Maggie's Farm

"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything."

Thomas Sowell, via Dr. Sanity's One Big Fathead

"Some of the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss."

Isaiah Berlin, from Isaiah Berlin, Beyond the Wit at Chronicle. I would have said "does," not "may."

The Dems are the fast road to Socialism and the Republicans are the slow road to Socialism.

Many people say this, but heard most recently from my son and one of my daughters (the Ron Paul one at Kenyon - not the McCain one in NYC). We observed during our drives yesterday, with irony, that the only reason China has been able to slowly, step-wise get rid of Socialism is by having an authoritarian, police-state government. Places like France, England, and Germany will never be able to do that, with so many people sucking on the government teats. They are screwed economically, spiritually, and humanly. Their people with verve and ambition still come to America...for now.

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. … Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the "new, wonderful good society" which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean "more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) h/t, reader.

Hebrews 12: 1-3

¹Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

 ²Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

 ³For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.

Isn't accusing Muslims of homophobia a bit Islamophobic?

Mark Steyn

"The problem with having the Americans as your allies is that you never know when they'll turn around and stab themselves in the back."

Bernard Lewis, as quoted in a David Warren piece on Honduras

"Ask yourself as you start your day, "Are you incorporating God into your plan?".
And if you are, then why are you not incorporating yourself into God's plan?"

via Slower Pace

Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.

Anon. h/t, Old Misery Guts, whose site quote is:

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another's trouble,
COURAGE in your own."

- Adam Lindsay Gordon

"I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money...."

Sherlock Holmes

"If you need to foresee the future, you are doing something badly wrong."

From Stumbing and Mumbling in a piece on the inability of economists and other social scientists to make predictions.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.

Henry Ford

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

H. L. Mencken, quoted at Am Digest

Things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.

Viktor Frankl (h/t, Vanderleun)

Spending on medical treatment is a wonderful thing and a great privilege. People should want to spend more on it. Just check out my dental implants, or read my (stainless steel) left hip. Good stuff, but not cheap - but worth every penny, and only easily available in the good old USA.

The Barrister, in a post here last week: Medical care in Canada "imploding," says top doc - plus a few words about the government Octopus and hallucinations, plus a good word for costly American bionics

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Aldous Huxley (h/t, LGF)

If Harry Reid showed up for a job interview, would you hire him?

Mark Simone, filling in for Mark Levin tonight on the radio.

Always love your country - but never trust your government.

Robert Novak, 1931-2009

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H.L.Mencken (h/t, Am Digest)

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks — drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high.

Mark Steyn, linked here.

'Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit.' 

Anon.
 

This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats.

Samizdata, discussing space flight but applicable to most things

"Universal health care isn't worth our freedom." From Dr. Tom Szasz in the WSJ this morning:

Henry David Thoreau famously remarked, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." Thoreau feared a single, unarmed man approaching him with such a passion in his heart. Too many people now embrace the coercive apparatus of the modern state professing the same design.

and

Our national conversation about curbing the cost of health care is crippled by the vocabulary in which we conduct it. We must stop talking about "health care" as if it were some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it. No government can provide the same high quality body repair services to everyone. Not all doctors are equally good physicians, and not all sick persons are equally good patients.

If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a "compassionate" government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Arthur C. Clarke (h/t, LGF)

Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Charles Krauthammer, via a piece at Classical

Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"; and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile."

1 Corinthians 3:18-20

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Anon.

If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.

F.A. Hayek 

From a Canadian, via Right Wing Prof via SDA:

The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry ‘caste.’ In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either ‘poverty’ or ‘consumerism.’

In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry ‘alienation.’ In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry ‘oppression.’ In a society of boundless private charity, they cry ‘avarice.’ In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the ‘exploitation’ of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry ‘injustice.’

In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like ‘liberty’ in quotation marks when these refer to the West.

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Al Capone, quoted at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in a piece on CaponeCare

The right side of the blogosphere is playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing Kill the Man With the Ball.

Roger de Hauteville, King of Sicily, at Maggie's Farm