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#14115839
"A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program." -- George Will
#14127926
Alexander Zinoviev on the Stalin era:

"We lived through a lot of things: horrific living conditions, arrests and hardship of the war. And yet, I would not trade my life in those days for any other life. Many millions of my peers in those days felt free and realized they were Citizens with a capital C. We gained tremendous knowledge; the entire country was studying. In those days Russia transitioned from the most illiterate into the most educated country. We were given access to the highest cultural achievements. This was our compensation for the poverty of our daily living. Our pants were ripped and patched, we wore no ties, but in our heads we carried something, which to us meant more than any treasures of the material world."
#14128283
"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."

~Abraham Lincoln

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."

~Plato
#14128289
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." – Samuel Adams

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." --H. L. Mencken

"Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.” -- Ernie Kovacs

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." -- Robert Heinlein ('The Moon is a Harsh Mistress')

"Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." -- Robert A Heinlein

"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs." - Walter Lippman

"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." - Flannery O'Connor

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." - Henry Adams
#14133268
"The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian."
George Orwell

The veracity of this statement is why I have reservations about describing myself as a "left-winger".
#14133433
Soixante-Retard wrote:"The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian."
George Orwell

The veracity of this statement is why I have reservations about describing myself as a "left-winger".


This is one of those comments that sounds best when uttered by the fireside with friends and brandy. Most people have no problem declaring themselves to being left or centre or right without alluding to the extremes. Now, with which group do you feel most comfortable, the tolerant people or the intolerant ones?
#14153577
"We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press. . .we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess." -- Adolf Hitler

“Woman's world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.”― Adolf Hitler
#14155677
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it polite?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’. And there comes a point when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor polite, nor popular, but one must take it because his conscience tells him that it is right.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

"ISN'T MAN AN AMAZING ANIMAL?

He kills wildlife — birds, kangaroos, deer, and all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes — by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative — and fatal — health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases.

Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for 'Peace on Earth.'"

— from Old Mac Donald's Factory Farm by C. David Coats

''People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines…. It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.''
- Voltaire, Traité sur la tolerance

“Farm[ed] animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”
— Jane Goodall

"Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won't be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn't know."
-Dr. Helmut Kaplan

''Waking up to the animal holocaust is deeply painful. Not only are you confronted by the sheer size of it all, 10 billion land animals in the US, 58 billion globally each year, but when you share what you have learned with your friends and family members, who you deeply respect and love, they show indifference at best. You feel like you have come upon a genocide that everyone is trying to hide and ignore. And you can no longer participate. And you can no longer keep quiet. And then you are painted as militant, extreme, judgmental, et al. It is deeply painful on so many levels.''
- Gary Smith

“It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”
— Mark Twain

Sorry, I've been collecting quotes about animals recently.

“People think of education as something they can finish.”
Isaac Asimov

"I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
Ettiene De Grellet

“To forgive and accept injustice is cowardice.”
— Gandhi

“We are terrible animals, I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.”
— Kurt Vonnegut.
#14157350
They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

--Milton Friedman

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

--George Bernard Shaw

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort. (It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.)

--Voltaire

When you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

--Anon

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

--Eric Hoffer

And clearly my children will never get any taller, because there is no statistically-significant difference in their height from one day to the next.

--Andrew Vickers
#14157360
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

- Sir Winston Churchill
#14158762
ThirdTerm wrote:Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

- Sir Winston Churchill


My favorite Churchill quote:

“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived."
#14159272
Yeah, it's an interesting one. In the year this quote apparently comes from (1909), he was a member of the Liberal Party, which at that time seemed somewhat receptive to the ideas of Henry George.
#14159728
Yeah, it's an interesting one. In the year this quote apparently comes from (1909), he was a member of the Liberal Party, which at that time seemed somewhat receptive to the ideas of Henry George.



Yes it certainly doesn't represent his politics of later years.
#14159729
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote:Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred; for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together, and will be always attained by one who abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women. And when he is obliged to take the life of any one, to do so when there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it; but above all he must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed.
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