Saturday, January 30. 2021
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on stupidity. He compares foolishess with malevolence.
Tuesday, January 26. 2021
"A drill is combat without blood. Combat is a drill with blood."
Tom Clancy
Thursday, January 14. 2021
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Attributed to Confucius
Wednesday, January 6. 2021
"Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."
Jefferson would have shrugged off today, much as he shrugged off Shay's Rebellion and (more or less) supported the Whiskey Rebellion (later repealing that stupid tax). He also supported the French Revolution, not for what happened, but for its original principles.
People can't always be well informed - and certainly with nonsense information spewing from not only the 'mainstream' media but also from myriad other 'sources' like Qanon - we need more than ever to look back through history and put things in perspective both ideologically and historically. Few people remember 1954 and Puerto Rican nationalists shooting up Congress. Today's events may have been wrong and lawless, but they are not at all unusual or necessarily misguided in the larger scheme of US history.
Friday, December 11. 2020
The blame instinct makes us exaggerate the importance of individuals or of particular groups. This instinct to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding of the world: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because one we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere.~Hans Rosling
h/t to Cafe Hayek
Tuesday, November 24. 2020
Image via Moonbattery
Wednesday, November 18. 2020
I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise.
William F. Buckley Jr.
Friday, November 13. 2020
Tuesday, November 10. 2020
Eric Hoffer observed that in America, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He made that observation a half century ago when America was still a country.
Via The Church of Covid at Taki
Tuesday, October 6. 2020
Americans value freedom over safety.
Scott Adams
Saturday, September 12. 2020
Via Instapundit:
“Charges of Imperialism would be more supportable if America regarded the world as a prize to be won rather than a nuisance to be tolerated.”
Wednesday, August 19. 2020
“The earth laughs in flowers.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wednesday, August 5. 2020
"We can tell when it’s politics being talked about for the solution to a current problem is always whatever it was that the person wanted to do anyway."
Tim Worstall
Wednesday, July 29. 2020
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
Ernest Hemingway
Wednesday, July 1. 2020
It's a meme this week:
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
Wednesday, June 10. 2020
"Americans have the constitutional right to instant gratification"
- Somebody, somewhere
Monday, May 25. 2020
"Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation's Capital just beyond, the graves of America's military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these graves ourselves -- with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America's own have ever served and sacrificed. ... Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up, fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its destruction. We know, as have our Nation's defenders down through the years, that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty, justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead, let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country's own."
Ronald Reagan
Friday, May 15. 2020
Two of them (h/t a commenter somewhere):
" If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part."
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
- Richard P. Feynman
Tuesday, April 28. 2020
Via Prof Boudreaux:
Yet creationism in government shows no sign of fading. To this day, despite the resurgence of liberal values that came after the Second World War, and especially after the Cold War, the knee-jerk assumption on the part of much of the intelligentsia is still based on planning rather than evolutionary unfolding. Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
Thursday, April 9. 2020
"The problem with students straight out of high school is that they believe everything you tell them. The problem with students coming later to college, after they have done something else, is that they don't believe anything you tell them."
Some college prof, via AVI's What You See
Monday, February 10. 2020
In campaigns, Democrats tend to focus on fear and jealousy, Republicans tend to focus on freedom and efficiency.
Scott Adams
Tuesday, January 14. 2020
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures, and otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”
Advice from Harold Bloom, shortly before his recent death
Monday, January 13. 2020
"For real people, if something works in theory, but not in practice, it doesn't work. For academics, if something works in practice, but not in theory, it doesn't exist."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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