Maggie's Farm

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”

- TS Eliot

More TS Eliot quotes here.

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

- Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

- Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

- The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of."

H.L. Mencken (h/t Marginal Rev)

    Knowing others is wisdom;
    Knowing the self is enlightenment.
    Mastering others requires force;
    Mastering the self requires strength;
    He who knows he has enough is rich.
    Perseverance is a sign of will power.
    He who stays where he is endures.
    To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

Tao Te Ching, (chap. 33, tr. Feng and English) 

"I trust the businessman only when he’s out to make money – because then he’s going to want to do things my way.  When he’s out to do me good, he is going to do it his way."

Benjamin Rogge, via Cafe Hayek

"I've just found out I'm back in Trudeaupia, where they're normalizing insanity. I think I'll get out before they make it compulsory."

Kate, in Canada at Small Dead Animals.  Also, see her When A Clinton Does It, That Means That It's Not Illegal

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

G K Chesterton,  as quoted in Warren's On the need to remain cheerful. Warren's short essay reminded me a bit of Kipling's eternal IF:

If you can keep your head when all about you  
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;  
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;  
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,  
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes (of all people) as quoted at Zero Hedge's "We Are At A Point Where The Encroachment Of Government Power Has Historically Resulted In Rebellion"

"The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them." 

- Glenn Reynolds

"When you're explaining, you're losing."

That expression has been going around a lot lately, especially applied to Mr. Trump.  Corollaries might be "If you're complaining, you're losing" and "If you're making excuses, you're losing."

People thought he would be a fiery antagonist, but his aim is terrible. Hillary is a sitting duck, for 100 reasons.

"Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed."

Thomas Sowell, via Carpe

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. 

From The Mourning Bride by William Congreve (1670-1729)

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

Theodore Dalrymple