Maggie's Farm

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. And root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, (1854)

"Worrying about how to live makes me want to die. I want to be a tree."

Buddy Larson, one of our many wise commenters and an oak of a fellow

"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it."

"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

It can be said, with some justice, that libertarians apply only one measure to every issue. But what a sublime yardstick it is. Libertarians ask, about each thing they encounter in public life, “Does this promote the liberty, responsibility, and dignity of the individual?” Libertarianism can have political implications, but politics is, by definition, mass action. And libertarians don’t believe in the masses. They believe in the individuals huddled in those masses. A pure libertarian is opposed to politics down to the soles of his shoes (or, libertarians being libertarians, down to the bottom of his sandals worn with socks). Libertarianism is contra-political, an emetic dose to be given to politics.

P.J. O'Rourke, here

From the other side, Progressivism and the authoritarian impulse. About that, McQuain comments:

This is the real problem we face in America. Jeff G. calls it “un-American”. In the strictest sense of the word and given the fact that it rejects everything our founders believed in – I agree.

"Making money is art, working is art, and good business is the best art."

Andy Warhol (a well-known marketing genius)

"People have a great misconception in this way, they think way they solve things by electing the right people. It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve them. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things!"

Milton Friedman

"In love as in politics, there's Mr. Right and there's Mr. Right Now...and, of course, Mr. Right never exists."

Monica Crowley, my secret girlfriend, on the radio today

The case for rewarding performance is that we can do it, not that it is the same as rewarding merit. Likewise, holding individuals personally responsible for the consequences of their own actions is a social expedient for prospective control, not a cosmic retrospective moral judgment.

Thomas Sowell, via Cafe Hayek

"You’ve got great values, which, unfortunately, generate their own kind of unhappiness."

Dr. Lastname, in Impossible Parents

"God has all the essential characteristics of what we mean by a “person,” in particular conscious awareness, the ability to recognize and the ability to love. In that sense he is someone who can speak and who can listen. That, I think, is what is essential about God. Nature can be marvelous. The starry heaven is stupendous. But my reaction to that remains no more than an impersonal wonder, because that, in the end, means that I am myself no more than a tiny part of an enormous machine. The real God, however, is more than that. He is not just nature, but the One who came before it and who sustains it. And the whole of God, so faith tells us, is the act of relating. That is what we mean when we say that he is a Trinity, that he is threefold. Because he is in himself a complex of relationships, he can also make other beings who are grounded in relationships and who may relate to him, because he has related them to himself."

Pope Benedict XVI, (from God and the World), via Anchoress

..."taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Alexis de Toqueville, 1830, quoted here yesterday. Soft tyranny is always for your own good, of course, because you are an idiot and they are smart. Either that, or "for the children."

 "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."

(The first) Governor Cuomo. Somebody tell Mitt Romney.

One thing I have continually imprinted on my boys is the need to speak clearly and with authority.

Our Farmer Bulldog, in a comment here.

"My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.”

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”

Lord Acton