obvious fact that some people are in trouble through no fault of their own, she argues that the fault is often that of the very welfare system that is supposed to be their salvation.”                                 

- “She also argues that the real misanthropes are those who support and maintain the welfare state because it throttles the lives of productive individuals.”                                

 

Frederic Bastiat

- "Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, — at the risk of a small present evil.”                                    

    “The Law”

- “A bad economist will pursue a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come. A good one, on the other hand, will pursue a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.”

- “If everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.”                   

- "Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.”

- “ We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."                                      

 

Isaiah Berlin

- “…it is this—the 'positive' conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to—which the adherents of the 'negative' notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.”                                

- “But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”                                

- “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”                               

- “One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals.... This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.”                                

- “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.”                                

- “If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it — as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.”

                              

Don Boudreaux

- “The only sure means of keeping money out of politics is to keep politics out of money. “                                           

 

Jay Bhattacharya  - Professor, Medicine, Stanford University                                     

- "Be very careful when driving to work." (Regarding COVID comparative degree of risk analysis  - When asked "How do you speak to a 40 year old reasonably healthy teacher who's very frightened (about going back to work) …what does the data tell us.")                                   

      

Billy Binion

- “Principles should be applied consistently. That means applying them to people you find unsavory.”                               

 

Harry Binswanger

- “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. The cash-value of this conclusion is that to be a value is to be pro-life. Only by showing something to be beneficial to the self-sustaining actions of an organism can one rationally identify it as a value. To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms.”                                 

- “To be a value is to be something one goal-directedly acts to gain and/or keep. Action towards a goal (as opposed to action merely having an effect) implies that the agent has something at stake—something to gain or lose—in the outcome of the action. The fundamental, all-inclusive thing at stake in goal-directed action is the agent’s life.”                                 

- “ ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”                                 

- “I quote from Galt’s speech: ‘There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms . . . . It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death.’ ”                         

- “Therefore, to be a value is to be something that a living organism acts to gain and/or keep in response to its survival needs. In short, to be a value is to be pro-life.”                                   

- “The only means of demonstrating something to be a value is to relate it back to one’s needs, the basis of which is the alternative of life or death.”

 

Yaron Brook

- “Freedom results in inequality. Most systems of authoritarianism result in vast equality among people, although there's always a small group that are super unequal relative to everybody else.”                                

- “Economic freedom has proven itself time and time again to be the engine of prosperity.”                                  

- “If you want to help the poor, spend your own money, not other people's.”                                  

- “If we cannot offend, we cannot find truth. Every new truth offends someone.”

- "Human beings [are unique in that we] have the capacity to self-program.”                                  

- "Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our society.”                                   

- "Live life win-win. This applies to business, relationships, everything. Win-lose, no matter which side you are on, always turns into lose-lose. Therefore, the alternative is win-win or lose-lose. (Extremely rough paraphrase/interpretation.)                                  

- "Capitalism is inherently win-win. (Extremely rough paraphrase/interpretation.)                                  

- "You have to have a living thing that values something, otherwise, it's not a value.                                   

- "What would this look like if a government committee designed it?" (Holding up an iPhone, the audience laughs. He pauses to let them consider that.)

"Then why do we let government design our health care system ...or our school system ...or our heavily regulated housing system ...or our so heavily regulated financial system?" (Very loosely quoted.)                                        

- ”It's not the government's job to help us, it's the government's job to protect us.”                                               

- “ [The Socialist definition of freedom] is freedom from reality … [it is a definition of freedom that] is unmoored from reality. “                                           

- “We're taking our guilt, and imposing it on poor countries, and making sure that they stay poor, ...and that's a tragedy."                                               

- “How is it that politicians go into office poor, and come out of office rich, having produced nothing, created nothing, made nothing. The answer is …some form of implicit corruption…”                                              

- “Very few of them actually get suitcases full of cash or wired dollars into some Cayman Islands or Swiss bank account, but almost all of them get consulting gigs and speaking gigs you know once they leave or in some way or their family members or whatever in ways that are roundabout...                                             

How many of these congressmen are wealthy who started out not wealthy? Unbelievable.”                                         

- “Walmart is more responsible for raising the standard of living of low-income Americans than any government program, ever. But they're resented for the fact that they drive out mom and pop stores, and they're resented for the fact that they're actually improving the lives of the poor… ...because they [the Left] want government to do that.”                                             

- “Our basic interests then are in harmony with other people: to deal with one another through mutually beneficial cooperation and voluntary trade.”                                

- “Selflessness on this view is senseless.”                                 

- “There is no reason on earth why each individual should not seek to make the most of his own life, without victimizing others or becoming a victim himself.”                                

- “Focusing exclusively on shareholders actually makes all your other relationships better. As a consequence, you treat your employees well, treat suppliers well, treat our creditors well, treat your customers obviously really well, [because all these are in your best interest].”                      

- “This is a recognition of an important principle in Objectivism …a recognition of the idea that there is no conflict between rational people with rational goals …your goals are consistent, your goals are not in conflict.”                               

- “This is true of self-interest. When individuals pursue their rational, long-term self-interest, it doesn't put them in conflict with one another. It's the opposite. Rational self-interest is a moral system that creates harmony among rational people.”                                

- “Capitalism is a system of harmony.”

 

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

    "Equal is unfair"     

- “Economic inequality is an inevitable byproduct of freedom.”                                  

- “Whether or not it's a person's fault that he's failed to achieve success, achieving success is still his responsibility.”                                 

- “Today, more and more of the world is following our lead, with the result that billions around the globe have been liberated from poverty in recent decades: since 1981, the fraction of the earth’s population living on less than a dollar a day has dropped from over 40 percent to only 14 percent.”                                  

“This is an incredible achievement. Yet most of the people who wring their hands over economic inequality have been inexcusably silent about this feat. Our intellectual leaders should have taught us to celebrate this triumph and should have explained the political and economic conditions that made it possible.”                                   

“Imagine if mortality from cancer had declined from 40 percent to 14 percent in California’s hospitals. We would expect medical researchers to investigate what was responsible for this magnificent achievement—and we would be outraged if we discovered that they had ignored it.”   

“What some of the people alarmed by inequality have done is worse. They haven’t simply been silent about the global escape from poverty; they have condemned it for increasing inequality, which is akin to condemning those hospitals for increasing cancer survival inequality.“               

- “Fighting economic inequality requires us to jettison political equality, and install a politically privileged class of “elites” who have the power to dispose of other people’s time, effort, and wealth by force.”                                  

“To understand the campaign against inequality, the first thing to understand is that the inequality alarmists want to be those privileged elites.”                                  

“The inequality alarmists are authoritarians, and, like all authoritarians, they desire the power to dictate how other people live.”                                  

“They see themselves as a uniquely compassionate and intellectually gifted elite, entitled to control the rest of society for the alleged good of society.”                                   

- “We should celebrate, encourage, and reward success. This is the precondition of human progress.”                                   

“The egalitarian conception of justice amounts to a perverse inversion. Instead of rewarding people for their achievements, it rewards people for not achieving anything.”                                  

“Instead of teaching us to celebrate success, it teaches us to condemn the successful for making society more unequal and for stirring up resentment in the unsuccessful.”                                   

“It teaches us that the only way to show compassion toward others is to grind everyone down to the lowest common denominator.”                                 

“A rational concept of fairness is grounded, not in equality, but in treating people as they deserve.”                                    

“There is a sense in which this requires equality. It is, as Aristotle said, just to treat equal things equally. But for the same reason, he added, we must treat unequal things unequally.”                                  

“Achievement is unequal, and so equal is unfair.”                                  

“This is the key thing to realize about the inequality alarmists. They regard economic inequality as inherently unfair.”                                    

- “But as Ayn Rand observes:                                 

‘If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (not equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop-—or by razing the mountains.’

The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man's stature and actions;                                 

but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual’s achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society.                                 

The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms).                                 

Yet it is the second method that [the egalitarians] are pursuing.                                 

The essence of the egalitarian project is to level down, i.e., to destroy values as an end in itself. And every once in a while, egalitarians will admit this.’ ”

 

Robert Bryce

    ”Smaller faster lighter denser cheaper”                                      

- “The facts are simply indisputable: never have so many lived so well, or so free.”                                            

- “Yet despite this astounding progress, there remains an entrenched and powerful interest group that believes we humans are doing too much, that we must reduce our consumption of everything, return to our agrarian past and employ what one prominent catastrophist calls "a new civilizational paridigm."                                               

Following such a path would be disastrous. Just as we are accelerating the trend toward Smaller Lighter Faster Denser Cheaper in nearly every sector, some people want to turn back the clock and wrench defeat from the grasping fingertips of victory.                                              

And that poses the essential question: will we continue innovating, embracing technology, and getting richer, or will we listen to those who are advocating degrowth?”                                               

- “In 2012, James Hamilton, a vice president and engineer at Amazon Web Services, wrote about Apple's new iCloud data center in Maiden, North Carolina.                                           

Hamilton was responding to Apple's claim that it was going to use solar energy to help run the site.                                             

In a blog posting called "I love solar but …" Hamilton calculated that powering Apple's 500,000-square-foot data center would require about 6.5 square miles of solar panels.                                              

Hamilton said that setting aside that much space, particularly in the densely populated regions where data centers are built, is "ridiculous on its own" and would be particularly dificult because that land couldn't have any trees or structures that could cast shadows on the panels.”           

- “Utilizing wind energy to fuel Data Centers would be equally problematic. To demonstrate that, consider the Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, which needs 28 megawatts of power.                                             

The areal power density of wind energy--and it doesn't matter where you put your wind turbines--is one watt per square meter.                                             

Therefore, just to fuel the Facebook data center with wind will require about 28 million square meters of land.                                               

That's 28 square kilometers or nearly 11 square miles--about half the size of Manhattan Island, or about eight times the size of New York City's Central Park.”                                             

- “Take a moment to look at the period at the end of this sentence. Using current manufacturing techniques, Intel Corporation could fit more than six million transistors onto that little dot.”                                         

- “Cities, said Descartes, provide ‘an inventory of the possible.’                                            

Cities mean density.  Density means prosperity.  Density means innovation. “                                         

- “In 1968, Paul Ehrlich grimly declared, the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon know.                                            

At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.                                               

When Eric made his dire prediction, the global population was 3.5 billion. Today, the world has more than twice that many people (about seven billion), and yet the death rate today is lower than it was when Ehrlich made his claim.                                              

What happened?  Better farming happened.                                              

What Ehrlich overlooked, and his fellow catastrophists continue to overlook, is our capacity for innovation, and in this particular case our ability to produce more food with less land.                                               

Smaller computing devices, Faster communications, Lighter vehicles, Denser cities, and Cheaper energy will help foster innovation.                                             

Innovation, in turn, will generate the wealth and new ideas and technologies we need to deal with the challenges we face, whether it's a changing climate, food and water scarcity, or difficult diseases.                                               

- “The best way to protect the environment is to get richer. Wealthy countries can afford to protect the environment. Poor one's generally can't.”

 

William F. Buckley Jr.

- ”Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”               

 

Vladimir Bukovsky

- ”This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. “            

- ”The pessimist is the man who believes things couldn't possibly be worse, to which the optimist replies: 'Oh yes they could!”              

- ”This term "liberal” in the American context does not mean anything definite, or anything similar to traditional European liberalism- In fact, it’s nothing but an extreme mental aberration best described by the Russian saying:   That it is like a dog in reverse because it barks at its own folks and wags its tail in front of a stranger.”             

                                 

C

 

Adam Carolla

- “California has very intense rules for people who pay taxes, play by the rules …an insane amount of regulation and red tape,                                 

but conversely, if you do not want to pay taxes or [play by the rules] …you can then construct yourself a shelter on the side of the freeway and you will be left alone…”                                

- “...we have some of the most stringent building codes and they are up your ass every step of the way, so if you own a home, and you want to build a gazebo in your back yard, that's a two year permit situation, but, if you'd like to not pay taxes, or property taxes, and just build a plywood home in the park, you'll be left alone, and that's why we have over regulated for those who are playing by the rules, and almost zero regulation for anyone who wants to just slam drugs and live in the street.”                               

 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

    "Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It"

- ”[W]e mostly have been brainwashed into thinking that confidence will eventually cause competence. “            

- “ .. I think it's much more appropriate to think of confidence as a compensatory strategy for lower competence.” (In regard to overconfidence as a crutch)            

 

Eugenia Cheng

    “The art of logic in an illogical world”

- ” [When arguing/debating a topic]                                                

1. We should carefully define the concepts we're talking about.                                             

2. We should carefully state the assumptions we're making.                                           

3. We should carefully state exactly what we're going to prove, in an unambiguous way.”                                            

- ”Abstraction is the discipline of separating out relevant details from irrelevant ones, and finding the principles that are really behind a situation in such a way that we can try to apply logic.”                                             

 

Noam Chomsky

- “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”          

 

David Christian

- “Study the world itself rather than what has been said about the world."                                               

 

Tyler Cowen

    "Stubborn Attachments"                                               

- “A higher growth rate means the future, at some point in time, will be MUCH richer than it would be otherwise, and, as I argued earlier, it also means that human beings will be MUCH better off.”

 

Jerry Coyne

    “How the ACLU got woke, became political, and changed its mission”                                                

   “…the ACLU, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, is going down the tubes. And they’re both disintegrating for the same reason: Wokeness, i.e., they’re abandoning their original mission to engage in political activities promoting aspects of ‘social justice’ not connected with their avowed missions.”                                              

- ”Now ... the ACLU is making noises about how free speech might not be all it’s cracked up to be.”                                               

- ”The original mission of the ACLU was to defend the First Amendment, no matter how offensive someone’s free speech might be (ergo they defended the Nazis in the famous Skokie case). Now they’re engaged in dismantling Title IX and backing off on free speech.”                                  

    Excerpt quoting documentary  - “The Disintegration of the ACLU”  - By James Kirchick  - A new documentary about former Executive Director Ira Glasser explains how the once-storied civil liberties organization came to embrace the ideology it was built to fight  - MARCH 30, 2021  

- “In 2018, the ACLU spent over$1 million on advertisements likening Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh to Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, essentially accusing him of crimes for which he was never tried or convicted.”

- “More egregious than their brazen political partisanship was the way in which the ads traduced the presumption of innocence, a bedrock of American jurisprudence and a principle the ACLU was founded to uphold.”                                              

- “Asked why his organization was willing to further violate its tradition of political neutrality, Faiz Shakir, a Democratic Party operative then serving as the ACLU’s national political director, was brutally honest. ‘People have funded us and I think they expect a return,’ he said.”                    

- “The embrace of political partisanship, the dropping of standards, the buckling to donor demands at the expense of long-held principles—Glasser says all of these developments have rendered the ACLU unrecognizable from the group he once led.”

- “The roots of the ACLU’s evolution from principled, nonpartisan defender of civil liberties into just another cog in the progressive machine are cultural as much as generational.”    

    Excerpt quoting Ira Glasser  - Former executive director of the ACLU                                            

- “ ‘My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,’ Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director.’ “  

 

Ed Crane (Cato Institute)

- “Gov redistribution of wealth creates perverse incentives for investors trying to protect their assets and creates a culture of dependence and entitlement seeking that marginalizes the values of hard work, individual responsibility, and ethical values.”

 

Jason Crawford

    "Progress studies as a moral imperative"  -  The Roots of Progress blog     https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-studies-a-moral-imperative                       

- “To understand these facts, and to care about human life and happiness, is to see progress as a moral imperative.” (‘These facts’ being an outline of how much human life has improved over time.)                              

- “But progress is not automatic or inevitable. For most of human history, very little of it happened. Almost all our progress has been made in the last 500 years—even though we’ve had writing for 5,000 years and language for 50,000.”

- “Seen this way, we are fantastically wealthy relative to where we were even a hundred years ago—and by implication, we are desperately poor compared to where we can be a hundred years from now, if we keep this going.”                               

- “I submit that progress today is threatened. First, most people today don’t appreciate progress. And how could they? They don’t learn about it in school: it falls between the cracks of history and science classes.                                

They don’t learn about it from the news media, who are subject to strong negativity bias (“if it bleeds, it leads”). They don’t get it from popular culture, which since the 1950s has increasingly turned away from optimistic visions of the future and toward dystopian ones.”                          

- “The result, according to polls, is that most people don’t even know or believe that progress has happened.                               

But it gets worse: progress is actually under attack, from several quarters. As Steven Pinker points out, “the Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since”.                                 

Rousseau advocated a return to nature and praised the “noble savage”. Today, anti-tech narratives are on the rise, with claims that technology invades our privacy, steals our attention, and isolates us from one another.                                

Romantic ‘greenists’ spread fear about technologies that are actually beneficial, such as GMOs. Some attacks come from academia, such as Jared Diamond’s claim that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”.

We see conspiracy theories, such as the anti-vaccination movement, which has led to new outbreaks of measles and other preventable diseases.                                 

And there is a growing distrust of elites and institutions, including the elites and institutions that drive progress: founders and VCs, scientists, and universities, even courts and the rule of law.                                

So I see threats to progress. Populist political movements could enact policies that would slow, stop, or destroy it.                                  

After all, when you don’t understand how far we’ve come, it’s easy to romanticize the past as a lost golden age, a Garden of Eden from which we have fallen. When you don’t see the modern world as a set of solutions to problems, it’s easy to propose un-solving problems we have already solved.”                               

- “Even more worrisome is the risk that the next generation will not be motivated to pursue progress. Progress only marches on when we decide to drive it. To keep it going, the students of today must become the scientists, inventors, and business leaders of tomorrow.”                           

- “If no one tells them the story of progress, and all they hear are the attacks, who will be inspired to carry the banner forward? So progress needs to be defended. We need to tell its story, counter the attacks with truth, and promote progress as a noble quest.”                                 

    "There are no natural resources" - The Roots of Progress blog    https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-studies-a-moral-imperative                     

- “There are no ‘natural’ resources. Everything nature gives us is wrong somehow. Through effort and ingenuity, we make natural materials and energy into what we need.”

 

Lee Cronin

- “Of course I’m wrong, the question is to what degree.” (Paraphrased?)     

                                 

D

 

Janet Daley

- “The United States has now acquired an electorally powerful liberal bourgeoisie who are convinced, as their European counterparts have been for several generations, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that public spending is inherently virtuous, that poverty can be cured by penalizing wealth creation, and that government intervention can engineer social fairness.”

 

Antony Davies

- “When politicians say cut the budget, what they mean is to increase the budget less than they would actually like. ...[They don't mean cut the budget] in the way that any normal human being uses it.”                                  

- “If you are for equality of opportunity, then by definition you are against equality of outcome.”                               

- “If you are for equality of outcome, then by definition you are against equality of opportunity.”                                

- “The reason for this, is because people are different.”                               

 

Stephen Davies

- “There are very powerful social practices, norms, institutions which inhibit innovation. And the reason makes perfect sense because in the Malthusian world, innovation is very, very risky because most innovations fail.                                              

And so if you use up scarce resources on a new, innovative way of doing things, those resources are probably going to be wasted in most cases. And that might be the difference between making it through the winter and starving to death.                                              

So you can see why people are very skeptical of and hostile towards innovation, because it's very, very dangerous.                                              

But the paradox is that it's only innovation and sustained innovation that will enable you to escape from that Malthusian trap.”                                              

                                      

Richard Dawkins

    “The God Delusion”

- ”A visiting lecturer from the States arrived in England to give a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells. An elderly member of the Zoology Department at Oxford University, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, attended the lecture with great interest. What would this American have to say that hasn’t already been said? I can imagine the professor saying to himself, ‘How dare someone make such an outlandish claim that I have already disproved. And in the halls of my university!’   To the professor’s surprise, the lecture demonstrated with indisputable evidence the Golgi apparatus did exist. Dawkins relates how, at the end of the presentation, ‘the old man strode to the front of the hall’ to look the American in the eyes. However, the post-lecture engagement was not an argument but a confession, as the elderly professor took the American by the hand and said — with passion — ‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red.”              

 

Alexis De Tocqueville

- “After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”                                 

 

Doomberg  - (Writing focused on '...highlight[ing] the fundamentals missing from many economic and policy decisions...by a group of individuals '...deep[ly] experience[d] in heavy industry, private equity, and the hard sciences.')

   Interview

- “In the "Green Utopia" there are no tradeoffs …electricity is immaculately produced, and batteries just magically appear …it's a cake that bakes itself and the ingredients are free.”                                

- “…’Green Energy’, just because you call it green does not mean it is green, but that's the politics of today, that there are no downsides to solar and wind, and there are no upsides to fossil fuels and nuclear power. That is an unscientific framing of the problem which will lead to terrible solutions.”                                   

- “Which of the energy tradeoffs do you want to make? Do you want to have solar panels that ...can't be effectively recycled today, ...are made by slaves, and the energy required to make them is derived from the dirtiest fuel on the planet, or do you want to handle some nuclear waste? ...There is no perfect solution.”

 

Frederick Douglass

- “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!”

- “Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”                                     

 

Anthony Downs quoted by Steven Koonin                                 

- “The elites environmental deterioration is often the common man's improved standard of living. “                             

                                   

Arthur Conan Doyle

- “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” 

 

E

 

David Eagleman

    “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”                                 

- "Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”                                    

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

- “Earth laughs in flowers.”

 

"Planning Engineer"

    "Will California ‘learn’ to avoid Peak Rolling Blackouts?"  -  Climate Etc. blog                                   

- “If California were more honest about the capabilities of ‘green’ intermittent resources planning would be enhanced.                                 

However, being honest about the capabilities of ‘green’ resources would have consequences that some would find unacceptable.                             

There has been a big push to make ‘green’ options appear much more economic and capable than they are so that they will be more competitive.”                              

- “Subsidization of ‘green’ resources by traditional uses occurs in many ways.                              

In addition to crediting ‘green’ resources above their dependable capability, others subsidies include directing costs associated with such additions to others.”                             

- “Being honest makes the ‘green’ dream a much harder sell. Assuming that 'green’ resources work well saves other investment in the grid.                              

This subterfuge tends to limit the cost increase that should be imposed by these resources, but does so at the cost of reliability.                             

This tradeoff takes a while to see as we have built the electric grids to have very high levels of reliability at the bulk level. In the short term it looks like you are getting a cleaner, equally reliable system at a moderate cost increase.                              

But as penetration levels increase, cost get higher and reliability gets much worse.”                              

- “Greater penetration of renewable resources will limit the options available to operators while at the same time increasing uncertainty around expected generation patterns.                                 

To accommodate such uncertainty the choices are to:  Likely all four are and will continue to occur to some extent as the penetration of intermittent resources increases.                              

1) increase grid costs and infrastructure, 2) limit the operational flexibility of the grid, 3) increase generation costs through backup generation resources or 4) live with increased risks and degraded reliability.”                           

 

Alex Epstein

- “Whenever someone offers you ‘science,’ not to inform your voluntary choices but to impose a ban on you, you can be confident that what they are calling science is a distortion.”                                               

- “One sign that science has this religious character today, is that it dictates evaluations as scientific, and that should never happen…”                            

- “… the scientists should be saying ….. here's what's true about reality ..… then you need to use your own methods of evaluation including your values to make a decision,                                  

but as soon as somebody says science says ‘Do X’, you know you're dealing with a fraud, and you know you're dealing with somebody who wants to impose a kind of religious dogma.”                               

- “There's only one form of energy that the green movement has ever supported in its history. Most people don't know but it's: imaginary energy.”                              

- “When you look at the climate side effects of fossil fuels, you recognize that those are actually neutralized and overwhelmed by the climate benefits of fossil fuels, namely the ability to use fossil fuels to power machines that allow us to master the climate.”                              

- “Elon Musk thinks we can make Mars livable...but says Earth won't be livable if the temperature changes 2 degrees.”                                

- “One of the challenges of civilization is that it insulates you from the state of nature, and so the job of civilization is you always need to educate people about every step, so you don't take it for granted.”                                              

- “What happens is, when you have bad education, you treat civilization as natural.”                                              

- “We're not taught that we live in this miraculous world, in large part because of energy …and that energy almost all comes from fossil fuels, …but if you don't learn that, you take all the benefits of fossil fuels for granted.”   

- “The Green Movement [is] anti-human because … they’re against human impact … and … humans survive and flourish by impacting the Earth, so you’re against our means of survival  .”

- “Fossil fuels didn’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; it took a dangerous climate and made it safe.”                                  

    “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels”

- “To put it bluntly, in our ‘natural climate,’ absent technology, human beings are as sick as dogs and drop like flies.”                                  

- “Notice that today, though we talk a lot about climate, and episodes of bad weather get huge media attention, we don’t fear climate on a day-to-day basis. There are two lessons here: First, weather, climate, and climate change matter  - but not nearly as much as they used to, thanks to technology. Climate livability is not just a matter of the state of the global climate system, but also of the technology (or lack thereof) that we have available to deal with any given climate. Second, having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.”                                

- “We often talk about Mother Nature as if it is really our mother  - a being that deliberately nurtures us and has our best interests at heart. But it isn’t, and doesn’t. Nature, including the climate, is a wondrous background that gives us the potential for an amazing life  - if we transform it.”

- “To obsess over changes in the background while ignoring the need for technology and transformation is a prescription for a worse life. The one thing we can’t live without, climatologically, is technology. Which means we can’t live without the fuel of technology, energy. Which means we can’t live without energy we (and potentially everyone) can afford. Which means, for the foreseeable future  - as in, most of the unrepeatable, irreplaceable years of our lives  - we can’t live without fossil fuel energy. With it, we can achieve a stunning  - and growing  - amount of mastery over any climate hazards, natural or man-made. We have been doing so for decades. And we can get even better.”

- “If we look at history, an incredibly disproportionate percentage of valuable ideas have come in the last several centuries, coinciding with fossil-fueled civilization. Why? Because such a productive civilization buys us time to think and discover, and then use that knowledge to become more productive, and buy more time to think and discover. We should be grateful to past generations for producing and consuming fossil fuels, rather than restricting them and trying to subsist on something inferior. If we slow down our progress, including the generation of new ideas, by using inferior energy, we deserve nothing but contempt from future generations  - for example, from those who die prematurely because a medical cure comes twenty years later than it needed to.   The production of energy increases the production of knowledge, and it is knowledge that enables one generation to begin where the last left off.”

    "Fossil Future"

- “The Earth is not a naturally nurturing ‘delicate balance’ but rather a naturally (1) dynamic, (2) deficient, and (3) dangerous place that we must massively impact if we are to survive and flourish.”

- “…the reality of the relationship between Earth and human beings is the ‘wild potential’ premise … that Earth has the potential to be a highly livable place if we impact it positively enough.”

- “The cost of energy is determined by the cost of the full process.”

- “…the intermittent flows of sunlight and wind … cannot by themselves provide reliable energy without being accompanied by a massive storage system … This … has thus far proved so cost-prohibitive that there is not one single self-sufficient solar and/or wind-based electrical grid anywhere in the world—and the ‘storage systems’ solar and wind depend on are largely fossil—fueled power plants.“

- “…any sunlight- or wind—based process, if it is to be part of a reliable, on-demand electricity system, always requires paying for the cost of some controllable energy source to replace it … or to supplement it… .”                               

- “There are three approaches, in theory, to doing this: (1) relying on some controllable source of energy, such as fossil fuels; (2) relying on a diverse, distant, and enormous network of solar panels and wind turbines—so there is always sufficient electricity from somewhere; or (3) relying on a man-made storage system to store enough intermittent energy to always be able to meet demand. The current reality of solar and wind is that none of these approaches has yet proven cost-effective and only approach 1—relying on some controllable source of energy, such as fossil fuels—has been implemented at any cost.”                                

- “Here’s an easy question: What’s more expensive, a 100 percent controllable energy infrastructure plus a massive intermittent energy infrastructure or just a 100 percent controllable energy infrastructure?”                          

- “The massive infrastructure duplication costs of intermittent solar and wind are compounded by a further cost problem with solar and wind’s dependence on controllable, usually fossil fuel, power plants: a decrease in the fuel efficiency of the controllable power plants.”

- “To the extent a grid is committed to using solar and wind, whenever sunlight or wind increases, the grid has to cycle down controllable power plants, and whenever sunlight or wind decreases or disappears, it has to cycle up controllable power plants. Rapidly cycling power plants up and down is an efficiency killer, just as stop-and-go-traffic kills your car’s fuel efficiency. … This reality leads to a frequent, additional negative consequence: declining reliability. The reason is simple: governments seeking to lessen the large price increases that come with more solar and wind are trying to get away with fewer controllable power plants as backup. This is a game of “reliability chicken” that many areas of the U.S. are losing, with disastrous consequences.”

    "Fossil Future"  - (reference to Dracula  - Netflix miniseries)

- “While two hundred years ago shelter involved constant anguish and labor, today the average person can acquire a shelter that has comforts and capabilities that go far beyond its exceptional abilities to protect us from climate and predators.                                  

A rare appreciation of modern shelter was uttered by the title character in the Netflix miniseries Dracula. Dracula wakes up after a few hundred years and is in awe of a poorer-than-average British homeowner:                               

‘DRACULA: You’re clearly very wealthy. KATHLEEN: Wealthy? DRACULA: Yes. Well, look at all this stuff. All this food. The moving picture box. And that thing outside. Bob calls it, um, a car. And this treasure trove is your house! KATHLEEN: It’s a dump.  DRACULA: Kathleen, l’ve been a nobleman for four hundred years. I’ve lived in castles and palaces among the richest people of any age. Never never have I stood in greater luxury than surrounds me now. This is a chamber of marvels. There isn’t a king or queen or emperor that I have ever known or eaten who would step into this room and ever agree to leave it again. I knew the future would bring wonders. I did not know it would make them ordinary.’ ”                                

- “The future has made wonders ordinary. Because the future is an empowered human environment in which fossil-fueled machine labor and freed-up mental labor can produce unimaginable amounts of value for us - and fossil fuel materials could make a modern ‘chamber of marvels’ weatherized, insulated, sanitized, and decorated cost-effectively enough for the typical individual to afford.” 

- “While today’s massive fossil fuel use is amazing, having created an unnaturally livable world in which just about everyone has an increased ability to flourish,  there is still a need for vastly larger quantities of cost-effective energy…”

- “The most obvious reason far more energy is needed is that there are billions of people who use very little energy. While most of those billions benefit from the productivity of the empowered world—e.g., charitable help with food, clothing, shelters, medical care, and disaster relief—that is no substitute for actually empowering themselves with machine labor, which is the only way their world will be truly livable.”

 

F

 

Marcus Feldman and Richard Lewontin

    “Echoes of the Past: Hereditarianism and A Troublesome Inheritance”  National Center for Biotechnology Information  - National Library of Medicine – National Institute of Health    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263368/

- “From the data and analyses of worldwide molecular genomic variation, Richard Lewontin and I amplified the conclusions of Lewontin and Barbujani et al. as follows: ‘The repeated and consistent results on the apportionment of genetic diversity…show that the genes underlying the phenotypic differences used to assign race categories are atypical of the genome in general and are not a reliable index to the amount of genetic differentiation between groups. Thus, racial assignment loses any general biological interest. For the human species, race assignment of individuals does not carry with it any general implication about genetic differentiation.’ “

 

Richard P. Feynman

- "Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”                                   

- "I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!                                  

- "The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.                                 

- "The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?                                 

- "The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."                                   

- "It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.”                                 

- "See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.                                  

- "Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.”                                   

- "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”                                 

- "Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.”                                 

- "It is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization.”                                 

- "...it is a part of the adventure of science to try to find a limitation in all directions and to stretch the human imagination as far as possible everywhere. Although at every stage it has looked as if such an activity was absurd and useless, it often turns out at least not to be useless.”            

- "It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.”                                 

- "I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”                                  

- "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything, and of many things I don’t know anything about but I don’t have to know an answer.”                                 

- "I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.”                                 

- "Philosophy of Science is about as much use to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”          

- “But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of.  We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.”                                               

- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.”                                               

- ”Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”                

- “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”                                 

 

Mike Forbes  (911 dispatcher in TX who was reprimanded for his response to a woman who called in to report her 10 year old daughter had kicked a hole in the wall)                                  

- "Do you want us to come over and shoot her?"                                   

 

Benjamin Franklin

- “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.                                               

- “Any society that will give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.                                              

 

Lex Friedman

- "To maximize the win is to focus on win-win.”  (Extremely rough paraphrase.)                                 

 

Milton Friedman

- “A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality or liberty, and a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed."                     

- “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”                                   

- “Without a market, no mechanism exists to curtail waste. No mechanism exists to incent people to excel in their work. No mechanism exists to reward creativity and experimentation. The only certain outcomes come from the current arrangements are weaker and weaker results, demand for more inputs, and another generation of indoctrinated minds unable to consider the virtues of any alternative approach.”   (In regard to government run schools).                

- "How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?"                                   

- "A society that puts equality  - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who will use it to promote their own interests."                                 

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

- “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”                                              

- ”The minimum wage law is a law requiring employers to discriminate against low-skilled people.”

- “In one of these massive buildings scattered all through this town, filled to the bursting with government employees, some of them are sitting around trying to figure out how to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes.                             

In another of the massive buildings, maybe far away from the first, some other employees equally dedicated/equally hard working are sitting around figuring out how to spend our money to subsidize farmers to grow more tobacco.”                               

- “The view I'm expressing, is the view that classically been termed ‘Liberalism’ . In the modern day and age, the word 'Liberal'  has come to mean almost the opposite of what it used to mean.                                

If you look at the dictionary, 'Liberal' means ‘Of and pertaining to freedom’. If you look at behavior today, 'Liberal' means ‘Of and pertaining to freedom with other people's money.’ "                              

 

G

 

Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge,                                  

- “News is bad news; steady progress is not news.”

                              

Max Gammon

    Dr. Max Gammon’s Theory of Bureaucratic displacement

- “In a bureaucratic system…increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production….such systems will act rather like black holes in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of emitted production.”

 

John Taylor Gatto

    “Dumbing us down - The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling”

- ”I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.”                                               

- ”Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.”                                              

- ”That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”                                              

 

Onkar Ghate

- “Faith is a get out of reason free card.”  

 

Thomas Gilovich

- ”For desired conclusions we ask ourselves, ‘Can I believe this?’, but for undesired conclusions we ask, ‘Must I believe this?’ "              

 

Giulio Giorello

- “Yes we have a soul... but it is made of lot's of tiny robots."

 

David Goggins

- "Most people are missing something, because they don't know who they are. They never examined themselves."

- "...we're all lab rats, but you're also the scientist."

- "You create your own self."

 

Jonah Goldberg

- “Bureaucrats should wear body cams.” (unverified)  

    "Suicide of the west"

- “Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of people's lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: it doesn't feel like it.”                                  

- “Poverty is natural, wealth takes effort.”

- “The free market is the greatest anti-poverty program in all of human history. In a very real sense, it is the only anti=poverty program in all of human history.                                  

- “Government officials are the only citizens  … who are allowed by law to use violence for reasons other than self-defense. In this, a flunky from the IRS or the EPA is vastly more powerful than the Koch brothers.”                                   

- “I was once invited to speak at Williams college by a group that called itself Uncomfortable Learning. The group chose that name because they knew that, if they tipped off students that they might hear conservative or libertarian views, the students would boycott the event. But because ‘Uncomfortable Learning’ sounds so rebellious, and transgressive students assumed they'd be hearing things they already agreed with, the reaction from the audience when I spoke reminded me of my dogs' reaction when they think were driving to the park, only to discover were heading to the vet.”                                  

- “Politicians delight in likening the country to a family. This is a dangerous analogy. Welfare programs -- including numerous middle class entitlements -- are justified on the grounds that we all belong to the same American family, families take care of their own, and in the family there is no shame in asking for help. The problem here is twofold.  Anyone who has asked a family member -- particularly the wrong family member -- for money knows that shame often plays a big role in the experience, particularly if you ask more than once. Family generosity has its limits, and it comes with strings attached. This is because generosity is different from entitlement, and familial assistance brings with it complex forms of reciprocity, guilt, expectations, etc. The second problem is that welfare is not received as charity; it is seen as an entitlement. When you tell people  - particularly strangers -- they're entitled to something they did not earn or work for, you are teaching a profound and often profoundly pernicious lesson about how life itself works.  “                               

- “…voting should be the culmination of one’s civic engagement, not the gateway to it.”                                    

- “Yet the tide pushes the other way. Legislators in California and elsewhere increasingly want children to vote. Others want people to vote online so as to not have to suffer the inconvenience of pursuing democracy. Better to have it delivered like open phone lines during American Idol.”

- “Patrick Deneen, a brilliant and intellectually anachronistic (in a good way) professor at the University of Notre Dame, writes: My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decant. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation.’ ”

- “[College students today] live the most bespoke lifestyles of any humans in history, getting their wants and desires fulfilled on demand. …They think it is normal that others prepare their food, clean their dorms, fraternities, and sororities, and protect them from not just physical violence but allegedly ‘violent’ ideas—and yet they are convinced they are ‘independent.’ ”                                   

- “Is it any wonder that they want to make society as a whole as sheltered and nurturing as the only world they’ve known? Is it any wonder that they let their feelings and desires guide their sense of right and wrong?”                                   

- “ ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,’ Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”        

- “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

- “Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy .porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. . . . In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.”                        

- “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.“

 

Barry Goldwater      (Sometimes attributed to Karl Hess, Goldwater’s speechwriter)                          

- “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue. “                             

 

Gina Gorlin

- “Suppression of emotions is like tampering with evidence." 

 

Martin L. Gross

- “Nominally, there is one executive for every eight [federal] employees, a ratio that would bankrupt many private industries.                  

Government at all levels has emerged as our number one growth industry...for the first time in American history  - even in the history of the Western industrialized world  - there are more people working for government at all levels (18.7 million) than in manufacturing (18.1 million).

Since manufacturing jobs make money while government jobs take money, this has become an equation for economic disaster.”

 

H

 

Jonathan Haidt

- "I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject ‘intelligent design’ as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the ‘intelligent design’ of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view." 

- "Nietzsche did not say what kills you makes you stronger, but he did say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”                                  

- "It's very, very important that kids can get hurt on playgrounds…. Because then every day they learn how not to get hurt.” 

- "...programs that try to raise children's self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of..." "Such direct enhancement can potentially foster unstable narcissism."  (Paraphrasing Roy Baumeister.)                                  

- "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” (Paraphrasing Roy Baumeister.)

- ”The three Great Untruths have flowered on many college campuses, but they have their roots in earlier education and childhood experiences, and they now extend from the campus into the corporate world and the public square, including national politics.                                           

What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”                                              

- ”If the Ku Klux Klan wanted to harm African Americans and reduce their success, they would buy a million copies of Ibram X. Kendi's book and Robin DiAngelo's book (the 2 most prominent books promoting critical race theory) and they would tell everyone and every institution to accept the victimhood narrative.”                                              

- ”You will feel righteous, but you will not get ahead. If you believe these 3 untruths, you will be disempowered.”                                             

 

Richard Hanania  - Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI)                                                 

- ”Scientific and technological progress have stalled. There is no lack of funding for research and development, but our current systems seem to disincentivize genuine risk-taking and innovation.”                                               

- ”At the same time, there are areas in which we know how to advance social goals, but ignore the relevant knowledge for political reasons. Social scientists understand a great deal about how to prevent crime and build affordable infrastructure, but politics often makes it difficult to do what is right.”                                               

- ”In the last decade, white liberals in America have shifted far to the left on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Ideas once seen as radical, like defunding the police and gender being on a spectrum, are embraced by more people than ever before. “                                           

- ”The sacralization of physical and emotional safety is a worrying trend. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the inability of public health officials to consider the tradeoffs between physical safety and personal freedom.”                                             

- ”Progress in science and technology is impossible without physical risk. Progress in ethics and politics is impossible without emotional risk. Yet, society and government seem to be becoming more risk averse.”                                               

- ”CSPI welcomes work investigating the origins, nature, and effects of safetyism. We are also interested in policies and practices that reduce risk aversion or encourage better cost-benefit analysis.”                                              

- ”CSPI believes in the importance of science. However, we think much of what is considered science is better understood as scientism: the use of scientific language and concepts without much actual rigor or objectivity. “                                             

- ”Today we are constantly told to “trust the science” and “listen to the experts.” Thus, it has never been more important to point out bad science when we see it and question the nature of scientific authority. Our scholars have criticized questionable research practices and political bias in fields such as international relations, epidemiology, and psychology.”                                             

- ”CSPI welcomes work that challenges bad scientific practices, debunks established findings, or explains modern reverence for scientific authority and expertise in political matters.”                                             

- ”Public institutions used to pride themselves on being politically neutral, but this is no longer the case. Institutions such as schools, universities, and public health bureaucracies now take public stances on polarizing issues and let political ideology undermine their functioning.”              

- ”Private companies are being politicized too. Media, tech, and big business actively signal their political affiliations and incorporate them into their products and marketing.”                                             

- ”We believe that government policy along with ever-growing bureaucracy are responsible for much of the failure of institutions we see.”                                             

 

Sam Harris

    "Letter to a Christian Nation"

- "Along with most Christians, you believe that mortals like ourselves cannot reject the morality of the Bible. We cannot say, for instance, that God was wrong to drown most of humanity in the flood of Genesis, because this is merely the way it seems from our limited point of view.

And yet, you feel that you are in a position to judge that Jesus is the Son of God, that the Golden Rule is the height of moral wisdom, and that the Bible is not itself brimming with lies.

You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible—and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guideus in the world; rather, we must depend upon the prescriptions of the Bible.

You are using your own moral intuitions to decide that the Bible is the appropriate guarantor of your moral intuitions. Your own intuitions are still primary, and your reasoning is circular.

We decide what is good in the Good Book. We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses.

And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).

If we are civilized, we will reject this as the vilest lunacy imaginable. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions. The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.

The choice before us is simple: we can either have a twenty—first-century conversation about morality and human well-being—

a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two

thousand years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

Why would anyone want to take the latter approach?"

- "The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist.

No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to “never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence..."

- "God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.

Of course, people of all faiths regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent?

This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. lf God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.

You may now be tempted to execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God’s goodness in the first place.

And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction, like Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom most sane humans now ignore."

- "The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty.

It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t.

Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies."

- "The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not.

If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe.

Everyone recognizes that to rely upon “faith” to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous—

-that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad’s conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society.

Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers.

Anyone caught worshipping Poseidan, even at sea, will be thought insane."

 

Daniel M. Haybron

    "Happiness - A very short introduction"

- “Impartial is not terribly interesting…"                                  

- “…no one reaches old age and lies on his deathbed thinking, ‘If only I had killed myself when I was 17. Suicide really was the answer.’ "                                 

 

Friedrich Hayek (F. A. Hayek)

- “The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”

- “Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.”                                

- “The endnote at the end of this quote is great. Hayek quotes J.A. Wheeler from an article in American Scientist, 1956: “Our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.”                                

- “There can be no doubt that in history unfree majorities have benefited from the existence of free minorities and that today unfree societies benefit from what they obtain and learn from free societies.”                               

- “The significant point is that the importance of freedom to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the number of people who want to do it; it might almost be in inverse proportion.”                                

- “One consequence of this is that a society may be hamstrung by controls, although the great majority may not be aware that their freedom has been significantly curtailed.”                               

- “There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life [David R Henderson note: that is, the lives of others.] “                                

- “His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power.”                                

- “In the past, the spontaneous forces of growth, however much restricted, could usually still assert themselves against the organized coercion of the state.”                                

- “With the technological means of control now at the disposal of government, it is not certain that such assertion is still possible; at any rate, it may soon become impossible.”                                  

- “We are not far from the point where the deliberately organized forces of society may destroy those spontaneous forces which have made advance possible.”  

- “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”                                  

- “While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”                                  

- “From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.”                                  

- “Vital information is inherently local in nature, and if channeled through a distant central planning board, actions determined by the state would distort the signals necessary to run an economy efficiently.                                        

For a central authority to assume all the knowledge is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.”                                      

- “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”                                  

- “While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”                                  

- “From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time”                                   

- “From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently."

    "The road to serfdom"

- “When government fails, as it must in central planning, and doesn't admit failure, but exerts even more top-down control, increasingly distorting free markets, and increasingly diminishing freedom in the process.” (Paraphrased)                             

 

Martin Heath  - (Commentor on YouTube interview of the author of "Nudge", who advocates for more vaccine mandates.)                                  

- “We are all being "nudged" headlong into the nursery. The most appalling thing I have witnessed in six decades is the deliberate and total infantilization of society…”

 

Piet Hein

- "The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again, but less, and less, and less."

 

Robert Heinlein

- ”You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”               

 

Arthur Herman

    "The Cave and the Light"

    (Paraphrasing Machiavelli)                                  

- “When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success.”                              

- “The freer a society becomes, the more prosperous and more arrogant it becomes as well.                                

Like ancient Rome or Renaissance Florence, it sows the seeds of its own servitude. Although self-government and liberty are the highest forms of political life, Machiavelli revealed that human nature also makes them the most unstable.”                               

- “Galileo recalls the words of his father, Vincenzo:                                  

‘It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly.                                 

Perhaps they sensed that like many reformers, Rousseau loved humanity more than he liked human beings and that if his plans for their happiness and welfare were really implemented, they might have the opposite result.’ ”

 

Stephen Hicks

- “Some fairly clear contradictions in Post Modernism:                              

On the one hand, all truth is relative, on the other, Post Modernism tells it like it really is.                                

On the one hand, all cultures are deserving of respect, on the other, western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.                               

On the one hand, values are subjective, on the other, sexism and racism are really evil.                               

On the one hand, technology is bad and destructive, on the other, it's unfair that some people have more technology than others.                               

On the one hand, tolerance is good, and dominance is bad, on the other, when we (Post Modernists) are in power we're as politically correct as hell.                                

There is a common pattern here.                                 

What we have is subjectivism and relativism in one breath, and dogmatic absolutism in the next.                                

It makes me wonder, which side then of the contradiction is really deepest ... [concern in the mind of the holder of these contradictions].”                               

                              

Christopher Hitchens

- “The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. “                               

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

- “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

 

Phillip Howard

    "The Death of Common Sense" or "Life Without Lawyers"                                    

- "It may be helpful to restate it this way: The rights that are the foundation of this country are rights against law. In James Madison's words the constitution provides for ‘protection of individual rights against all government encroachments, particularly by the legislature.’ Rights  - freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association  - were to be the antidote against any new law that impinged on those freedoms.”                                 

- "The new rights aren’t rights at all: They are blunt powers masquerading under the name of rights. They have nothing to do with rights. The rights our forefathers died for are a shield - government can’t tell me what to do or say - to preserve our freedom from others ordering us around. The new rights are a sword.”                               

- "Modern a rights gave undefined powers to individuals to assert claims over other free individuals. Unlike constitutional rights, which shield citizens from state power, these new rights gave citizens a sword  against other free citizens.”                                   

- "The national program for playground safety at the University of Northern Iowa, advises that “Children should always be supervised when playing in the outdoor environment.”                                   

- "The consumer product safety commission and other safety groups want to protect against any activities that involve risks. “Safety” has been a primary goal of public policy and “Avoid Risk” is its twin.  Taking risks is essential to a healthy childhood. Exploring anything, especially if you’re not supposed to, is fun.  What’s really fun, more fun than anything, is risk.”                                  

- "Being on your own is a critical component of play because, among other benefits, it makes you responsible for yourself. Responsibility, like risk is intrinsically interesting. Instead we have trained children to believe that being on your own presents an ever present danger of abuse by adults who are strangers. In fact the chances of abduction by a stranger are about as small as getting hit by a meteorite and dramatically smaller than having an accident when riding in a car with your parents. If children need help the safest thing for them to do in many cases is ask a stranger for help.”                                 

- "The new rhetoric of rights is less about human dignity and freedom than about insistent unending desires.  Modern rights give a sword to one group to wander onto the field of freedom, and in the case of special education, to demand whatever they can imagine would be the best for their child.”                                 

- "Modern rights are not a tool of freedom… They are a form of tyranny albeit well intentioned. By allowing some citizens to wield coercive power over others for their own benefit, modern rights repudiate a core precept of freedom. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others,’ john Stuart mill explained. ‘His own good … is not sufficient warrant’. ”                                   

- "Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent… The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”                                   

- "Accountability is the flip side of freedom. You will be free to act on your best judgment only if others are free to judge you.” 

 

Coleman Hughes

- “I'm constantly told the most important thing to how legitimate my opinion is, is whether or not I'm black, but then when I have a dissenting opinion, I get told I'm not really black.”       

- “I wish these protests were against the War On Drugs––the root cause of Breonna's death along with so many other problems in this country––rather than against a cop's right to fire back when fired upon.”    (In regard to Breonna Taylor shooting verdict protests.)                              

- “We're operating on like, five or ten different definitions of racism simultaneously at the moment as a society. And yet the word 'racist' carries a severe stigma. So the stigma is very precise, but the definition is very vague.”                                              

 

Aldous Huxley

- “The authoritarian state will gain/maintain power by bypassing the rational side of man, and appealing to his …deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him, actually love his slavery."                                 

 

I

 

J

 

Elan Journo                               

- “The idea that need puts a claim on others.“  (Paraphrasing or Quoting Ayn Rand) (clarifying a faulty common ideology)

- "It's taken as a given that the Palestinians are owed [a] state because they're long suffering,

because they have misery, because they have not attained anything of significance, because they're ... victims and ... sufferers, which is a position their leadership has cultivated,

...that is seen as the passkey to the moral high ground, the sheer fact of their not having something, ... despite numerous opportunities to create a better society for themselves.

That again is the influence of altruism, it's the elevation of those ... who's only claim to virtue is that they are sufferers, as opposed to having ... achieved something, and pursued something, and accomplished something.

- "Israel should fundamentally oppose the creation of a Palestinian state until or unless the Palestinians adopt better ideas, and that is the essential issue.

They do not have ideas that would lead to a good society, ...in fact, we know what kind of societies their ideas lead to, ...the kind of societies that glorify murder, martyrdom, and the kind of slaughter that we saw on October 7th.

If you ignore all that, if you evade all that, and continually insist that they have a right to a state, then you're not thinking about morality.

It's a mockery of moral thinking, ...and you're certainly not thinking about justice, ...and you're not thinking about the well-being of any individuals, whether they're under Palestinian control or Israeli control.

You're not really concerned with human life if you're dropping that moral context."

- [Pursuing statehood for Palestine] "...reflects [an] insistence on self-sacrificial approaches, on the grounds that you have to serve those who are suffering, regardless of why they're suffering, and regardless of the opportunities they have forsaken.   

    "What Justice Demands  - America and the Israeli – Palestinian Conflict"  

- "The common theme here is a clash between a free society and regimes and ideologies that are hostile to freedom and contemptuous of human life."

- "No individual, no group of individuals, no self-identified national community has the moral right to create a tyrannical regime, whether dictatorial or theocratic. Yet that is the kind of state that the leaders of the Palestinian movement would create. And, fundamentally, there are no genuine Palestinian grievances—those involving the infringement of individual rights—that are even partly remedied by the wholesale violation of rights under a Palestinian tyranny.”

- "By our support of the Palestinian Authority [through foreign aid) and, indirectly the Gaza regime of Hamas [through relief}, we enabled two vicious, militant regimes that trample on the individual rights of their subjects and that imperil the lives and freedom of Israelis."

- "We should, therefore, withdraw not only our financial support, but more crucially, our moral backing of the Palestinian movement’s goal of a fully sovereign state."

- "...one necessary step forward, in the region and specifically in the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, is to judge all regimes, all ideological movements, all political groups. We need to judge them by the objective moral standard of freedom—and act accordingly. Without exception, across time."

- "We should endorse the side that upholds freedom. We ought to stand with Israel and everyone else in the region genuinely seeking freedom—uncompromisingly, resolutely, vocally. Such moral support is far more consequential than most people imagine. It also entails supporting Israel’s defeat of our common enemy, not only the dictatorial elements of the Palestinian movement, but also, and especially, the jihadists. Inflicting a morale-crushing blow to the jihadist cause would have wider impact."

- "This is the choice we face. Either we stay on the path that leads to more of the same, if not worse; the path that continues to empower vicious regimes and movements, the path that sells out the region's freedom seeking individuals. or we take a different path. This new path entails upholding our own moral-political ideals. It entails strengthening our ally and encouraging all those seeking to advance freedom, while combatting our common foes.

It's either/or. The attempt to avoid taking a moral stand, the recourse to some middle ground of moral neutrality, is itself a stand. The belief that you can skirt moral judgment is illusory. Worse, the practice of disregarding moral judgment is itself corrupting of our thinking and action. It can only undermine us, our interests, and our allies. On this point, the philosopher Ayn Rand offers a timeless insight.

'[M]oral neutrality necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue. A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil  finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good To him a person of virtue is a threat that can topple all of his evasions---particularly when an issue of justice is involved, which demands that he take sides. It is then that such formulas as "Nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong" and "Who am I to judge?" take their lethal effect. The man who begins by saying: "There is some good in the worst of us," goes on to say: "There is some bad in the best of us"—and then "There's got to be some bad in the best of us"---and then: “It’s the best of us who make life difficult---why don't they keep silent?"---"Who are they to judge." ' “

- "The path we've traveled is leading us toward precisely that kind of moral bankruptcy. The longer we stay on that path, the more it distances us from objective judgment, the more it hampers our ability to define and achieve our interests."                       

 

K

 

Brian Keating

- ”Science would stagnate if we merely accepted proclamations of past authorities.”              

- ”Case closed is not a scientific expression.”               

 

David Kelly

    "Two Strains Of Altruism"     https://www.atlassociety.org/post/two-strains-of-altruism                 

- “If we look for the sources of altruism in our culture, a good place to start is the New Testament, especially the Gospels. And if we read the Gospels carefully, we will see two distinct strands in the altruistic message that Jesus teaches. The first of these is the message of sacrifice: According to this strain of altruism, it isn't just that those who lack ability, strength, wealth, and so on need our help and we should give it to them. According to this strain, the helpless, weak, and the poor are actually superior to the able, the strong, the wealthy. They are the ones who will get into heaven most easily. Indeed the able, the strong, and the wealthy are suspect precisely because of their ability, strength, and wealth. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19:24). This is the leveling form of altruism.”                             

- “In the Gospels, there is a theological rationale for altruism's inversion of values. This world is in opposition to the next, this life to the next. Our bodies are attached to this world but our souls yearn for the life to come. Failure in this world is a good sign that one will flourish in the next, and vice versa: Success in this world is a very bad sign.”                               

- “In sum, then, Jesus is asking us to do two distinct things, both of which are unnatural: First, value others above self—that's the sacrificial form of altruism. Secondly, value the low end of the scale of human values over the high end. Value poverty over wealth inability over ability, weakness over strength.”

- “It is this leveling aspect of altruism that gives rise to egalitarianism, which I would broadly describe as holding that: People are equal, morally speaking. Differences in status, or wealth, or power or esteem are unmerited. Those who are low on those scales of status, wealth, power, and esteem are victims, who should be honored and helped.  Those who are high on those scales are oppressors, who should be cut down to size or made to pay in some way.”                               

- “I And remember, this egalitarianism does not apply only to innate and unchosen abilities and traits. It applies also to moral traits. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’ (Matt. 7:1). “                             

- “I What is the root of that idea, the idea of putting mercy over justice? The root, I suggest, is that the leveling concept of victimization applies even to the morally challenged.”                              

- “I So we have two strains of altruism: The core concept of the first is sacrifice; the core concept of the second is equality.”                               

 

John F. Kennedy                                                

- “For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”                                              

 

Charles Kettering

- "A problem well stated is a problem half solved." 

 

Matt Kibbe

- "My health is your responsibility" [and never my own]. (Clarifying an aspect of the increasingly common idea of collective as opposed to individual responsibility).

 

Martin Luther King Jr.

- “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

- “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ...

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' --

one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today! ..."                            

 

Steven Koonin

- “To ride through those long droughts, the backup system has to be at least as capable as wind solar alone, and hence at least as expensive.”                              

- “The most expensive part of a renewables heavy grid is the reliability, and it becomes more and more expensive as you demand higher reliability.”

                       

Anna Krylov  - Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California

    “From Russia with Love: Science and Ideology Then and Now”   (Note: this paper was presented at “The Politicization of the Sciences: A Conversation” panel at Duke University on 12/6/2021 and subsequently revised)                                            

- “The journal Nature published a letter calling for the replacement of the accepted technical term ‘quantum supremacy’ by ‘quantum advantage.’ The authors regard the English word ‘supremacy’ as ‘violent’ and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism.”                           

- “…they also warn us about the ‘damage’ inflicted by using such terms as ‘conquest.’ Professional societies (e.g., the Association for Computing Machinery) and tech companies (Google, IBM) joined the suite.”                                               

- “Last spring, I attended a meeting on quantum information science—it was a sad spectacle to watch grown-up scientists stumbling, trying to avoid the ‘offensive’ word. About 90%  conformed to this idiocy.”                                               

- “Many universities and corporations devote significant resources to identifying and rooting out (supposedly) oppressive language. These activities are usually carried out under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).”

- “How do things look now? I already described California’s proposal to do away with advanced mathematics programs in their public schools. Race-based admissions have quietly become common practice—the extent of them is documented in the book A Dubious Expediency.”      

- “The University of California system has permanently abandoned admission tests, in the name of equity. Faculty hiring is now prioritizing diversity over merit.”                                              

- “Social Engineering is a reality. Is it the right way to address past injustices? Will it result in a better workforce? I do not think so.”     

                                          

L

 

Aldo Leopold

- “The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.”                  

- “A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than that of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”                               

 

Richard Lewontin

    “The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment”

- “There is a story in rural Vermont of a man who claims to have had an axe in his family for 150 years. When asked how that was possible, he said that his family had taken very good care of it by providing seven new handles and three new heads.”                                 

 

Walter Lippmann

- “The change from the older faith…..that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt….that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and virtue of the rulers”          

 

Bjorn Lomborg

- “Electric cars won't save the planet. The IEA estimates that if every nation achieves their ambitious EV targets, it will reduce CO2 emissions in this decade by 235 million tons. That will reduce global temperatures 0.0001°C by 2100.  “                             

 

Glenn Lourey

- "MLK appealed to America's honor, BLM appeals to America's guilt." (Very loosely quoting Shelby Steele.)                                

 

Greg Lukianoff

- “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”                                 

 

M

 

Bill Maher

- “Is it really liberal for someone who doesn't go to college and makes less money to pay for people who do go and make more?”

                

Rafeael A. Mangual

    ”Criminal [In]Justice”

- “During a discussion about the systemic racism debate with a Black police officer who, at the time, was working in one of the most dangerous precincts in the country, he said something that stuck with me for years. He said—-and I’m paraphrasing, since it’s been awhile:                         

“ ‘A truly racist cop isn’t the guy constantly getting out of his car, frisking people, and clearing corners to try and prevent shit from happening.                                              

A truly racist cop is the guy that says, ‘Fuck ’em. Let ’em kill each other.’                                              

But the haters want us to act more like the racist and less like the go-getter. So, what does that say about them?’ ”

 

Mike Mazza  - Ayn Rand Institute

(Paraphrased)                                

- “A major key to being objective is overcoming the natural human tendency to want to be right instead of wanting to get it right.”                               

- “For objectivity, beware a ‘wanting to be right’ bias, as opposed to a ‘wanting to get it right’ bias."                               

 

Heather Mac Donald

    Lecture (Channeling John Rawls re free speech more specifically.)

- “What arrangement of rights would you choose, if you don't know your status when you're first born?" "If you don't know if you're going to be the one w/ power, or the one w/out power, do you want freedom of speech or not?"                                       

- “The concept of tolerance is not a religious concept, it is a (secular) enlightenment concept, and religion in the west has been forced to accept tolerence, which is a very good thing, but that is not an idea that is inherent to religion."                                      

 

Wilfred M. McClay

    "Land of Hope"                        

- “For the human animal, meaning is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish.”                                   

- “Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity, …”

- “But by and large, ‘history’ is interested in the eruptions of the extraordinary into the flow of the regular.”                                  

- “The past does not speak for itself, and it cannot speak to us directly. We must first ask.”                                  

- “A nation that professes high ideals makes itself vulnerable to searing criticism when it falls short of them - sometimes far short indeed, as America often has.”                                  

- “We should not be surprised by that, however; nor should we be surprised to discover that many of our heroes turn out to be deeply flawed human beings. All human beings are flawed, as are all human enterprises. To believe otherwise is to be naive, and much of what passes for cynicism in our time is little more than naivete in deep disguise.”                                   

- “What we should remember; though, is that the history of the United States, and of the West more generally, includes the activity of searching self-criticism as part of its foundational makeup. There is immense hope implicit in the process if we go about it the right way.”                        

“That means approaching the work of criticism with constructive intentions and a certain generosity that flows from the mature awareness that none of us is perfect and that we should therefore judge others as we ourselves would wish to be judged, blending justice and mercy.”            

- “One of the worst sins of the present - is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn't trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.                                   

- “This small book is an effort to counteract that condescension and remind us of how remarkable were the achievements of those who came before us, how much we are indebted to them.”                                 

- “…there is only one nation on earth that can point with pride to a written Constitution that is more than 230 years old, a continuously authoritative expression of fundamental law that stands at the very center of our national life.                                  

- “The Constitution the Framers wrote fell short, and grievously so, in one important respect; in its failure to address satisfactorily the growing national stain of slavery.”                                  

“As we will see, there were understandable reasons for that failure. But the trajectory of history that was coming would not forget it, and would not forgive it.”                                  

“Slavery is as old as human history. It has existed on all habitable continents, and all the world’s great religions have given it, at one time or another, authoritative approval.”                                 

- “Americans' attachment is not too something geographical or ethnic, but two a community built around widespread ascent to a universal civic idea of ‘freedom.’ “                                

“…those ideas have a universal and all-encompassing quality, so that the defense of the United States is not merely the protection of a particular society with a particular regime and a particular culture and history, inhabiting a particular piece of real estate, whose chief virtue is the fact that it is ours. It is something far greater and more inclusive than that.” 

- “American Society is built not on our shared the sense but on our shared consent, meaning that every individual is created equal and is equally provided with the opportunity to give his or her assent to the values for which the nation stands.”                                   

- “It doesn't matter where you came from, as long as you can say yes to those propositions, those ideas, that creed.                                   

“This is a very powerful view.  Its power is reflected in the fact that the United States has, for so much of its history, been so welcoming to immigrants. For one is, in this view, made an American not so much by birth as by a process of agreeing to and consciously appropriating the ideas that make America what it is.”                                 

- “Converts are always welcome.  In fact, in his view of America, we are one nation of converts, every one of us.”     

 

Deirdre McCloskey

- “The way to help the poor, in short, is to let the Great Enrichment proceed by commercially tested betterment, as it has widely since 1800 and especially in the past forty years.”                                             

- “Commerce works better than theft.”                                             

- “The emotional pattern seems to be something like, ‘[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore, his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.’ Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: ‘We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.’ It is not true, but it motivates.”

- “ …the much-maligned “capitalism” has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.”                                              

- “ …happiness is not a six-pack and a sport utility vehicle but what he calls ‘flow.’ It occurs ‘when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, 30).                                               

- “Human capital is of course much more equally distributed than ownership of factories or ships. We own ourselves, even if we are poor in stocks and bonds. Focusing on financial wealth is therefore misleading.                                               

- “…understand that liberty is liberty is liberty.                                              

- “Economic Liberty IS Liberty, and Greatly Enriching                                             

- “Envy is insatiable.                                              

   “Liberty of permission”

   [ …the extraordinary unique and dramatically accelerated progress of the last few hundred years is due to the recognition and promotion of ] equality of permission, not equality of opportunity [ which is not possible].     (Paraphrased)                                            

 

D. Q. McInery

    “Being Logical”

- ”A gray area is the situation in which the truth cannot be clearly established.  Life is full of them, and they have to be cheerfully contended with.  But don't make too much of them.”              

- ”We must recognize that many things are, in fact, clearly and sharply defined, and not to see that is simply not to see clearly.”              

- ”That you might find yourself at times in a situation in which you see no clear alternatives does not mean, objectively considered, that there are no clear alternatives. It simply means that you do not see them.  Don't project your subjective state of uncertainty on the world at large and claim objective status for it.”               

- ”To be in a state of uncertainty concerning the truth is neither a pleasant nor the desirable state to be in, and we should always be striving to get out of such states as soon as possible. “            

- ”Argument is the activity of logic, in any particular argument is a concrete manifestation of the reasoning process.”             

- ”The concrete expression of logical reasoning is the argument.  An argument stands or falls to the extent that the reasoning that it incorporates is good or bad.”               

- ”It is important to be aware of the difference between truth and validity. Though often confused, they are in fact quite different.”               

- ”First, truth has to do only with statements, whereas validity has to do only with that structural arrangement of statements that we call an argument.              

Second, a statement is true if what it asserts reflects what is objectively the case. An argument is valid, to echo what was just said, if it's structure is such that it will ensure a true conclusion-if its premises are true.”               

- ”Sometimes, in what superficially appears to be an argument, we have a discourse in which a point is stated vigorously, perhaps in a variety of ways, but is unaccompanied by any discernible supporting data.”              

- ”Only a supported statement is worthy of the term "conclusion." An unsupported statement is a mere opinion, which we are free to take or leave at face value.”             

- ”Narrow-mindedness is clearly debilitating in its effects, but there is a certain kind of open-mindedness which may be even more so…”               

- ”G.K. Chesterton pointedly observed that an open mind, like an open mouth, should eventually close on something. “            

- ”To be noncommittal in a situation that demands commitment is no virtue.”               

- ”To be tolerant of everything is to value nothing.”              

- ”The only thing really worth feeling good about is the truth.”                

- ”In this little book we have been advocating a view of logic that regards it as more than mere consistent reasoning.” (Logic also requires true presuppositions. Reasoning consistently is not the end.)               

- ”Argument is rational discourse. It is not to be confused with quarreling. The object of argument is to get to the truth. The object of quarreling is to get at other people.”               

- ”There are any number of folk who, though happy to quarrel with you, are either unwilling or unable to argue with you. Do not waste time and energy trying to argue with people who will not or cannot argue.”             

- ”…a favorite tactic of fallacious reasoning is to circumvent sound reasoning by appealing directly to the emotions.”               

- ”…fallacious reasoning can often be very persuasive, sometimes more so than sound reasoning.”              

- ”If we are satisfied with only the word of experts, we are essentially being told: ‘Don't ask any questions, just do as we say.’ "              

- ”The strongest kind of expert evidence incorporates the reasons the experts advance for holding a certain position. In such a case, we have more than mere opinion to deal with.  “            

- ”Conclusions are meant to be arrived at. Argument, as the linguistic expression of human reasoning, is goal oriented.”              

 

John McWhorter

- “A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.”                               

- “The race debate in our country is based less on helping people than on a certain kind of performance.”                                 

- “…what will help black America doesn't get represented because of a certain orthodoxy that is typical of two places which are only a subset of society …academia, and the media.”                               

- “…to talk about diversity in university and admissions and at the same time applaud when the black university student complains about having to express their diverse view in classes and saying that that's racism to impose that expectation, doesn't that cancel out the whole issue of diversity and affirmative action and suggest that we need to start looking at things in different ways ...you're not supposed to say that ...any white person engaging those issues knows that they're just supposed to shut up.”                                   

- “On the idea of racial equity instead of racial equality is bad.                                             

The cute cartoon with a box is nice. You were born short, so we're going to put you on a taller box. It's not your fault you were born short.                                           

Do people not realize that analogy here if we're talking about tests is: You were born dumb, so we're going to let you in anyway?                                          

Do people not understand that? I am truly …and folks I am not performing …this truly does insult me. It's a terrible, terrible thing.”                                      

 

Douglas McWilliams

     “The Inequality Paradox”                                    

- “The inequality paradox that provides this book with it's title is that while inequality in rich countries has been growing  - at least until recently  - at the same time as the fastest rise in inequality , there took place a quite extraordinary reduction in poverty. We have seen that until the 1980s poverty was pervasive worldwide. Interpolation from the data in Figure 9 suggests that in 1950, 65% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. The latest estimate for 2011 suggests that this has fallen to 10.9%."                                  

- “Oddly, surprisingly few people in the west know about the fall in poverty. A recent survey in the UK showed that only 12% agreed with the proposition that "In the last 30 years the proportion of the world population living in poverty has decreased." In other words, 88% of the population don't believe something that every person who has made an objective study knows to be true about one of the most important issues in world economics and politics. If you ever wanted an explanation of why democracy often doesn't produce the right answer, this perhaps gives a clue. A different survey showed that only 8% of the adult population in the US and Germany agreed with the proposition that global extreme poverty had fallen in the last 20 years. But interestingly, in a country where the fall in poverty would be much more obvious than in the West, fully half the population of China covered in the same survey knew this."                                   

- "But what is startling is that charity and overseas aid have played a minor role, if any. Indeed, given the extent of anti-globalization campaigning by charities over this period (though recently some have started to change their views) one could argue that the reduction in poverty has taken place despite these charities."                                 

- "Many wealthy entrepreneurs have become wealthy through developing products and services that are worth multiple times more to society than the amount that the entrepreneurs receive in return." "… society benefits much more than they do." "Even if, from an equality point of view, one might think they earn too much, it is still likely to be the case that if the deserving rich were driven away, society as a whole (and almost always the poorest in society) would be worse off as a result of their departure,"                                  

- "The huge reduction in extreme poverty from the 1980’s and the concomitant improvement in so many other indicators such as infant mortality, deaths from malnutrition and life expectancy came largely as a result of economic development."                                  

- "It is important to note that aid and charity did little to assist the reduction in poverty over this period, though both had a substantial role in causing some of the worst aspects of ill health to diminish."                                  

- "As pointed out before, this book’s title, ‘The Inequality Paradox’, comes from the fact that the period of most rapid growth in inequality in the Wealthy economies coincided with the period of most rapid decline in poverty in poor countries. Rises in inequality and in poverty don’t go together. "                                   

- "The reason that aid and charity played a lesser role in reducing extreme poverty in the recent past is that in the 1980s most of the extreme poverty that existed at the time largely reflected lack of economic development. Even now there is some continuing poverty from this source and it is likely that the development of countries in Africa and Asia in the coming years will reduce this poverty to low levels. But lack of development is not the main source of extreme poverty today."                                   

 

Peter Meijer

- “Politicians don't create jobs except for jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place.” 

 

Jamie Metzl

    "Hacking Darwin"                                  

- “The Human genome project to sequence the first human genome cost 2.7 billion and took thirteen years to be completed in 2003. Today it costs $700 and takes about a day.”                                 

- “If logic were our guide, people would start getting more comfortable with gene editing embryos once the error rate with gene editing embryos matched the error rate of natural conception.”                              

- “As we've seen from the experience of self-driving cars, however, the reality is that new technology like this needs to be much safer than nature for it to be adopted.”                                   

- “Many technologies start out being used by a few elites before later reaching a wider audience.”                                   

- “Meeting with female villagers participating in a micro credit program during my 2012 visit to Bangladesh, I was incredibly impressed by what all the women receiving the loans were doing to start small businesses and take care of their families but saddened that they seemed to have little chance to do more. With my iPhone connecting me to the universal library of the Internet, I felt the already huge advantage of my privileged American birth widening. How could these poor people ever afford the expensive technological marvel I held in my pocket I wondered. Today Bangladesh villagers can get a new smart phone for an affordable $60 and usage levels are skyrocketing.”                                  

- “If we had demanded equal access to smart phones for everyone from the get-go, the smart phone industry would never have grown quickly enough to drive down prices to where these phones became accessible to poor people around the world.”                                

- “There are no easy answers but it's fair to ask whether preventing the first adopters from genetically enhancing their children would be the same as preventing the early adopters of smart phones and supercomputers from leveraging the advantages those technologies provided.”          

- “Even if an enhancements like these were not evenly distributed, a compelling case can be made that a small number of enhanced people, if motivated by positive values, could make tremendous contributions to various fields like science, philosophy, art, or politics, that could make the world better for everyone.”                                   

- “As frightening as this might seem to some, restricting the genetic enhancement capacities we may need to maintain our species position in a world of artificial super intelligence might and of being like limiting horse and buggy speeds at the dawn of the automotive age.”               

 

Javier Milei  - President of Argentina

    Special address  - World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos  - 2024   (Transcribed in full)

“Good afternoon. Thank you very much.

Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.

We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.

Thirty five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.

But before having the discussion, it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it's the only morally desirable system to achieve this.

If we look at the history of economic progress, we can see how between the year zero and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period.

If you look at a graph of the evolution of economic growth throughout the history of humanity, you would see a hockey stick graph, an exponential function that remained constant for 90% of the time and which was exponentially triggered starting in the 19th century.

The only exception to this history of stagnation was in the late 15th century, with the discovery of the American continent, but for this exception, throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, global per capita GDP stagnated.

Now, it's not just that capitalism brought about an explosion in wealth from the moment it was adopted as an economic system, but also, if you look at the data, what you will see is that growth continues to accelerate throughout the whole period.

And throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, the per capita GDP growth rate remains stable at around 0.02% annually. So almost no growth. Starting in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the compound annual growth rate was 0.66%. And at that rate, in order to double per capita GDP, you would need some 107 years.

Now, if you look at the period between the year 1900 and the year 1950, the growth rate accelerated to 1.66% a year. So you no longer need 107 years to double per capita GDP - but 66. And if you take the period between 1950 and the year 2000, you will see that the growth rate was 2.1%, which would mean that in only 33 years we could double the world's per capita GDP.

This trend, far from stopping, remains well alive today. If we take the period between the years 2000 and 2023, the growth rate again accelerated to 3% a year, which means that we could double world per capita GDP in just 23 years.

That said, when you look at per capita GDP since the year 1800 until today, what you will see is that after the Industrial Revolution, global per capita GDP multiplied by over 15 times, which meant a boom in growth that lifted 90% of the global population out of poverty.

We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. And that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious.

Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable.

Therefore since there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is superior in productive terms, the left-wing doxa has attacked capitalism, alleging matters of morality, saying - that's what the detractors claim - that it's unjust. They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic. Of course, with the money of others.

So they therefore advocate for social justice. But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn't contribute to general well-being.

Quite on the contrary, it's an intrinsically unfair idea because it's violent. It's unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. Or can any one of us say that we voluntarily pay taxes? This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom.

Those who promote social justice start with the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared differently. But that pie is not a given. It's wealth that is generated in what Israel Kirzner, for instance, calls a market discovery process.

If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. They will do well and produce more if they make a good quality product at an attractive price. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward.

But if the state punishes capitalists when they're successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less.

The pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole. Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price.

So how come academia, international organisations, economic theorists and politicians demonise an economic system that has not only lifted 90% of the world's population out of extreme poverty but has continued to do this faster and faster?

Thanks to free trade capitalism, the world is now living its best moment. Never in all of mankind or humanity's history has there been a time of more prosperity than today. This is true for all. The world of today has more freedom, is rich, more peaceful and prosperous. This is particularly true for countries that have more economic freedom and respect the property rights of individuals.

Countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed. The lowest percentile in free countries is better off than 90% of the population in repressed countries. Poverty is 25 times lower and extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries.

Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on freedom in Argentina, Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defence of the right to life, liberty and property.

Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price.

In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero.

And this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future. A model based on the fundamental principle of libertarianism. The defence of life, of freedom and of property.

Now, if the free enterprise, capitalism and economic freedom have proven to be extraordinary instruments to end poverty in the world, and we are now at the best time in the history of humanity, it is worth asking why I say that the West is in danger.

And I say this precisely because in countries that should defend the values of the free market, private property and the other institutions of libertarianism, sectors of the political and economic establishment are undermining the foundations of libertarianism, opening up the doors to socialism and potentially condemning us to poverty, misery and stagnation.

It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it's been tried out. It's been a failure economically, socially, culturally and it also murdered over 100 million human beings.

The essential problem of the West today is not just that we need to come to grips with those who, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overwhelming empirical evidence, continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism.

But there's also our own leaders, thinkers and academics who are relying on a misguided theoretical framework to undermine the fundamentals of the system that has given us the greatest expansion of wealth and prosperity in our history.

The theoretical framework to which I refer is that of Neoclassical economic theory, which designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation.

The problem with Neoclassicals is that the model they fell in love with does not map reality, so they put down their mistakes to supposed market failures rather than reviewing the premises of the model.

Under the pretext of a supposed market failure, regulations are introduced. These regulations create distortions in the price system, prevent economic calculus, and therefore also prevent saving, investment and growth.

This problem lies mainly in the fact that not even supposed libertarian economists understand what the market is because if they did understand, it would quickly be seen that it's impossible for there to be market failures.

The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures.

If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.

Consequently, if someone considers that there is a market failure, I would suggest that they check to see if there is state intervention involved. And if they find that that's not the case, I would suggest that they check again, because obviously there's a mistake. Market failures do not exist.

An example of the so-called market failures described by the Neoclassicals is the concentrated structure of the economy. From the year 1800 onwards, with the population multiplying by 8 or 9 times, per capita GDP grew by over 15 times, so there were growing returns which took extreme poverty from 95% to 5%.

However, the presence of growing returns involves concentrated structures, what we would call a monopoly. How come, then, something that has generated so much well-being for the Neoclassical theory is a market failure?

Neoclassical economists think outside of the box. When the model fails, you shouldn't get angry with reality but rather with a model and change it. The dilemma faced by the Neoclassical model is that they say they wish to perfect the function of the market by attacking what they consider to be failures. But in so doing, they don't just open up the doors to socialism but also go against economic growth.

For example, regulating monopolies, destroying their profits and destroying growing returns would automatically destroy economic growth.

However, faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful - and the empirical evidence that it has failed couldn't have been otherwise - the solution proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation, which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer and our lives depend on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office.

Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda: they left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life and to economic growth.

The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership.

All that the radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder economic process, giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples are ministries of women or international organisations devoted to promoting this agenda.

Another conflict presented by socialists is that of humans against nature, claiming that we human beings damage a planet which should be protected at all costs, even going as far as advocating for population control mechanisms or the abortion agenda.

Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a stronghold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities and also international organisations.

The latter case is the most serious one, probably because these are institutions that have enormous influence on the political and economic decisions of their member states.

Fortunately there's more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don't truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom, and therefore, worse standards of living.

The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it's only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances.

Today, states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.

This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists.

Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history.

We have come here today to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity. Economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth. The impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. It's a reality that we Argentines know very well.

We have lived through this. We have been through this because, as I said earlier, ever since we decided to abandon the model of freedom that had made us rich, we have been caught up in a downward spiral - a spiral by which we are poorer and poorer, day by day.

This is something we have lived through and we are here to warn you about what can happen if countries in the Western world, that became rich through the model of freedom, stay on this path of servitude.

The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be, how much you may have in terms of natural resources, how skilled your population may be, how educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank - if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.

Therefore, in conclusion, I would like to leave a message for all business people here and those who are not here in person but are following from around the world.

Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen.

Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing.

Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch and unconditional ally.

Thank you very much and long live freedom!”

                                 

John Stuart Mill

- "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. “

- “His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”                            

 

John Milton

- “Luck is the residue of design.”                                

 

Ludwig Von Mises

- “Only because inequality of wealth is possible in our social order, only because it stimulates everyone to produce as much as he can and at the lowest cost, does mankind today have at its disposal the total annual wealth now available for consumption."

    “The Anti-capitalistic Mentality”

- “Few Americans are fully aware of the fact that their country enjoys the highest standard of living and that the way of life of the average American appears as fabulous and out of the reach to the immense majority [3] of people inhabiting non-capitalistic countries.”                               

- “Most people belittle what they have and could possibly acquire, and crave those things which are inaccessible to them.”                                                

- “Now, nobody ever contended that under unhampered capitalism those fare best who, from the point of view of eternal standards of value, ought to be preferred.”                                             

- “What the capitalistic democracy of the market brings about is not rewarding people according to their ‘true’ merits, inherent worth and moral eminence. What makes a man more or less prosperous is not the evaluation of his contribution from any ‘absolute’ principle of justice,          

but evaluation on the part of his fellow men who [6] exclusively apply the yardstick of their own personal wants, desires and ends.”                                               

- “It is precisely this that the democratic system of the market means. The consumers are supreme—i.e., sovereign. They want to be satisfied.                                               

- “To the grumbler who complains about the unfairness of the market system only one piece of advice can be given: If you want to acquire wealth, then try to satisfy the public by offering them something that is cheaper or which they like better.”                                               

- “Now we can try to understand why people loathe capitalism.                                              

In a society based on caste and status, the individual can ascribe adverse fate to conditions beyond his own control. He is a slave because the superhuman powers that determine all becoming had assigned him this rank. It is not his doing, and there is no reason for him to be ashamed of his humbleness.”                                              

- “If a man’s station in life is conditioned by factors other than his inherent excellence, those who remain at the bottom of the ladder can acquiesce in this outcome and, knowing their own worth, still preserve their dignity and self-respect.”

- “But it is different if merit alone decides. Then the unsuccessful feel themselves insulted and humiliated. Hate and enmity against all those who superseded them must result.”                                           

- “In order to console himself and to restore his self-assertion, such a man is in search of a scapegoat. He tries to persuade himself that he failed through no fault of his own.”                                               

- “The suffering from frustrated ambition is peculiar to people living in a society of equality under the law.”                                               

- “It is not caused by equality under the law, but by the fact that in a society of equality under the law the inequality of men with regard to intellectual abilities, will power and application becomes visible.                                              

The gulf between what a man is and achieves and what he thinks of his own abilities and achievements is pitilessly revealed.”                                               

- “Daydreams of a ‘fair’ world which would treat him according to his ‘real worth’ are the refuge of all those plagued by a lack of self-knowledge.”                                              

- “The common man as a rule does not have the opportunity of consorting with people who have succeeded better than he has.”                                               

- “His envy and the resentment it engenders are not directed against a living being of flesh and blood, but against pale abstractions like ‘management,’ ‘capital’ and ‘Wall Street.’”                                              

- “It is different with people whom special conditions of their occupation, or their family affiliation bring into personal contact with the winners of the prizes which—as they believe—by rights should have been given to themselves.

With them the feelings of frustrated ambition become especially poignant because they engender hatred of concrete living beings. They loathe capitalism because it has assigned to this other man the position they themselves would like to have. Such is the case with those people who are commonly called the intellectuals.”                                               

                

Secondat Montesquieu

- “Commerce cures destructive prejudices. The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace.”

 

Marilyn Moore  - Atlas Society

    "Age of Envy Revisited"                                 

- “Social justice is envy paraded about under the pretext of justice.”                              

 

Joshua Muravchik                                 

- “ Socialism is primarily focused on how to distribute wealth, and capitalism is concerned primarily with how to produce it.”                               

 

Douglas Murray

- “You punish people who look like people who did a bad thing in the past, on behalf of people who look like the people to whom the bad thing was done.”    (On proponents for reparations like Ibram X Kendi.)                                     

 

Elon Musk

- “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.”                                  

- “A good sign as to whether there is free speech is if someone you don't like is allowed to say something you don't like.”                                

- “People that don't like corporations should not somehow think that that the government is much better ...because the government is a corporation in the limit …it is the ultimate corporation …with a monopoly on violence.”                               

 

Brian Myers  - Des Moines Register

    “Believe All Climate Change Doctrines – Or Else”

- “Roger Pielke a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, believes that climate change is ‘real,’ and that human emissions of greenhouse gases require action (including a carbon tax). But he has a problem with doctrine No. 3: ‘My research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable,’ Pielke said. ‘There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.’ ”

 

N

 

Thomas Neill

- “Of those who say nothing, few are silent.”

 

Johan Norburg

- “If you learn about the world through daily news and social media, you have probably missed the greatest stories of our time.”                                

 

O

 

Barack Obama                                    

- "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be  - you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman - if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now." (The same applies to being of any random race or religion in the U.S., ... though Barack Obama very likely would not agree w/ that addition.)               

 

Kathy O'neal

- “Algorithms are opinions written in code.”

                                   

Barak Orbach   (Arizona law professor and member American antitrust institute)  (Given one sentence as the only anti big gov quote/info out of 20+ featured pro big gov people, 10 or so of which were featured as ‘warriors’ )                                  

- He calls Elizabeth Warrens antitrust ideas ‘uninformed and impractical’, noting ‘the energy for reforms is not in science and facts, but in accounts that can move public emotions.’ "

 

P. J. O’Rourke

- “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”                

- "The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fryed."                  

- " There is only one number that matters in politics. And you may think that number is the number of votes, but that's not the number. It is the avowed purpose of politics to bring the policies of our nation down to a level where they are good for everyone, no matter how foolish, irresponsible, selfish, grasping, or vile everyone may be, politics seeks fairness for them all. I do not. I am here to speak in favor of unfairness.                 

I have a ten year old at home, and she is always saying, "That's not fair". When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that that things don't start getting fair for you."                 

 

George Orwell

    “Looking Back on the Spanish War”  (1942 essay)                  

- "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories.               

...This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”             

    “1984”

- “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words."                                               

- “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."                                                

- “Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”                                               

- "Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence? … You are no metaphysician, Winston … Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening? No. Then where does the past exist, if at all? In records. It is written down. In records. And – ? In the mind. In human memories. In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?” (Part 3, Chapter 2)            

- “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.  Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”            

- “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”             

- “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.”           

- “Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”            

- “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”  

- “For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”             

- “War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. “            

- “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”              

- “ [Winston] knew in advance what O’Brien would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.  “         

- “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

“How do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”              

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”              

 

Jesse Owens

- “I’m no scholar in history but I don’t think you have to be a PhD to see the striking, disgusting similarity between all forms of tyranny. Suppressing the personal identity of the individual into some group, the end justifying the means, force instead of freedom.                                

These are what make every despot and potential despot tick, whether it be a Hitler, a George Lincoln Rockwell, a KKK’er, or a black militant…I’ve seen the despotism of the spirit drive out almost everything else good in a man, day after day, sometimes hour by hour, until he’s a fanatic wooden stereotype.”                                 

- “Each man has a right, a responsibility, to defend his own life. Freedom is unfortunately sometimes the freedom to use violence—only after you’ve first been attacked in some way.                               

But prejudice isn’t violence. I’m not saying bigotry isn’t rotten. But the line between the man who pulls a gun on me and the bigot who pulls a prejudice on me is a thick line. And if we handle them both the same way, we’re trading liberty for the jungle. The man who thinks Negroes are inferior and won’t have anything to do with them is stupid, maybe sick.                                

But in the United States he has the right to be those things as long as he doesn’t back up his ideas as the KKK or the black thinkers have—with fists and fires and ropes.”                               

- “What in the hell is liberty if you make everyone else think the way you do? The black thinkers, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately, are trying to take away that liberty. They don’t educate, they don’t persuade. Their ‘dialogues’ are usually a hoax.”                                

- “Fifty-seven years on this earth have shown me that men aren’t basically evil. But they aren’t basically good either. The possibilities for both are always in us, and just because we did the right thing on Tuesday and Wednesday doesn’t mean we’re sure to do it on Friday and Saturday. You can’t rest on your laurels where character is concerned, just as you can’t stop breathing and expect to live simply because you’ve drawn fifty million breaths before that.                                

Humanity isn’t something you’re given. It isn’t a natural state of being. You earn it. You’ve got to work to be human.”                               

- “When the chips are really down, you can either put your skin first or you can go with what’s inside it…Remember that prejudice isn’t new. It goes way back, just as slavery goes way back, to before there ever was an America.”                               

- “Men have always had to meet insanity without losing their own minds. That doesn’t mean you should stand still for bigotry. Fight it. Fight it for all you’re worth. But fight your own prejudice, too.                                  

Don’t expect perfection in your white brother until there’s not an ounce of black think left in you.                                  

And remember that the hardest thing for all of us isn’t to fight, but to stop and think.”                                 

 

P

 

Edith Packer

- “As long as I am alive, there is always something to value and enjoy.”                                  

 

Camille Paglia

- “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”                                 

 

Rand Paul                                  

- “If you want everybody to have equal outcomes, you have to treat them unequally.” (Paraphrasing Friedrich A. Hayek.  )                                  

    Interview  (Paraphrasing Friedrich Hayek)

- “Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can either the one or the other, but not both at the same time.”                                       

- “Equal outcomes require the injustice of unequal treatment before the law.”

    Interview   (Paraphrasing Ludwig Von Mises)

- “Since people have different and unequal talents, the only way you get equal outcomes is to treat them differently. In other words, to have unequal application of the law. This should be anathema to both liberals and conservatives.”                                   

 

Jordan Peterson

- "Human beings are born with different capacities, if they are free, they are not equal, and if they are equal, they are not free.”

- “Maybe it's an issue of careless conflation of levels of analysis.”                              

- “If you're going to racialize the white cop against the black victim of the homicide, well than why can't the same thing be done exactly the same way when the reverse happens?”                                

- “...that ideology is so low resolution it does that conflation and doesn't notice, and when you get educated, you start differentiating, …”                                

- “...when I take this apart and see all the moving pieces, this is way more complex than my low-resolution representation guided me to believe to begin with…”                                

- “...when I try to take problems apart so they can be solved instead of just discussed ... you have to make a high-resolution model before you can get anywhere…”                                

- “...partly what we're doing when we're educating people if we're doing it right is saying, hey, ... you've got a map of the world, but it's not very detailed, and when you really look at it, well ... here's the complexity, and that's what we're actually contending with.“                              

- “People don't like that, because, well, it's complex, and you have the simple solution at hand to begin with, but the problem is it isn't the right tool for the job. You gotta make it high resolution, and that takes a lot of work…”                                

- “I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words. In the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.”                                

- “Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”                                        

- “My sense is that if you want to change the world, you start with yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way. I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized.”                            

- “There are people who are really striving, really trying hard and working themselves really hard and being productive, and then there are these people who are just doing nothing, they're completely in the way and they don't carry their weight at all, the take advantage every chance they get, and they're always whining about why they can't work, …                                              

…it's like, I find out who they are and call them into my office and I tell them exactly what they've been doing, it's like hit the road buddy, you've had your run of it…                                         

…I've had situations in my lab where I've had underperforming graduate students, and one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high performing graduate students, you know, because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing…”  .     (Noting why a "disagreeable" manager acquaintance loves firing underperformers.)           

    (Paraphrased)

- “Before trying to change the world, one should develop and demonstrate the competence and knowledge base to accomplish the much much simpler task of getting their own personal realm (life) in order and running reasonably well/productively.”

- “Once one does that, they have at least begun to develop the competence, and knowledge base required to solve bigger problems, and are therefore in a much better position to take on larger societal problems and the leadership roles to solve them.”                                     

- “Too often, those least competent at solving the problems of their own life are those most inclined to focus on solving much larger and more complex societal problems …or put another way, they can't solve their own problems but think they have the solutions to other's problems.”      

- “They think their own problems are complex, and larger societal problems are simple/straightforward, when in a relative sense, the opposite is actually the case. “

 

Leonard Peikoff

- “The first duty of justice is not to condemn evil, but to acknowledge and defend the good.”    (Attributed but not verified)                              

- “Agnosticism is the enshrinement of ignorance.”                              

- “The romantacist is intoxicated with the possible.”               

                                           

Steven Pinker

- “If you ask why is there poverty worldwide, you're kind of asking the wrong question. Poverty is our natural state. The question we should ask is why is there wealth. That's the first step to appreciate the progress we have made. “

- “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.”                                               

- "...universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance, with non-leftist speakers drowned out by jeering mobs, professors subjected to Stalinesque investigations for unorthodox opinions, risible guidelines on ‘microaggressions’ (such as saying ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job’), students mobbing and cursing a professor who invited them to discuss Halloween costumes, and much else.              

These incidents have drawn worldwide ridicule, and damage the credibility of university scientists and scholars when they weigh on critical matters, such as climate change.               

Many of these illiberal antics come from a radical fringe of students, egged on by an autonomous student-life bureaucracy.               

It’s up to the president of a university to stanch this credibility drain by imposing adult supervision on both: publicly affirming the sanctity of free inquiry and civil disagreement and reining in the factions that are assaulting them.”            

- ”The more we disagree the greater the chance that one of us might be right.”              

- “There are two ways to understand the world: a constant drip of anecdotes about the worst things that have happened anywhere on the planet in the previous hour, or a bird’s-eye view of the grand developments that are transforming the human condition. The first is called ‘the news,’ and for your wisdom and mental health I recommend balancing it with the second.”                                

     Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

- “As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”                                  

- “What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.”                                    

- “There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.”                                 

- “But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.”                                  

- “People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.”                                  

- “Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.”                                    

- “Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas.”                                   

- “Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”                                   

- “Chris Rock observed, ‘This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.’ ”                                  

- “We never see a journalist saying to the camera, ‘I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out’—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.” 

 - “Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.”                                   

- “The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.”                                   

- “The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.”                                 

   "Rationality"

- “When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality --- the interchangeability of perspectives --- you get the core of morality. You get the golden rule...”                                         

- “Despite its lack of coolth, we should, and in many nonobvious ways do, follow reason. Merely asking why we should follow reason is confessing that we should. Pursuing our goals and desires is not the opposite of reason but ultimately the reason we have reason.”

- “We deploy reason to attain those goals, and also to prioritize them when they can’t all be realized at once. Surrendering to desires in the moment is rational for a mortal being in an uncertain world, as long as future moments are not discounted too steeply or shortsightedly.”              

- “…morality does not sit apart from reason but falls out of it as soon as the members of a self-interested social species impartially deal with the conflicting and overlapping desires among themselves.”                                           

- “Terrorism, like other losses of life with malice aforethought, brews up a different chemistry of fear. Body-counting data scientists are often perplexed at the way that highly publicized but low-casualty killings can lead to epochal societal reactions. The worst terrorist attack in history by far was 9/11, and it claimed 3,000 lives; in most bad years, the United States suffers a few dozen terrorist deaths, a rounding error in the tally of homicides and accidents. … Yet 9/ 11 led to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.”                                           

- “To take another low-death/high-fear hazard, rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides.”                                             

“Yet American schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof Whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills.”

- “In 2020 the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a white police officer led to massive protests and the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, newspapers, and corporations.                                             

“These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising.”                                            

- “A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.”                                           

- “Things that happen suddenly are usually bad, a war, a shooting, a famine, a financial collapse --- but good things may consist of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace or forgettable region that is healthy and well fed.”                                               

“And when progress takes place, it isn't built in a day; it creeps up a few percentage points a year, transforming the world by stealth.”                                         

- “As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline ‘137,000 PEOPLE ESCAPED POVERTY’ every day for the past 25 years. But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened.”

- “So one of the greatest developments in human history --- a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor --- has gone unnoticed.”                                             

“The ignorance is measurable. Pollsters repeatedly find that while people tend to be too optimistic about their own lives, they are too pessimistic about their societies.”                                           

“In their ‘Ignorance Project’, Hans and Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Ronnlund have shown that the understanding of global trends in most educated people is exactly backwards; they think that longevity, literacy, and extreme poverty are worsening, whereas all have dramatically improved.”                                           

- “Calamity-peddlling journalism also sets up perverse incentives for terrorists and rampage shooters, who can game the system and win instant notoriety. How can we recognize the genuine dangers in the world while calibrating our understanding to reality?”                                           

- “Consumers of news should be aware of its built in bias and adjust their information diet to include sources that present the bigger statistical picture; less Facebook news feed, more ‘Our World in Data’.”                                           

- “Journalists should put lurid events in context. A killing or plane crash or shark attack should be accompanied by the annual rate, which takes into account the denominator of the probability, not just the numerator.”                                           

- “A setback or state of misfortunes should be put into the context of the longer term trend.”

 

Robert M. Pirsig

- ”The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, give it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.”                                              

 

Karl Popper

- ”Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.”

 

Dr. Vinay Prasad

- “The Covid risk for an 88 year old was 8,700 times greater than for an 8 year old, and yet for 2 years of the pandemic we never leveraged that.”                                 

 

Q

 

R

 

Ayn Rand

- "In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.” 

- “What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.”                               

- “Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival.”                              

- “I quote from Galt’s speech: ‘Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice...”                               

- “Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil. Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.”                               

- “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.”                               

- “The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”                                

- “It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.”                                

- “If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”

- “A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.”                                

- “No right of mine constitutes an obligation on any man living.”                                  

- “Capitalism has been called a system of greed, yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal.”                                 

- “I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”                                   

- “Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong.” 

- “…the rational interests of men do not clash - that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”                                

- “The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value. “

- “A trader...does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, exchange—an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment.”                                   

- “An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something."                                   

- “Emotions are produced by man's premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly."                                  

- “An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception."                                  

- “There is no reason why you should consider the benefit of others as a value if you do not consider your own benefit a value.”                                             

- “Altruism demands that you regard everybody as a value except yourself. And remember that this applies to every human being. Therefore, according to an altruist, no human being has any right to any value nor to any happiness of his own. He only has the right and duty to serve others.”                                               

- “Therefore, altruism does regard man as sacrificial animals, as objects of sacrifice for others. That is not a theory of benevolence for men.”                                           

- “The moral justification of capitalism is man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.”                               

- “Rights impose no obligations on [neighbors] except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.”                                

- “The right to property…does not mean that others must provide him with property.”                              

- “The right to property…is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it.”                              

- “The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. “                             

- “If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights.”                               

- “An individualist…says: 'I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave.' “                              

- “No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.”                               

- “The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.”                                

- “Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity.”                                

- “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”                               

- “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote…the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.”                                

- “Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: ‘I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.’ “                             

- “An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.”                              

- “An individualist is a man who says: ‘I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to myself.’ “

- “What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”                            

- “Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible.”

- “The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.”

    “The Virtue of Selfishness”

    Compromise:

- “There can be no compromise on basic principles or on fundamental issues. What would you regard as a ‘compromise’ between life and death? Or between truth and falsehood? Or between reason and irrationality?”                               

- “Today, however, when people speak of ‘compromise,’ what they mean is not a legitimate mutual concession or a trade, but precisely the betrayal of one’s principles — the unilateral surrender to any groundless, irrational claim.”                              

- “The root of that doctrine is ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or a whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and ‘compromising’ with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine.  The immorality of this doctrine — and the reason why the term ‘compromise’ implies, in today’s general usage, an act of moral treason - lies in the fact that it requires men to accept ethical subjectivism as the basic principle superseding all principles in human relationships and to sacrifice anything as a concession to one another’s whims.”                                

- “The question ‘Doesn’t life require compromise?’ is usually asked by those who fail to differentiate between a basic principle and some concrete, specific wish.”                                 

- “Accepting a lesser job than one had wanted is not a ‘compromise.’ Taking orders from one’s employer on how to do the work tor which one is hired, is not a ‘compromise.’ Failing to have a cake after one has eaten it, is not a ‘compromise.’ Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one's subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles. A ‘compromise’ (in the unprincipled sense of that word) is not a breach of one’s comfort, but a breach of one's convictions. A ‘compromise’ does not consist of doing something one dislikes, but of doing something one knows to be evil. Accompanying one's husband or wife to a concert, when one does not care for music, is not a ‘compromise’; surrendering to his or her irrational demands for social conformity, for pretended religious observance or for generosity toward boorish in—laws, is. Working for an employer who does not share one’s ideas, is not a ‘compromise’; pretending to share his ideas, is.  Accepting a publisher’s suggestions to make changes in one’s manuscript, when one sees the rational validity of his suggestions, is not a ‘compromise’; making such changes in order to please him or to please ‘the public,’ against one's own judgment and standards, is.”                              

- “The excuse, given in all such cases, is that the ‘compromise’ is only temporary and that one will reclaim one's integrity at some indeterminate future date. But one cannot correct a husband's or wife's irrationality by giving in to it and encouraging it to grow. One cannot achieve the victory of one's ideas by helping to propagate their opposite.   One cannot offer a literary masterpiece, ‘when one has become rich and famous,’ to a following one has acquired by writing trash.”                               

- “If one found it difficult to maintain one’s loyalty to one’s own convictions at the start, a succession ot betrayals — which helped to augment the power of the evil one lacked the courage to fight — will not make it easier at a later date, but will make it virtually impossible.                      

- “There can be no compromise on moral principles.”

- “ ‘In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.’ “ (Atlas Shrugged.)                                

- “The next time you are tempted to ask: ‘Doesn’t life require compromise?’ translate that question into its actual meaning: ‘Doesn’t life require the surrender of that which is true and good to that which is false and evil?’ ”                               

- “The answer is that that precisely is what life forbids — if one wishes to achieve anything but a stretch of tortured years spent in progressive self-destruction.”

    “Philosophy  - Who Needs It “

- “The symptoms of today's cultural disease are:                                 

conformity, with nothing to conform to                                 

timidity. expressed in a  self-shrinking concern with trivia                               

a kind of obsequious anxiety to please the unknown standards of some nonexistent authority                              

and a pall of fear without object.                               

Psychologically, this is the cultural atmosphere of a society living under censorship.”

- " ‘I can't prove it, but I feel that its true’ is more than a rationalization: it is a description of the process of rationalizing.  Men do not accept a catch phrase by a process of thought, they seize upon a catch phrase-—any catch phrase—because it fits their emotions.”

 - "Such men do not judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality—they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.”

- "…if you undertake the task of philosophical detection, drop the dangerous little catchphrase which advises you to keep an ‘open mind’. This is a very ambiguous term  - as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having ‘a wide-open mind’. ”

 - "That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything.”                                                

- "What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind——a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically.”                                               

- "An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. “

     “Atlas Shrugged”  Francisco d’Aconia                                        

- "So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Aconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”                                      

- "Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”                                      

- "Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”                                      

- "Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”                  

- “If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money’. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.” 

    "The Ethics of Emergencies"

- "Sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue.”                                  

- "Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less ‘selfish,’ than help to those one loves).”                                 

- "The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.”                              

- "This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men.”                                 

- "It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values (values chosen and validated by a rational standard).”                                

- "Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.”                                

- "Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another.”                                 

- "One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves.”                                

- "It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.”                               

- "A ‘selfless,’ ‘disinterested’ love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.”                                

- "Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests.”                               

- "If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a ‘sacrifice’ for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.”

    “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s interests”

- "…there are no conflicts of interests among rational men."                               

- "A man’s ‘interests’ depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values  - and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.”                                

- "Desires (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests.”                                

- "The mere fact that a man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good, nor that its achievement is actually to his interest.                                

- "To claim that a man’s interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated - is to hold a subjectivist view of man’s values and interests.  Which means: to believe that it is proper, moral and possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not. Which means: to hold an irrational or mystical view of existence. Which means: to deserve no further consideration.”                               

- "In choosing his goals (the specific values he seeks to gain and/or keep), a rational man is guided by his thinking (by a process of reason) - not by his feelings or desires.”                                

- "He chooses and/or identifies his desires by a process of reason, and he does not act to achieve a desire until and unless he is able rationally to validate it in the full context of his knowledge and of his other values and goals.                                 

    "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal"

- “Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.”                                       

- “We stand for freedom, say both groups—and proceed to declare what kind of controls, regulations, coercions, taxes, and ‘sacrifices’ they would impose, what arbitrary powers they would demand, what ‘social gains’ they would hand out to various groups, without specifying from what other groups these ‘gains’ would be expropriated. Neither of them cares to admit that government control of a country’s economy—any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state. A mixed economy is merely a semi-socialized economy—which means: a semi-enslaved society—which means: a country torn by irreconcilable contradictions, in the process of gradual disintegration.”                                         

- “Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.”                                         

- “If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights—which means: the politico-economic system of capitalism.”                                         

- “Individual rights, freedom, justice, progress were the philosophical values, the theoretical goals, and the practical results of capitalism. No other system can create them or maintain them; no other system ever has or will. For proof, consider the nature and function of basic principles; for evidence, consult history—and the present state of the different countries of Europe.”                                         

- “They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism. Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. The conflict between capitalism and altruism has been undercutting America from her start and, today, has reached its climax.”

- “The American political system was based on a different moral principle: on the principle of man’s inalienable right to his own life—which means: on the principle that man has the right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself, and that men must deal with one another as traders, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit.”                                         

- “The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality—with the code of self-sacrifice—is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state. Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.”

    Public Interest:

- "So long as a concept such as ‘the public interest’ (or the ‘social’ or ‘national’ or ‘international’ interest) is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation—lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.”                                         

- "If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as ‘the public.’ The government’s policy has to swing like an erratic pendulum from group to group, hitting some and favoring others, at the whim of any given moment—and so grotesque a profession as lobbying (selling ‘influence’) becomes a full-time job. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.”                                         

- "Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice. All ‘public interest’ legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined, undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials.”                                          

                       

John Ratey and Richard Manning

    "Go Wild"                                   

- "Annual per capita sugar consumption in the U.S. was 5 pounds per person in 1700, 23 pounds in 1800, 70 pounds in 1900, and 152 pounds today."                                   

 

Jonathan Rauch

- “A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words. This principle is a menace—and not just to civil liberties. At bottom it threatens liberal inquiry—that is, science itself.                                              

   In liberal science a community discovers what it thinks through criticism, and its’ members never do all think any one thing, and if it did, intellectual progress would stop.”                                              

- "There will never be a broadly shared set of facts, because humans have very different views of things, and in fact that diversity is the raw material of science and knowledge and all learning, so you don't want a world where people agree on a single reality because they'll just all be sharing in the same errors. You do want a world where people generally agree and are friendly to the system that produces the facts, and that's the constitution of knowledge."

 

John Rawls

- “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.”

- “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”

- “It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many."                                       

- “Therefore, in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.                                      

- “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”                                      

- “Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”                                      

- “The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.”                                       

- “We strive for the best we can attain within the scope the world allows.”                                        

    "Democracy in America"

- “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”                                   

 

Wodehouse Reader (On Amazon reviews of "OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind" by Jill Filipovic)                                   

- “Waaaaaaahhhhhhh! Why isn't life easy?! Why isn't everything I want given to me!? Waaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! There. You've now read the book.”                                 

 

Ronald Reagan

- “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

- “How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

- "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.'' (Reciting a letter he received.)

 

Annette Gordon-Reed

    (On Juneteenth)

- “I also recalled being slightly embarrassed by the character who was Jim Bowie’s slave.                                              

I knew by then to flinch, or slightly hold my breath even, whenever Black actors appeared in movies, especially old films. I never knew what was going to happen, but I knew what could happen. Would the Black character be good for Black people, or bad for Black people?”                      

- “I had a strong sense that such things could never just be about that one actor’s characterization. There were so few representations of Blacks in films in those days that every appearance counted. Television was a bit ahead of the game on this.

Movies, an early (and continuing) delight, may have been generally fraught when Blacks appeared, but not those with Sidney Poitier, even the ones made before I was born that ran on television.                                                

I could relax, even become exhilarated, when he came on screen. I knew everything would be just right.”

                                               

Thomas Reid

- "There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."                                  

 

Wesley Branch Rickey

- “Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best.”                               

- “Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”                            

 

Matt Ridley

- “This is an astonishing collection of positive trends. I want every young person to see it and begin to escape the indoctrination in pessimism they have been subjected to by the media and the education system.”    (In regard to the dramatic and consistent improvement in human lives)    

“The Rational Optimist”

- “The history of human prosperity, as Robert Wright has argued, lies in repeated discovery of non-zero-sum bargains that benefit both sides.”                                   

- “That's the Indian rope track by which the world gets rich.  Yet it takes only a few sidelong glances at your fellow human beings to realize that remarkably few people think this way. … Zero-sum thinking dominates…”                            

- “Michael Shermer thinks that is because most of the stone age transactions rarely benefited both sides: ‘ during our evolutionary tenure, we lived in a zero-sum (win lose world), in which one person's gain meant another person's loss’.”

- “This is a shame, because the zero some mistake was what made so many -isms of past centuries so wrong.  Mercantilism up said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor, a fallacy mocked by Adam Smith ... “                                  

- “Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy.”                                 

- “The notion of synergy, of both sides benefiting, just does not seem to come naturally to people.”                               

- “For most people, therefore, the market does not feel like a virtuous place.  It feels like an arena in which the consumer does battle with the producer to see who can win.”                                   

- “Like biological evolution, the market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge.”                                   

- “As the Australian economist Peter Sanders argues, ‘ nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it.  This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant.  It gets on perfectly well without them.’ "

- “The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout western history.  Of 1900, Brink Lindsay writes: ‘ many of the brightest minds of the age mistook the engine of eventual mass deliverance  - the competitive market system - for the chief bulwark of domination and oppression.’ "

- “Wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce, and wherever there is commerce, the ways of men are gentle, observed Charles, Baron de Montesquieu.”                                  

- “Voltaire pointed out that people who would otherwise have tried to kill each other for worshiping the wrong god were civil when they met on the floor of the exchange in London.”                                  

- “David Hume thought ... " nothing is more favorable to the rise of politeness and learning, and a number of neighboring an independent states, connected together by commerce and policy".                                   

- “Perhaps Adam Smith was right, that in turning strangers into honorary friends, exchange can transmute base self-interest into general benevolence.  “                               

- “The rapid commercialization of lives since 1800 has coincided with an extraordinary improvement in human sensibility compared with previous centuries, and the process began in the most commercial nations, Holland and England.”                                  

- “Unimaginable cruelty was commonplace in the pre-commercial world: execution was a spectator sport, mutilation a routine punishment, human sacrifice of futile tragedy, and animal torture a popular entertainment.”                                 

- “Random violence makes the news [now] precisely because it is so rare; routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. “                               

- “There is a direct link between commerce and virtue.  ‘Far from being a vice,’ says Eamonn Butler, ‘the market system makes self-interest into something thoroughly virtuous.’ "                                  

- “Ingo Potrykus, the developer of golden rice, thinks that 'blanket opposition to all GM foods is a luxury that only pampered Westerners can afford.' “                                   

- “Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, 'You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?' “                                  

- “Companies have a far shorter half-life than government agencies. Half of the greatest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy; half of today's biggest companies did not even exist in 1980.”                                  

- “The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incompetence they may display.”                                  

- “Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the goodwill of the leviathans that can force you to do business with them, but are suspicious of the behemoths that have to beg for your business. I find that odd.”                                  

 

John Robson

    (In regard to Thomas Sowells’ "Conflict of Visions")

- ”Conservatives are very concerned about what has worked in the past, partly because they are convinced that all life is 6 to 5 against us, that peace and plenty are unusual things, and that war and suffering and scarcity are normal,               

   …wheras liberals tend to have this instinct that tells them that it is natural for things to go well and if things go badly some evil person is making them go badly.  “            

- ”Liberals are far more likely to attribute problems to malice than to stupidity. “            

- ”People on the left are convinced ... that people who disagree with them have bad motives, and you don't really discuss with people like that, you just have to crush them and get them out of the way so that you can build the new Jerusalem.”               

- ”…[because liberals] think that people who disagree with them are malevolent, they don't let them into the discussion, or at least try not to, and then all they hear from are people who agree with them …. And I think this is one of the major reasons why they are just so certain that all you need is love, and when you say no wait a minute it's not that simple.... “            

- ”…there are 2 battling [cold war] bumper stickers that underline this way of thinking very well, on the left they had visualize world peace, which wasn't about methods, it was about your heart being filled with love, and on the right we had bumper stickers which said peace through strength, which is a method, and it's a method for an imperfect world, and when you're not even agreeing whether the world is an imperfect place it's very very hard to have a productive discussion about the details.”              

              

Gene Roddenberry            

    (Gene Rodenberry script for ‘The God Thing’ - Cancelled first Star Trek movie 1976 about an alien race that created religions on other planets to train races in morals - The story was a bout the malfunction of the program to do this – ‘God was a malfunctioning spaceship’, his first major submitted script was the one which became known as ‘The God Thing’. One scene that worried the studio was a discussion on Vulcan where the masters under which Spock was studying described religion on Earth, saying ‘We have never really understood your Earth legend of gods. particularly in that so many of your gods have said, 'You have to bow down on your bellies every seven days and worship me.' This seems to us like they are very insecure gods.’ Roddenberry completed the script on 30 June, but Paramount rejected it during the following month.)              

- “For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, ‘No, we don't.’ “                   

- “I handed them a script and they turned it down. It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, 'Who is God?' The Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human beginning, an alien entity that early man believed was God, and kept those legends. But I also wanted to suggest that it might have been as much the Devil as it was God. After all, what kind of god would throw humans out of Paradise for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the Vulcans on board, in a very logical way, says, 'If this is your God, he's not very impressive. He's got so many psychological problems; he's so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He's a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being.” 

- “We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.”                  

 

Paul Romer

- “Everybody wants growth, but nobody wants change. You can't have one without the other.”

                

Nathan Rosenberg and L.E Birddzell Jr

- “We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not."            

 

Theodore Roosevelt

- “Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation, – these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness; …life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a ‘state of nature’. ”                                   

- "In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”                                  

 

Hans Rosling

    “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think”

- “I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

Dave Rubin

- “[A mainstream media source such as CNN,MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC] is not designed to give you information that you can do anything with, it's designed to keep you watching.”                               

- “The goal of government is to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not to maximize happiness. That’s on you.”                               

 

Bertrand Russell

- "Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man."

    "Marriage and Morals"

- "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

 

S

 

Gad Saad

- “ …each of these idea pathogens free us from the pesky shackles of reality. Utopian aspirations are exactly that.                                               

I don't like the pesky, cruel world, therefore I will erect edifices of bullshit that ultimately feel good. It's a form of ideological dopamine.                                              

It feels good to think that there is a way that we can reorganize societies where we all walk with fig leaves around our genetalia ...there is no sexual violence, there is no racism, there is no poverty, there is no inequality, and I think I've got the magic pill for that… “                                       

- “ ...it's called communism, it's called socialism, it's called BLM, but of course each of these ideological movements are not grounded in reality.”                                             

 

William Safire

- “Never assume the obvious is true.”                

 

Carl Sagan

     “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”                                    

- "Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”                                   

 

Leah Libresco Sargeant

    "Reckoning With Reality"  - National Review                                                 

- “ ‘The tradesmen must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.’  “ (Quoting Matthew Crawford  - "Shopcraft as Soulcraft")                                           

- “There's a clarity to physical work that can be harder to achieve in the broader liberal arts.                                             

Repeated encounters with the "infallible judgment of reality" can help train away the squirmy impulse to help, argue, or assert a falsehood into being true.                                            

In other classes, and in many white-collar jobs, the truth can seem secondary.”                                         

- “You can succeed without solving the problem in front of you if you can instead tell a story about why the problem isn't your responsibility.                                           

That is its own education and formation of character.”

 

Paul Samuelson

- "Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?"  (Samuelson credited a similar version of this quote to John Maynard Keynes  - Unverified)                              

 

Peter Schwartz

- “Altruism is a way of evading self-responsibility.”

   (Paraphrased)

- (The core principle of altruism is not improving lives, it is making your life worse.                              

Helping others without making your life worse is unsatisfactory by the standard of altruism.                            

Attempting but failing to help others, while making your life worse meets the standard of altruism.                           

Note the priority.  This is a prioritization of suffering over flourishing, of pain over happiness, of bad over good. It is anti-life.                           

The common altruism emphasis on improving lives/helping others is dishonest …since the true emphasis/the actual priority of the altruism ideal is suffering. Actually/truly improving lives/helping others is at best secondary, at worst irrelevant to the altruism ideal. )                      

(Related point: Jesus on the cross is a prime example of the prioritization of the suffering over the actual helping.)

 

Michael Shellenberger

- “Alarmism is the goal.” (Re climate change extremists  - Particularly journalists.)                                  

    “America’s Shadow Self  - Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation”

    City Journal / From the Magazine / States and Cities, Politics and law, Economy, finance, and budgets Special Issue 2023: Can California Be Golden Again? https://www.city-journal.org/article/americas-shadow-self                        

- "The progressive defense of urban chaos is that it is cruel, racist, and immoral to insist that criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill obey the law.

- “In California, addicts and the mentally ill are treated as sacred victims and permitted to take over large parts of cities.

To victims, everything should be given, and from them, nothing required. Once labeled victims, they become blameless; if they harm others, it is the system’s fault.

These ideas, once radical, are today the conventional views of the people who run California, from its legislature to its governor’s office to the myriad organizations that influence them.”                             

    “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”

- "Nuclear waste has never been a real problem. In fact, it’s the best solution to the environmental impacts from energy production.”

- "Consider: Every year, the lives of seven million people are cut short by waste products in the form of air pollution from burning biomass and fossil fuels…”

- "If all the nuclear waste from U.S. power plants were put on a football field, it would stack up just 50 feet high. In comparison to the waste produced by every other kind of electricity production, that quantity is close to zero.”

nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.”

- "Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.”

- "Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.25 And the amount of forests in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home nation, has doubled during the last century.”

- "The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”

- "It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.”

- " [A Potsdam Institute report on food production] also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself.”

- "Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere”

    “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities”

“The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.”

“It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim…”

“…’pathological altruism’, defined as ‘behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.’ ”

 

Charles Silver and David Hayman

    "Overcharged  - Why Americans Pay Too Much for Healthcare”

- "If all anti-poverty programs were replaced with simple cash transfers, at current spending levels, a poor family of four would receive an annual income of approximately $70,000."                                  

- "The (health care) payment system behaves as if it's objective is to move the largest possible amount of money into the health care sector. It does that job extraordinarily well…"                                  

- "Once one recognizes that (health care) providers respond to incentives, one should immediately appreciate the importance of making it financially advantageous for providers to do what is best for patients. Compensation arrangements designed by regulators and elected officials do that only by accident, if ever."                                 

- "Our health care programs largely let providers set cost benchmarks, encouraging higher pricing, are primarily focused on rewarding higher quantity of treatments, regardless any benefit, encouraging over treatment and counter productive treatment, and punish efficiency in any aspect of treatment.                                   

- "It is perfectly predictable that payment arrangements designed by government officials will cause the interests of providers and patients to conflict. Not only do regulators lack the information needed to design compensation arrangements correctly, but their incentives are also defective. They neither gain when they design payment arrangements correctly nor lose when they incentivize providers to do harm."                                  

- "…aligning the interests of providers and patients is intrinsically hard. No compensation arrangement can motivate an agent to serve a principal well in all circumstances and, because technologies, knowledge, and other important factors change over time, an arrangement that works well today may perform poorly tomorrow. Markets deal with both problems by creating always-present incentives for sellers to take buyers' interests to heart. Providers that serve patients well and adapt quickly to changes win customers and thrive. Those that serve patients poorly or seek to exploit them for financial reasons lose customers and fail. Markets do automatically what regulators don't do at all."                                 

- "…Who thinks more is better than less? …that's what most Americans think about health care. But more is often worse. More can injure. More can kill. And more always costs more money."                                  

- "Our main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine. The U.S. spends one sixth of national income on medicine… …But health policy experts know that we see at best only weak aggregate relations between health and medicine, in contrast to strong aggregate relations between health and... exercise, diet, sleep, smoking... …We could cut U.S. medical spending in half without substantial net health costs. … …Overuse perpetuates the status quo---a system devoid of transparency, in which clinicians are paid to do more, not better. Exhortations to do less have little effect when the economic incentives encourage providers to do more. … …The contrast between medicine and other service sectors is striking. … …The medical sector is the only one in which there is an epidemic of overuse. Not coincidentally, it is also the only one in which control over spending rests mainly with government officials and other third-party payers."                                  

- "The project of moving as many taxpayer dollars as possible into the health care sector is a joint undertaking… of government and medical providers…".                                 

- "The more we route payments through third-party payers, the less we bear the real costs of services at the point of delivery and the more we consume. … …The more heavily we rely on third-party payers, the more we spend."                                   

- "…providers perform better and charge less when consumers buy medical treatments directly, and health care can and should be sold in competitive markets."                                  

- "Everywhere one looks, the tax system encourages health care spending. … …elected officials use the tax system to buy support."  

 

Harvey Silverglate

- ”In a modern university diversity means people who look different but think alike.”             

 

Julian Simon

- “The most valuable thing is your human time.”                                 

    "The ultimate resource"  - 1981                                     

- “There is no physical or economic reason why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.…”             

- “Adding more people will cause [short‐​run] problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems and leave us with the bonus of lower costs and less scarcity in the long run.…”                                  

- “The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” 

    “The Doomslayer”  – Wired Magazine    https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/               

- “This is my long-run forecast in brief:            

The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.              

I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”              

- “Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover. “            

- “Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”

- “Human beings create more than they destroy.”              

- “Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich. “            

- “The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge.”               

- “The world’s problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom.”               

- “It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.”               

- “Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.”              

- “All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.”                

- “Greater consumption due to increase in population and growth of income heightens scarcity and induces price run-ups. A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That is, we need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.”               

- “Our whole evolution up to this point shows that human groups spontaneously evolve patterns of behavior, as well as patterns of training people for that behavior, which tend on balance to lead people to create rather than destroy. Humans are, on net balance, builders rather than destroyers.”               

- “The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.”              

 

Upton Sinclair

- “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."                                   

 

Mark Skousen

    "The Big Three in Economics"

- “...you can only help yourself by helping others...  Businesses that focus on fulfilling the needs and desires of their customers will be the most profitable.”               

- “Although capitalists are motivated by the desire for personal gain, the way that they maximize their profits is by focusing their everyday attention on meeting the needs of the public.”              

- “Thus, the successful capitalist inevitably orients his everyday conduct toward the task of helping and serving others.”                  

- “Self-interest leads to empathy.“             

- “All legitimate exchange's most benefit both the buyer and the seller, not one at the expense of the other.”              

- “Smith's invisible hand only works if businessmen have an enlightened long-term view of competition, where they recognize the value of reputation and repeat business.”                

- “In short, self-interest promotes the interests of society only when the producer responds to the needs of the customer.”            

- “In many ways, Marxism has become a quasi-religion, with its slogans, symbols, red banners, hymns, party fellowship, apostles, martyrs, bible, and the definitive truth. “            

- “Marx had the self-assurance of a prophet who had talked to God....he was a poet, prophet, and moralist speaking as a philosopher and economist; his doctrine is not to be tested against mere facts but to be received as a ethical-religious truth....Marx was to lead the chosen people out of slavery to that New Jerusalem.... “                 

- “Becoming a Marxist or communist is like falling in love, an essentially emotional commitment.  (Wesson)”              

- “He (Marx) wrote sparingly about the happy world of utopian communism, prodigiously about the flaws of capitalism.  In "Capital", published in 1967, Karl Marx attempted to introduce an alternative model to the classical economics of Adam Smith. This system aimed to demonstrate through immutable ‘scientific’ laws that the capitalist system was fatally flawed, that it inherently benefited capitalists and big business, that it exploited workers, that labor had been reduced to a mere commodity with a price but no soul, and that it was so crisis prone that it would inevitably destroy itself. In many ways, the Marxist model rationalized its creator's belief that the capitalist system must be overthrown and replaced by communism. Marx was an idea idealist who failed profoundly to comprehend the role of capital, markets, prices, and money in advancing material abundance of mankind. The irony is that it is capitalism, not socialism or Marxism, that has liberated the worker from the chains of poverty, monopoly, war, and oppression, and has better achieved Marx's vision of a millennium of hope, peace, abundance, leisure, and aesthetic expression for the ‘full’ human being. “            

- “Could Marxist socialism create the abundance and variety of goods and services, breakthrough technologies, new job opportunities, and leisure time of today?  Hardly. Marx was incredibly ingenious in thinking that his brand of utopian socialism could achieve a rapid rise in the workers’ living standards. He wrote in the 1840s, ‘in communist society...  Nobody has won exclusive sphere of activity of each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, ...thus making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, in accordance with my inclination, without becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic’.  This is sheer ivory tower naiveté, the characteristic of the early Marx. Marx's idealism would take us back to a primitive, if not barbaric, age of barter and tribalism, without the benefit of exchange and division of labor.”                

 

Stephanie Slade

    “Both Left and Right are Converging On Authoritarianism”  - Reason Magazine  https://reason.com/2022/09/13/the-authoritarian-convergence/                                

- “Wealth appropriation is a death sentence for risk taking and innovation.”                               

 

Sam Slote - Literature Professor/writer/critic on James Joyce                                               

- “It's a testament to Joyce's genius, that Ulysses is a difficult book.                                               

 

Vaclav Smil

- “I will not say anything about Green New Deal, because if I would say anything it would dignify nonsense, and a scientist shouldn't dignify pure nonsense.”                                               

 

Adam Smith

- “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the Baker, that we expect our dinner, but from the regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”        

 

Tara Smith

    (Lecture channeling Ayn Rand) (Some or all loosely quoted from “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand)                                         

- “To be anti-wealth is to be anti-life."

- “By making money you are manufacturing time" "any increase in efficiency or productivity, ultimately reflected in more money, moves the grave that much further away from you."                                      

- “Money can buy you more life …Money can buy happiness."                                    

- “ ...our cultural climate is … antagonistic to the virtue of integrity… “                              

- “ …the reigning moral ethos works against integrity… …sacrifice, put others above self… …you can't practice irrational moral principles [like this] consistently.”                               

- “On a moral code that demands self-harm, you have to cheat unless you truly hate yourself…”                                 

- “ …what is… …subtly reinforced…[is]…the idea that moral directives are not to be taken seriously… …thus the insignia of the modern sophisticate ...flexibility.”                            

 

C. P. Snow

- "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?                                 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, ‘what do you mean by mass, or acceleration’, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘can you read’? Not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language, so the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”                                   

 

Timothy Snder

    "On Tyranny"

- “Post truth is pre fascism. “                             

 

Mike Solana - Pirate Wires

- “There is a tremendous irony in the notion that tech workers have ruined the region, for which we are now constantly being blamed while at the same time being told that leaving is tantamount to violence.”                                 

 

Thomas Sowell

- “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”                                  

- “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.”                               

- “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”                                   

- “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”                                 

- “Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”                                  

- “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”                                   

- “The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.”                                 

- “Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.”                                 

- “The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”                                  

- “The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything  - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.' ”                                 

- “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”                                 

- “What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”                                   

- “Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.”                                 

- “ There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?”                                   

- “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”                                  

- “Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.”                                  

- “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”                                   

- “Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.“                               

- “ I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.”                                 

- “Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”                                  

- “Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America.”                                  

- “We're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional, and they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.”                                

- “ [So many tend to believe that] … good things happen automatically, but bad things are somebody's fault.”                                   

- “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’. ”                                  

- “I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”                               

- “Our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know, after hearing only one side of an issue ...it is artificial stupidity.”                              

- “Those whites who feel a need to do something with blacks and for blacks have been some of the most dangerous ‘friends’ of blacks.” 

 

Spock   - (TV series Star Trek – Created by Gene Roddenberry)

- “You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical, but it is often true.”                 

- “I see no logic in wanting to worship a deity that demands you to live in a perpetual state of fear.”                

- “Lieutenant Dave Bailey: ‘Raising my voice back there doesn't mean I was scared or couldn't do my job, it means I happen to have a human thing called an adrenalin gland.’ Spock: ‘That sounds most inconvenient, ... Have you considered having it removed?’ ”     

- "Where there's no emotion, there's no motive for violence .”                              

 

Balaji Srinivasan

- “Why does Socialism keep rising over and over again?                               

It is the easiest way to become a leader of men.                            

Socialism is the lowest skilled way to put yourself at the head of a mob.” 

 

Shelby Steele

    "Shame"

- “It is often the victim’s fate to be victimized the second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer.”                                   

- “One can chalk up many of black america's problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon.”                                   

- “The larger society around us - having acknowledged its abuse of us - wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.”                                 

 

Louis C. K.  (Louis Alfred Székely)

- “When I read things like, ‘The foundations of capitalism are shattering,’ I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots  . . . flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story . . . they’re like, ‘it was the worst day of my life  . . . we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.’  . . . oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them?  . . . you’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now!  . . . people say there’s delays?   . . air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking  . . . the Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.”   

 

T

 

Matt Taibbi                           

- “ ‘You guys are always trying to change our lives but you can't change a * oil filter.’ ”   (Loosely (cleaned up language) quoting a Trump voter in Wisconsin.)

 

John Tamny

- "In the free market, bad ideas die quickly. We learn from it and try something new. That's what leads to progress. In Government, bad ideas that fail keep getting more money. The loss of progress due to gov is staggering. If gov had not been as large as it has been for decades, cancer would have been solved by now. Government slows the experimentation that enables progress."  (Roughly paraphrased.)                                     

 

Michael D Tanner

    "The Inclusive Economy"                                 

- “In the 1960s as much as 20% of the U.S. population and more than 33% of poor people had diets that did not meet the recommended dietary allowance for key nutrients. In 2013, just 5.6% of U.S. households and 18.5% of those below the poverty level had "very low Food Security", a category roughly comparable to the 60's measurements.”                                   

- “In 1975 roughly 4% households lived in units with physical defects or faulty plumbing, electricity, or heating. Today that number is 1%. In 1970 17.5% of households did not have fully functioning plumbing. Today that number is 2%.”

- “By any measure the vast majority of the population was poor 100 years ago. In fact, even the richest individuals 100 years ago would be considered poor by many of today's standards. What changed that was the enormous growth and innovation that took place since then.”                  

- “The poor themselves recognize how the existing welfare system fails to address their larger needs. According to a joint American enterprise institute and Los Angeles Times poll, 71% of individuals living below the poverty level believe that the government lacks the knowledge to eliminate poverty even if willing to spend whatever was necessary.”                                  

- “Moreover, the poll showed that people living below the poverty level were split evenly at 41% for and against whether the welfare system actually helped people escape from poverty or encouraged the poor to stay poor.”                                 

- “By a 48 to 41% margin, the poor believed that people who have been poor for a long time were likely to remain poor despite government assistance. “                               

- “People with incomes above the poverty level were more likely to have favorable impressions of the welfare system and government’s role than did the poor themselves.”                                   

- “Economic growth does more to reduce poverty over time than any government intervention.”                                   

- “Christians saw almsgiving as a transaction with God, not necessarily with the specific individual being helped. Perhaps for this reason, the church did not distinguish between deserving and the undeserving poor.”                                   

- “Since the start of the war on poverty in 1965 Federal spending on antipoverty programs have risen by almost 302% from $6,972 to $21,113 per person that is below poverty in 2014. $63,339 for a family of three.”                                   

- “We must recognize that people always have choices and control over their own lives and decisions. Ultimately people must be responsible for themselves and their families. Anything else deprives them of their place as full human being. The poor are neither helpless victims of the lottery of life nor the sole architects of their own condition.”                                   

- “Whether poverty results from our checkered history and the current structures of society, from cultural influences, from individual choices, or from some combination of all of these, the government is much more part of the problem than part of the solution. Rather than continuing to throw money at the problem, we must instead create the conditions that enable people to become self-sufficient and to lift themselves out of poverty.”                                 

- “Free markets and individual liberty have done more to reduce poverty than any force in history.”                                   

- “Being equally poor is far worse than being unequally rich. Our goal, therefore, should not be to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, to mindlessly pursue economic equality, or to redistribute wealth regardless of the consequences.”                                 

 

Robert Tarr

    “Foundations of a free society: Reflections on Ayn Rands Political philosophy”  - Chapter: Economic theory and conceptions of value                                                  

- “...the fundamental role of the businessman is to take factual knowledge and figure out what value it can serve. It is precisely the businessman's role to engage in goal directed thinking so as to form the conceptual integrations necessary for identifying and achieving value.”                    

- “Profit is the reward for successfully discovering new value opportunities, and it pertains precisely to the discovery. Once knowledge about value opportunities becomes widespread and widely implimented, the profit is competed away and disappears. The only way to consistently earn new profits is to continually engage in a process of discovery of new value opportunities.                                               

- “Competition, for Rand, is effectively competitiion in this type of cognition. The competitive race is at root the race to create new value.”                                               

- “One's ‘advantage’ over competition is precisely the creation of new products valued more highly by the market, or the discovery of how to better integrate factors of production in higher valued uses---knowledge that competitors do not possess.”

- “For Rand, the fundamental issue is the creative evaluation and grasp of new opportunities, not the competition per se. She writes: ‘Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others’ (‘The Moratorium on Brains,’ ARL 8).”

- “The integration underlying production is a direct result of the volitional thinking of the producer. It is a new phenomenon (it wouldn’t exist at all but for the producer’s mental effort).                                

And it is creative (it’s not ‘intrinsic’ in the facts of reality, to be algorithmically or automatically imprinted in his mind, but is the result of a creative thought process).                                

These are the factors that underlie Rand’s fundamental justification of why a producer is the fundamental cause of production of value, and thus why, in justice, he fully deserves the value he produces.                               

This is the view of production from an objective conception of value.”                                

- “If value is conceived as intrinsic or subjective, however, then value does not essentially involve any mental work. Instead, all value is simply ‘given’ to the mind, quite apart from any deliberate conceptual act (value is ‘just known’ or ‘just felt’).

On these conceptions of value, there is no room for any mental integration to play a role, no room for the mind to do anything in producing value per se.                                 

If conceptual knowledge is not involved, then value cannot be something rationally created by the mind; it cannot be some new mental integration that the thinker brings into existence; and it is not the result of any volitional mental effort on the part of the individual.”                             

- “What does this imply for a view of production? A teleological view of production is impossible on intrinsic or subjective conceptions of value since they exclude a view of valuing in terms of conceiving ends that guide the creative integration of means.                                 

But the only real alternative is an “efficient cause” view of production, where the value of output is deemed to stem entirely from the inputs to a production process (raw materials, labor, machines, etc.).                                 

In this view, the producer plays no fundamental role in creating value; at best, he is merely a deterministic cipher passively reacting to circumstances. There is nothing for him to do, since all production stems directly (and effectively ‘automatically’) from the factors of production themselves; they are the source and cause of value.                              

These sorts of views have been important in mainstream economic theory, but they are antithetical to Rand’s view of production.”                                

- “Production also effectively comes to be conceived as static. If production of value doesn’t fundamentally stem from conceiving goals and creatively integrating means, then there is no room to account for a process of creating such new mental integrations, as the driver of progress in production.                                 

Scientific and technical knowledge may be acknowledged as one of the input factors to production, but there is no recognition of the distinct process of goal-directed thinking to identify the value of integrating factors of production (including technical knowledge) into a given process of production.                                

Any innovations in technical knowledge are therefore conceived as occurring completely independently from any value considerations; they occur exogenously to economic production (in this view), and are then simply “automatically” reflected in production.                                

Production itself is just the static process of output stemming from given and known input factors rather than a continuous process of new value-­integrations.”                                                    

 

Edmund Way Teale

- “It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money, as long as you have got it.”                                   

 

Margaret Thatcher               

- “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”   

 

Bradley Thompson

    "America's Revolutionary Mind"                                    

- “As Alexander Hamilton noted in the first essay of ‘The Federalist’, the United States was the first nation in history founded not on accident or force but on reflection and choice, and thus on reason and free will.”                               

- “In contrast to the monarchical and aristocratic societies of Europe, the founding fathers established governments, according to John Taylor of Caroline, ‘rooted in moral or intellectual principles’ rather than in ‘orders clans or [castes]’.”

- “The declarations truths can be reduced to just four words: equality, rights, consent, and revolution. Taken together the declarations four truths form a concise synthesis of a new American style republicanism.”                                

- “…individuals must be free to pursue their own rational self-interest unhindered by the coercion of others.”

- “… American revolutionaries assumed that the individual is the primary unit of moral and political value. … Given their view of man as a rational and volitional being and given their view of human equality, they assumed that each man is a morally autonomous and sovereign agent, which means that each man is an end in himself and not the means to someone else’s end. … Rights apply to individuals and only to individuals.”                                 

- “…the revolutionary generation assumed that, as one New York paper put it, ‘Self-interest is the grand Principle of all Human Actions’. ”                                 

- ”During his trip to America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans ‘are pleased to explain all the actions of their life with the aid of self-interest well understood’. ”                                    

- “In fact, most Americans ‘think that knowledge of one’s self-interest well understood is enough to lead man toward the just and the honest’. “                                  

- “The leading thinkers of the American Revolution all understood that self-interest had to be ‘enlightened’ or ‘well understood,’ as Tocqueville put it.”                                  

- “Enlightened self-interest taught men ‘that to be happy in life one ought to watch over one’s passions and carefully repress their excesses; that one can acquire a lasting happiness only in refusing a thousand passing enjoyments, and finally that one must constantly triumph over oneself to serve oneself better’. ”                                   

- “They assumed that enlightened self-interest was a virtue, although they likewise knew that corrupted self-interest was a vice, which meant that it should be both set free and tamed.”                                  

- “The idea of pursuing one’s own enlightened self-interest necessarily led to the pursuit of happiness as a right. The founding generation viewed self-interest as the motive and happiness as the end.”                                  

- “The country was unified through commercial system of natural liberty and a harmony of economic interests.   Instead of anarchy, the natural system of liberty encouraged and generated new associations and bonds of civil cooperation.  This, then, was the great paradox of American Society it united radical individualism with tight bonds of civil association. The former was responsible for the latter. It was e plurbis unum. (Out of many, one.)”                                   

- “What made this revolutionary society unique was that the force and authority of government and the ties of land and blood were not what held it together, as was true of most countries of the old world.”                                    

- “The American people were united instead by self-interest, rights, freedom, money, benevolence, voluntary associations, and most importantly by a common moral ideal that was who expressed so eloquently in the ringing phrase ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’. "

- “The American experiment in self-government truly was a novus ordo seclorum. (new order of the ages)”                                   

- “Frederick Douglass, the former slave and leading abolitionist believed that the declaration was ‘the ringbolt to the chain’ of America’s ‘destiny,’ and he described its moral principles as ‘saving principles’.  Douglas challenged the American people to ‘stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost’. "                                   

- “The declarations promise of liberty and justice to all meant everything to the man who had once been held in chattel bondage as another man's property. It provided all Americans, including slaves, with a moral and political standard by which to judge the actions of government officials past, present, and future. It declared certain moral and political principles to be true - true for all men and women everywhere.”                                   

- “Pro slavery writers opposed the moral philosophy at the heart of capitalism (e.g., self-interest, natural rights, and individualism), the political principles of laisse-faire (e.g., the separation of the economy and state), and the economic mechanisms at the heart of a market society (e.g., division of labor and competition), and they supported plantation socialism as a cure to all the ills associated with capitalism and a free society.”              

 

J.R.R. Tolkien

- “Not all who wander are lost.”

 

Marian L. Tupy

- “While few people would go as far as to compare population growth and the concomitant increase in consumption to ‘the creed of a cancer cell,’ as Ehrlich did, many people continue to feel uneasy about overpopulation and overconsumption.

These concerns have deep historical roots and may have been justified at a time when human and animal worlds were more similar than they are today. Back then, a sudden increase in population really could lead to overconsumption of resources, starvation, and death.                          

Today’s world, however, is very different from that analyzed by Aristotle or Malthus.                                    

As American writer Jonah Goldberg put it in a recent book chronicling human progress, ‘Almost everything about modernity, progress, and enlightened society emerged in the last 300 years.                                   

If the last 200,000 years of humanity were one year, nearly all material progress came in the last 14 hours.’                                 

It is, in fact, much more difficult to compile a list of measures by which the world is worse off today than it was before science, reason, and humanism made us all healthier, better fed, safer, richer, and even happier.                                  

We are also much better educated, though old habits, such as our propensity toward pessimism, refuse to go away.                                    

Hence Simon’s Rule, which states that ‘As population increases, the time-price of most commodities will get cheaper for most people, most of the time. Unfortunately, most people will assume the opposite.’                                   

Simon’s revolutionary insights with regard to the mutually beneficial interaction between population growth and availability of natural resources are counterintuitive, but they are real.                                  

The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways.                                  

The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite.                                    

What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.”                                  

 

Neil deGrasse Tyson

- “Children … are all born scientists." "…we spend the first years of a child's life teaching [him/her] to walk and talk, and then the rest of their life telling [them] to shut up and sit down." "…school trains you that learning is a chore."                                   

 

U

 

Unknown

- "People who want to redistribute a cake have to make sure someone bakes it in the first place. If no one bakes the cake, you can't redistribute it."                                   

- “In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, 'under God,' to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer.”                                 

- “It’s like playing chess w/ a monkey. You get them to checkmate, and then they swallow the king.”  (Unnamed diplomat on the difficulty of nuclear talks w/ Iran)  

- “The art of plucking the goose w/ the least amount of squawking.” (Re taxes)  

- “Politicians are people who have what it takes to take what you have."   

- “The sickness of an over governed society.”

- “Moderation in all things including moderation.” 

- “It must be awesome to selectively choose reality like that!”

- “You can't have equality before the law and material equality at the same time… they are incompatible.”  (Paraphrasing Friedrich A. Hayek .)                                   

- "The majority of people that are born today will never see the Milky Way." (In most cases by choice never getting far enough away from cities and light pollution.)

- "You can't complain about something you're not trying to change." 

- “The government big enough to give you everything you want is a government strong enough to take away everything that you have.”                                    

- “Child to parent: ‘When I grow up, I want to be a socialist.’ Parent: ‘Okay, but the problem with that honey, is that you can't do both.’ "                                  

- “Was told in no uncertain terms that ‘The one thing you must never say, is recommending that people should eat less of anything.’ "    (Academic who worked in government food regulation briefly.)                                 

- "When you want to help someone else, you tell that person what they need to hear. When you want to help yourself, you tell that person what they want to hear. Politicians rarely do the first.”                                   

- "Socialism always works in the beginning.”                                 

- "Gravity highlights America's racism.”                                    

- "Protesters express their justified frustrations in mostly peaceful protests. In other news, some consumer luxury goods were acquired from capitalist businesses by oppressed people, a few capitalist businesses probably covered by insurance were burned down, and a few people were shot, probably because of Trump's rhetoric.”

- "In 1995 the Portland City Council selected ‘The City that Works’ as a new slogan for City government. The slogan resulted from a contest among City workers for suggestions to make the city more efficient and customer-service oriented.”

- ”The idea is rampant in our culture that goals should be achieved through coercion. Most people think coercion is fine as long as it benefits someone.”               

- ”To get respect you have to respect others.”                

- “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. “

- “Contempt for truth.”                                

- “Totalitarian governments’ goal is a populace who for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exist.”  

- “Socialism …ideas so good you have to force them on people.”   (Bumper sticker.)

- “Affluence leads to (or breeds) entitlement.”

- “No food, one problem. Have food, many problems.”  (Chinese proverb.)

 

V

 

Guillaume Verdon

- "We don't know ... the futures we left behind by regulating everything this hard... ."

 

W

 

Booker T. Washington

- ”There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”                                             

 

Don Watkins                                

- “Once you grant government or society the right to take things away from individuals based on the idea they don't ‘need’ them (i.e. taxing the rich) then you are obliterating the idea of freedom because ‘need’ is entirely subjective.“  (Extremely rough paraphrasing.)  

 

Amy Wax and Larry Alexander

    "Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country's Bourgeois Culture"

- “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.”                                 

 

Bret Weinstein

- “…words used to mean something, and it was cool when they did because you could use them for stuff…”

- "It's because they go to school."  (Responding to a question re why "So few people in this country are well educated.")                               

- ”The entire idea of taking science and marshalling against those who would challenge it is the height of unscientific.”              

- ”Everything we now believe started out as heterodoxy, and it comes to be orthodoxy because it withstands test and we find out how it works.”               

- ”Do you really think we're in a place where we can freeze that process now …it's like it's God given …this is a religious perspective.”              

- ”The scientific perspective is that we don't know what of things we believe today we will come to discover are false tomorrow.  “  

- “WWI was 81% peaceful, WWII was 85% peaceful, and the BLM protests are also ‘mostly’ peaceful.” (Very loosely quoted.)                               

 

Eric Weinstein                                 

- “ ‘You must understand my pain, you can't understand my pain, and you must listen to me.’ "  (Explicitly stating current social justice ideology contradictions.) (Very loosely paraphrased.)                                 

 

Bari Weiss

- "In the states, you could say we live in a culture of grievances, where people sort of hoard their victim-hood.

     “Common Sense - The New Founders America Needs” – The Free Press    https://www.thefp.com/p/the-new-founders-america-needs                          

- “The ideology that is trying to unseat liberalism in America begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated.”                                

“…Persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. The rule of law is replaced with mob rule.”                               

“…Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with disinvitation and de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion with exclusion. Excellence with equity.”                               

“…In this ideology, disagreement is recast as trauma. So speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all—but in fact justice.”                                

… …                             

“…In this ideology, information that does comport with The Narrative is recast as disinformation, its proponents as conspiracy theorists.”                                

“…In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about re-educating them in what to think.”                                 

“…In this ideology the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.”                                 

… …

“…In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: you are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. … … “

“…In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of ‘privileged’ to ‘oppressed.’ We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. … … “                            

”…Victimhood, in this ideology, confers morality. ‘I think therefore I am’ is replaced with: ‘I am therefore I know.’ Or: ‘I know therefore I am right.’  “                             

“…This ideology says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist.”                                

“…In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.”                                

- “In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” Why? Because the idea of working hard ‘supports the illusion of meritocracy.’                                 

- “…reject moral relativism. Some cultures are more just than others and it is right to say so. Ibram Kendi says this: ‘In order to be an antiracist, we have to stop standardizing our own culture and judging other cultures from our standards because whoever creates the standard becomes the top of the hierarchy.’ And: ‘We need to figure out a way to recognize that when we see cultural difference, all we are seeing is cultural difference.’ I say that’s nonsense. You can absolutely judge other cultures. Cultures that force women into burqas. Or practice female genital mutilation. Or hang gay people from cranes. To be a founder means saying: What we are building is harder to do, but, yes, it is better.”

- “…use your own eyes and ears. … To quote John Adams, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Use your own sensibilities to decipher fact from fiction. The mainstream narrative can be addictive and easy to digest, but reality is far too stubborn to fit so neatly into boxes.  Do your own research. Be independent  minded. And seek out the truth—don’t just rely on others to tell you how things are.  … You don’t have to become an ‘expert’ to form your own opinion from the facts, and, if the pandemic has taught us anything, you should certainly be skeptical of anyone claiming to be one.”                                  

- “…build new things. There is no fixed pie when it comes to building. Building is an action, a choice, a decision to create and move.”

 

Ai Weiwei

- “Ideological cleansing exists not only under totalitarian regimes it is also present, in a different form, in western democracies.”                                

- “Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans.”                              

- “It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don't believe in, simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement.”                               

- “[In America] In many ways, you are already in an authoritarian state, you just don't know it.”                               

- “Many things happen today in the U.S. that can be compared to the cultural revolution in China.”                                

- “Like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness, that is very dangerous.”                                 

 

David Wallace Wells   (In regard to Covid.)

- “Big-picture, though, I think this does remind us all that in fact the disease is much, much, much more dangerous for older people — especially very old people. I think people understand that, in principle, but don’t appreciate, at all, the skew — where a 90-year-old is 100,000 times more at risk than a 10-year-old, for instance, and many thousands of times more at risk than even a 50-year-old.”                                 

- “Public-health messaging has really emphasized the universal risk, I think as a way of incentivizing public investment in containment measures like social-distancing and mask-wearing. But the risk is skewed very, very dramatically.”                                 

 

Dana White

- “This next generation is just such a fuckin’ group of pussies ...for the small group of savages out there ...run these kids right over... [you can't beat hard work] ...it should be yours ...you out there listening right now, there's never been more opportunity than there is today.”                      

- “I tell young people now all the time. I definitely tell my kids, if you are even fucking remotely a savage, you'll run these people over this next generation.”  (Note: In this context, the definition of savage is being disciplined/tough/strong/hard working)                                              

 

Jason Whitlock

- “BLM = Bigots Love Marxism.”                                 

 

Dr. Einat Wilf

- “Doing good means doing a lot of things that don't feel good.”                                               

- “The distinction between actions that make one feel good and those that actually do good is relevant to numerous fields from parenting to governing. I have encountered it most frustratingly when it comes to the conflict and the Palestinians.”

- “Too many western policy makers claim to want to do good, but in reality they just want to feel good. The reason is that doing good would require them to do and say a lot of things that do not feel good at all.”                                            

- “There is an old Hebrew saying that those who are kind to the cruel will inevitable find they are cruel to the kind. For too long people who claimed to want to do good were actually just eager to feel good, with their actions not only being self serving to their image of being “good people”, but being deeply harmful to people living here, ensuring that generation after generation the conflict continues.”                                            

- “It is time that we insist that those who genuinely want to do good, who want to achieve real peace, will undertake actions that while not feeling good, actually serve the purpose of doing good.” 

 

Edward Willet

    “Genetics Demystified”

- “But we actually have less genetic variation than our closest relatives do.  Any two chimpanzees have four times as much genetic variation between them as any two humans.”                                                 

- “This probably indicates that at some time in the past, humans either underwent a severe but short-lasting population crunch that cut the population to just a few thousand, or a longer lasting, more moderate population crunch which cut the population to just a few tens or hundreds of thousands.”                                              

- “Interestingly, although race might seem like the most obvious way in which our genetic variety is manifested, analysis of DNA sequence data has confirmed work from the 1970s based on sequencing proteins:                                               

fully 80 to 90% of variation occurs within ethnic populations, while 5 to 10% is among ethnic populations within the major racial groups, and only 5 to 10% is among the major racial groups.                                              

Or, to put it another way, if all humans became extinct except one east African tribe, 85% of all human variation would still be preserved as the population rebounded.”                                           

 

Walter E. Williams

    “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent”

- “Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny. But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,                                   

I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.                                   

Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.”                                  

    “On Property, Rights and Justice”

- “Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.”  

- “I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree?...how much of what I earn belongs to you--and why?”                                             

- “If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.”                                             

- “There is no moral argument that justifies using the coercive powers of government to force one person to bear the expense of taking care of another.”                                              

- “Government has no resources of its own…government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong.”                                              

- “We don’t have a natural right to take the property of one person to give to another; therefore, we cannot legitimately delegate such authority to government.”                                              

- “No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.”                                              

- “The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable.”                                              

- “Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty.”                                              

- “Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.”                                              

- “Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.”                                             

- “Always be suspicious of those who…claim their way is the best way and are willing to force their way on the rest of us.”                                               

- “People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange…are for control and coercion.”                                               

- “Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.”                                              

- “The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests.”                                               

- “Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.”                                               

- “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man. How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively?”                                              

- “The recognition of the fact that Congress has no resources of its own forces us to acknowledge that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. If a private citizen did the same thing that Congress does, we would call it an immoral act—namely theft. Acts such as theft that are immoral when done privately do not become moral when done collectively.”

- “The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another.”                                           

- “French economist/philosopher Frederic Bastiat (1801–50) gave a test for immoral government acts: “See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”                                          

- “Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.”                                             

- “Do-gooders fail to realize that most good is not done in the name of good but done in the name of self-interest.”                                               

- “How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us ‘affordable’ housing to now turn their attention to bringing us ‘affordable’ health care? “                                           

- “Before the do-gooders ‘helped,’ they forgot to ask, why would anyone work ten hours per day for the paltry sum of $2 or $3 an hour? Would they have selected such a job if they had superior alternatives? The only conclusion is that the low-paying sweatshop job might be their best alternative. Such a person is indeed unfortunate, but they are by no means made better off by the destruction of that low-paying job.”                                             

- “I was so lucky to be born before white people wanted to be nice to blacks.”

 

Edward O. Wilson

    “The Ants”

   “Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species…”                                             

 

Jaana Woiceshyn

    "Instead of ESG and DEI, how about value creation, justice, and independence?"     https://profitableandmoral.com/instead-of-esg-and-dei-how-about-value-creation-justice-and-independence/

- "Value creation is the core principle of business sustainability. A business can only sustain itself by creating products and services that provide value to its customers (for which they are willing to pay more than the cost of producing and trading). Only this way does the business ensure value creation (a return on their investment) for the company’s shareholders."

"Creating and trading material values also requires that these activities don’t cause demonstrable harm to anybody (which rules out deception, fraud and exploitation, polluting others’ property, including air and water)."

"The principle of justice guides business (decision makers) to deal with others as traders, as explained by Ayn Rand, exchanging value for value, by mutual consent for mutual benefit. Companies trade salaries, wages, and bonuses for their employees’ productive input to their value creation. With suppliers, companies trade money for materials, components, and services. They trade products and services for payments from their customers. These trades are just when voluntary and values are exchanged for value: trading partners are compensated based on the value they offer."

"Not all companies follow these principles, to their detriment. Destroying value instead of creating it, through deception, fraud, or exploitation is unsustainable because not only is it immoral but illegal. Companies that engage in fraud or coercion will be prosecuted and punished. Not trading value for value, even when not illegal, is unjust and leads to a loss of customers, employees, suppliers, and profits. Giving up first-handed adherence to reality is similarly unsustainable, resulting in copy-cat investment in such value-depleting programs as ESG and DEI that violate the principle of justice."

"Businesses that adhere to the principles of value creation, justice, and independence, benefit not only their shareholders but all those with whom they trade, thereby creating a continual virtuous circle of increasing human flourishing."

"Can technology solve our problems?"     https://profitableandmoral.com/can-technology-solve-our-problems/

- "If we want to maximize genuine human flourishing with the help of technology, including increased prosperity for all and management of climate impacts, the mixed economy with its ever-expanding welfare state and government controls is an impediment. The mixed economy disincentivizes technological innovation because it does not protect the freedom of creators and their trading partners but violates it through regulations and “redistribution” schemes."

"To let technological innovation truly flourish, we need a different social system where the freedom of individuals to think, produce, and trade freely is protected. That system is capitalism – where the government’s only role is to protect its citizens against the initiation of physical force and fraud. The government protects freedom by upholding individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. It deters and punishes rights violators through the police and the law courts. That, instead of the regulatory and redistributive state of a mixed economy, is all what is needed to protect our freedom to think, produce, and trade – and to develop technological solutions to our problems and a prosperous economy for all."

"How to help workers flourish"     https://profitableandmoral.com/how-to-help-workers-flourish/

- "While labor unions were originally founded for the legitimate purpose of improving working conditions and helping negotiate wages, they have long since substituted that purpose for entrenching the power of their leaders and the entitlements for their senior members."

"Today’s labor unions in industrialized countries that operate on the principle of collectivism (e.g., forced membership, benefits regardless of performance) as opposed to justice, do not help workers flourish—to perform at their best for their own economic wellbeing, purpose, and enjoyment of life."

"The fundamental principle that we need to recognize to help all workers flourish, ignored by most labor unions and governments alike, is freedom. The principle of freedom implies two more specific principles: free markets and individual rights."

"If we want peace, we need capitalism"     https://profitableandmoral.com/if-we-want-peace-we-need-capitalism/

- "In the current war between Hamas and Israel, the anti-war protestors are siding with Hamas, the brutal terrorist organization and ruthless ruler of a religious dictatorship in Gaza that keeps the Palestinians in miserable poverty and doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice them (as human shields, suicide bombers, and child soldiers) for its cause: the elimination of Israel and its Jewish population."

"According to the protestors’ narrative, Israel is a colonial oppressor that wages war against Palestinians in capitalistic greed for more land and power. This narrative utterly distorts both the nature of capitalism and historical facts."

"Unlike economists who don’t acknowledge the moral foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, Ayn Rand defined it in fundamental terms as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, in which all property is privately owned.” In such a system, the government’s only role is to protect the rights of its citizens against the initiation of physical force – and never to initiate it itself."

"As Rand observes, capitalism is the only system that makes peaceful co-existence among people and countries possible. It bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships, as the evil that violates individuals’ rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness – the rights that leave them free to think, produce, and trade: to survive and prosper. In free, capitalist countries, the constitutions prevent governments from initiating force on their own citizens and on other countries. Governments are not permitted to start wars; armed forces are only for self-defense."

"Amidst the dictatorships and other statist regimes of the Middle East, only Israel is free (mostly, despite the military draft) and thus closest to capitalism: its citizens (including Arabs) have rights that the government protects. It is a free-enterprise nation where people are protected from force and thus prosper through their productivity."

"The governments of Israels neighbors, including Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, don’t respect the rights of their own people and initiate physical force against them. Most countries in the Middle East are the opposite of capitalism: their people are not free, which squashes their productivity and keeps them in poverty. (Elan Journo’s book, What Justice Demands documents how these countries violate their citizens’ rights, including lashings, imprisonment, and execution for criticizing the government)."

"Importantly, Israel has not initiated physical force against other countries or governments. As a free, mostly capitalist country, it has prospered by being productive; it has nothing to gain from invading and colonizing its neighbors. It did not start any of the wars it has been involved in. All – including the present war – have been fought in self-defense (including pre-emptive strikes under imminent threats) against the aggression of its neighbors."

"If we really want peace, we must condemn and stop supporting dictatorships and other forms of statism.  Instead, we must understand and adopt capitalism and the individual rights it rests on."

 

Stephen Wolfram

- "[Large language model AI's like ChatGPT's] ...primary, sort of, underlying technical thing is, you give it a prompt, it's trying to continue that prompt in a way that is somehow typical of what it's seen based on a trillion words of text that humans have written on the web."

"It's kind of a shallow computation on a large amount of ... what we humans have put on the web..."

- "The idea that you're going to get factual output, is not a very good idea ... it is a linguistic interface, it is producing language, and language can be truthful, or not truthful."

 

Frank Loyd Wright

- “I believe in God, only I spell it nature.”  

 

X

 

Y

 

Z

 

Peter Zeihan

- “For those of you who think we should go organic [instead of using chemical fertilizers and pesticides], oh god you are so bad at math.”                                               

- “Organic fertilizers require multiple applications over the course of a year, which requires a lot more carbon input.”                                              

- “In addition they require about an order of magnitude more energy to produce in the first place, and if you're going to be moving 6,7, 8, 10 times as much of the stuff you can imagine what the carbon footprint is for transport.”

- “The same goes for pesticides. Most pesticides in the U.S. now are once or twice and done for the season, as opposed to something you have to put on every few weeks, in case you want to go organic.”                                              

 

Zuby  (Nzube Olisaebuka Udezue)                                                 

- “We're living in a time where politics is binary and gender is a spectrum.”                                              

 

 

 

 

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BAD QUOTES

 

Joe Biden

    (A public speech as President)

- “…Democracy endures only if …we the people see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences…                                 

…American democracy only works …only if we respect our legitimate political differences.                               

…Democracy begins and will be preserved in we the people's habits of the heart, in our character …empathy that fuels democracy, the willingness to see each other not as enemies but fellow Americans.”

- “…Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”    (earlier in the same speech)                             

 

Donald Trump

- "I think I am actually humble. I think I’m much more humble than you would understand."

- "I’m intelligent. Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent.”

- “I know words. I have the best words.”

- "This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water."   (On Puerto Rico)

- "I think Viagra is wonderful if you need it, if you have medical issues, if you’ve had surgery. I’ve just never needed it. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if there were an anti-Viagra, something with the opposite effect. I’m not bragging. I’m just lucky. I don’t need it. I’ve always said, 'If you need Viagra, you’re probably with the wrong girl.' "

- "I think the only difference between me and other candidates is that I'm more honest and my women are more beautiful."

- “Within a couple of days,” Trump announced, “[infections are] going to be down to close to zero. One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear.”   ( March 6 2020 )

- “I've always known this is a real [sic], this is a pandemic. I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”   ( March 17 2020 )

- "While Bette Midler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct."

- "An "extremely credible source" has called my office and told me that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud."

- "And did you notice that baby was crying through half of the speech and I didn't get angry? Not once. Did you notice that? That baby was driving me crazy. I didn't get angry once because I didn't want to insult the parents for not taking the kid out of the room!"                                       

- "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election...".  (After losing the 2020 presidential election.)

"This Fake Election can no longer stand. Get moving Republicans...".

 

Hillary Clinton

- “There was a widespread understanding that this election was not on the level...” “We still don’t know what really happened.” (After losing the 2016 presidential election.)

- “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don't give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is, …”  (Asked what to do if Joe Biden loses the 2020 presidential election.)

 

Mika Brezinski  - MSNBC News

   (on Elon Musk buying Twitter  - in response to Musk stating he thinks no one should be banned from Twitter/that people should be free to hear all opinions and decide for themselves.)                                     

- “The dangerous edges here are that he's trying to undermine the media … undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think, and that Is our job."                               

 

Francis Collins

   (Email to Anthony Fauci regarding "The Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of public COVID policy by highly accomplished/respected epidemiologists.)

- "This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford.

There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online yet - is it underway."

   (Following comment was made in the context of a self-critical evaluation while voluntarily submitting himself to critique by an audience critical of his actions.)

- "If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life.

Doesn’t matter what else happens. … You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

- ”No one ever makes a million dollars; they take a million dollars.”

- “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change… .”  (Jan 2019)

- “Capitalism inevitably creates billionaires while others starve.”  (Paraphrased) 

 

Paul Ehrlich

    "The population bomb"  - 1968                                   

- “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”                                  

           

Anthony Fauci   Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)  - Chief medical advisor to the president  - Primary source of guidance during the Covid Pandemic

- “…They always come back and say Fauci was responsible for closing schools. I had nothing to do, I mean let's get down to the facts  …”   (  10/16/2022 )                     

- “…so clearly in certain circumstances, particularly in areas where there's community spread, the schools should be closed.”     ( 03/2020 )          

- “...what I symbolize in an era of the normalization of untruths and lies and all the things you're seeing going on in society from Jan 6th to everything else that goes on, people are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth, and for people caring about people...”  (Responding to a question re what some media coined "the Fauci effect" ...an increase in medical school applications during the pandemic.)                                

- “…if they get up and criticize science, nobody's goona know what they're talking about, but if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well people could recognize there's a person there, there's a face, there's a "vice" [sic] you can recognize, you see him on television, so it's easy to criticize.”                               

“But they're really criticizing science, because I represent science.”                                

“That's dangerous. To me that's more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I'm not goona be around here forever, but science is goona be here forever, and if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave, and that's what I worry about.”

- "When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ...Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85."                            

- “I believe for the most part you can trust respected medical authorities... ...I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me. But I would stick with respected medical authorities who have a track record of telling the truth, who have a track record of giving information and policy and recommendations based on scientific evidence and good data.”

- “There’s no secret. We’ve had a lot of divisiveness, we’ve had facts that were very, very clear, that were questioned. People were not trusting what health officials were saying.”

“People were not trusting what health officials were saying,” Fauci said, criticizing how mask-wearing was politicized under former president Donald Trump.

When asked if Trump’s dismissiveness of science and “lack of candor” cost lives, Fauci responded:

- it “...very likely did... ...When you’re starting to go down paths that aren't based on any science at all, and we’ve been there before...that is not helpful, at all.”

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones

    The New York Times Magazine

    “The 1619 Project” – Developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones

    (Original intro – Since edited without acknowledgement, removing the reference to 1619 as the true founding, which is the central implied theme of the project.)

- “The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones

- “I argue that 1619 is our true founding.”

- “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding.”

- “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

  

    Leslie M. Harris  - Professor of history at Northwestern University  - author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City”, “1626-1863 and Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies”

    “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me. - The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.”

    Politico Magazine   https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248

- “ … [a New York Times research editor] … wanted me to verify some statements for the [1619] project. At one point, she sent me this assertion:

‘One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.’

I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.”

“The editor followed up with several questions probing the nature of slavery in the Colonial era, such as whether enslaved people were allowed to read, could legally marry, could congregate in groups of more than four, and could own, will or inherit property—the answers to which vary widely depending on the era and the colony. I explained these histories as best I could—with references to specific examples—but never heard back from her about how the information would be used.

Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay.

In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619. Both sets of inaccuracies worried me, but the Revolutionary War statement made me especially anxious.

Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.”

 

Kim Jong-un  - North Korean leader                  

- "Having too many people makes Socialism difficult." (In regard to 10% of the Chinese population starving).  

 

John F. Kennedy

- “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

      

Paul Krugman                                       

- “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.”  (1998)   

 

Lenin  (Vladimir Illich Ulyanov)

"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.                                    

1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.                                    

2. Publish their names.                                     

3. Seize all their grain from them.                                     

4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.                                     

Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks. Telegraph receipt and implementation.                                    

Yours, Lenin.                                    

Find some truly hard people."

- "A beautiful plan. Finish it off together with Dzieriynski. Disguised as ‘Greens’ (we’ll heap the blame on them afterwards) we’ll advance 10-20 versts and hang the kulaks, priests, landed gentry. 100,000 rubles prize for each one of them that is hanged." (“Kulak” is a loosely defined term applied even more broadly than normal by Lenin’s Bolshevik enforcers to any peasant owning more land (perhaps more than 8 acres) or livestock (perhaps more than 1) than the average peasant.)

- "There can be no avoiding the arrest of the entire Kadet party and its near-Kadet supporters so as to pre-empt conspiracies. They’re capable - the whole bunch - of giving assistance to the conspirators. It's criminal not to arrest them. It’s better for dozens and hundreds of intellectuals to serve days and weeks in prison than that 10,000 should take a beating. Eh, eh! Better!"

- “It is devilishly important to finish off Yudenich. If the offensive has started, isn’t it possible to mobilise 20 thousand Petrograd workers plus 10 thousand bourgeois, place artillery behind them, shoot several hundred and achieve a real mass impact on Yuclenich?"

- "The greater the number of the representatives of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in shooting on this premise, the better. It is precisely now that we ought to deliver a lesson to this public so that they won’t dare even think about resistance for several decades.”

- "The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation. On the level of the state in general this is an entirely understandable thing, but we’re not counting on the exhausted, destitute peasant-owner understanding it. And we know you can’t manage without compulsion, to which the devastated peasantry is reacting very strongly."   

- "We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people, and we shall not hesitate, and we shall save the country."                                 

- “Lock up all the doubtful ones in a concentration camp outside the city.” …[and]“carry out merciless mass terror.”

- “Secure the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.”

 

Karl Marx

- “All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that ‘accounting and control’ are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. But ‘accounting and control,’ he goes on saying, have already been ‘simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.’                                  

Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.”                                 

 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

     “Communist Manifesto”

- “The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.                                        

But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.                                       

In this sense, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”                                    

- “To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal but a social status in production.                                        

Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.                                       

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. “                                    

 

Ayanna Pressley

- “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”                                             

 

Jack Resneck Jr.  - MD  - President AMA                                  

- “I recently participated in an annual fact-checking festival hosted by media organizations Poynter and Politifact, called the United Facts of America, where I explained the impact of unchecked medical misinformation to a diverse audience of journalists, policymakers and pundits, and also the responsibility physicians have in policing it.”

 

Klaus Schwab  - Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum

- "...the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

    Speech at World Government Summit 2017

- "There is of course an anti-system which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives.

- “How will this expanded role of governments manifest itself? A significant element of new “bigger” government is already in place with the vastly increased and quasi-immediate government control of the economy. As detailed in Chapter 1, public economic intervention has happened very quickly and on an unprecedented scale. In April 2020, just as the pandemic began to engulf the world, governments across the globe had announced stimulus programmes amounting to several trillion dollars, as if eight or nine Marshall Plans had been put into place almost simultaneously to support the basic needs of the poorest people, preserve jobs whenever possible and help businesses to survive.”

 

Smithsonian Institute

    "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States"

- "White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practice in the United States.

And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we have all internalize some aspects of white culture including people of color.

Rugged individualism:     The individual is the primary unit. Self-reliance. Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded. Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment, ‘You get what you deserve.’

Family structure:     The nuclear family: father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit. Husband is breadwinner and head of household. Wife is homemaker and subordinate to the husband. Children should have own rooms, be independent.

Emphasis on scientific method:     Objective, rational linear thinking. Cause and effect relationships. Quantitative emphasis.

History based on northern European immigrants’ experience in the United States:     Heavy focus on the British empire. The primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition.

Protestant work ethic:     Hard work is the key to success. Work before play. ‘if you didn't meet your goals, you didn't work hard enough.’

Religion:     Christianity is the norm. Anything other than Judeo-Christian tradition is foreign. No tolerance for deviation from single god concept.

Status, power and authority:   Wealth equals worth. Your job is who you are. Respect authority. Heavy value and ownership of goods, space, property.

Future orientation:     Plan for future. Delayed gratification. Progress is always best. ‘Tomorrow will be better.’

Time:     Follow rigid time schedules. Time viewed as a commodity.

Aesthetics:     Based on European culture. Steak and potatoes; ‘bland is best.’ Women's beauty based on blonde, thin  - ‘Barbie’. Man's attractiveness based on economic status, power, intellect.

Holidays:     Based on Christian religions. Based on white history and male leaders.

Justice:     Based on English common law. Protect property and entitlements. Intent accounts.

Competition:     Be number one. Win at all costs. Winner/loser dichotomy. Action orientation. Master and control nature. Must always ‘do something’ about the situation. Aggressiveness and extroversion. Decision-making. Majority rules (when whites have power).”

                                 

Sonia Sotomayor  - U.S. Supreme Court Justice                                                

- “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

 

Justin Trudeau  - Canadian Prime Minister

“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China." “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.”

 

Unknown

- “Rationality is a tool of white male oppression.”

 

Beatrice Webb  (Socialist  - Apologist of Stalin era Communist regime)                                        

- “Ethnic cleansing was an essential part of the socialist program before Hitler had taken any action in the matter. The Left, for a century, was proud of its ruthlessness, and scornful of the delicacy of its opponents.”                                        

- “ ‘You can't make an omelet,’ Beatrice Webb once told a visitor who had seen cattle cars full of starving people in the Soviet Union, ‘without breaking (a few?) eggs’.''                                      

 

Rochelle Walensky   - Director of the CDC

- “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick...”

 

 

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