Saturday, March 14. 2009
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
G.K. Chesterton (h/t, Dr. Bob)
Wednesday, March 11. 2009
Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?
Jesse Helms in 1959, as quoted at The Foundry
Tuesday, March 10. 2009
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.
William Faulkner - The Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, quoted in Vanderleun's piece which we linked yesterday.
Wednesday, March 4. 2009
“Deepen, exacerbate existing problems, crises, differences, and if they don’t exist, create them or convincingly claim that they exist, and then deepen, exacerbate them...and profit the most from them in any way you can, and, in the resulting chaos, blame our enemies for the whole thing.” -
Vladimir Ilich Ulianov (Lenin) - Thanks, reader.
Wednesday, February 25. 2009
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
William Burroughs, as quoted at Driscoll (nb: a QQQ doesn't mean we agree with it)
Saturday, February 21. 2009
The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.
The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.
David Brooks
Friday, February 20. 2009
If you watch the movie `Jaws’ backwards, it’s a movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach.
h/t, Bits and Pieces
Thursday, February 19. 2009
I have grown cynical since 1979 when I found myself in Washington as a 24 year old sprite, agog at the majesty and towering historical figures with whom I was rubbing shoulders. But the reverence I had for politicians and our system of government back then was misplaced. I see now that the stately buildings, the stirring rhetoric, the passion, the belief in ideas was a mirage, a beautiful facade behind which was the crumbling, rotten ruins of 200 years of hopes, aspirations and bloody sacrifce made irrelevant by hard-eyed, cynical men who exploited people like me and what I believed for their own gain. By the time I left Washington 6 years later, I had been disabused of my boyish naivete, having seen the grubby underside of politics and governing as well as the grasping, conniving nature of so many who wield power, ideally to benefit the people but instead, to protect and enrich a wealthy elite. The education of Rick Moran was complete.
Rick Moran
Tuesday, February 17. 2009
"He's the most unselfish person I've ever met."
Brianna Kelliher of her boyfriend, Lance Cpl. Kenneth Preach, mortally wounded in Afghanistan
Monday, February 16. 2009
Today we remember the Virginian George Washington, but, since it is now called "Presidents Day," why not remember this fine Vermonter too:
"The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act of resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil."
Calvin Coolidge
Photo: Coolidge in 1930 at his home in Northampton, MA with his dogs, Tiny Tim and Rob roy.
Wednesday, February 11. 2009
"Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima, Baghdad ain't shit."
Major General John F. Kelly to a reporter who asked him if he ever contemplated defeat (h/t, Blackfive)
Friday, February 6. 2009
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
Alexis de Toqueville (h/t, Viking)
Thursday, February 5. 2009
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain (h/t, Dr. X)
Friday, January 30. 2009
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is a force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
George Washington, via this TCS essay
The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.
Maggie Thatcher (h/t, New England Repub). Or you can put it on the nation's credit card...and let the Saudis and Chinese own our debt. Own us.
Thursday, January 29. 2009
"People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses. The reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses. They are just as stupid as the rest of us."
Vaksel, via Overcoming Bias
Wednesday, January 28. 2009
...it seems that the model we are following is this one: government and lobbyists use regulation and innovation to stop the market from innovating; government and lobbyists perceive need for that market innovation; government pays market to implement innovation by paying costs of regulation and litigation from taxpayer funds; government and lobbyists finally say the market has failed and only government can provide genuine progress.
Quoted at Tiger
Monday, January 26. 2009
The politics of campaigning are so simple: I’m going to beat you and leave you dead in a snowbank in New Hampshire and never look back.
Lawrence O'Donnell, via our Caroline link this morning. He goes on to say in the New Yorker piece:
But in the Senate you can be trying to prevail over another senator on Tuesday afternoon whose vote you know you’re going to need on Wednesday afternoon for something else. The ordinary work of the Senate never involves fighting. Virtually all the people who run for Senate seats lie and say they’re going to fight, but what they’re actually going to do—which they may not know when they go to Washington for the first time—is beg. And beg people like me, whom they’ve never heard of, the staff director of this or that committee, before they ever get to meet the chairman. So the personal qualities necessary for Senate work are politeness and charm and graciousness and generosity, which New York tabloids have no comprehension of. Why should they? The press is never allowed in the rooms where governance actually takes place.
Saturday, January 24. 2009
“If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now?”
Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in an Alex Massie piece Progressive Libertarians.
Thursday, January 15. 2009
Never use a wine for cooking or marinating that you would not be very happy to drink in a glass.
Dr. Joy Bliss
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
"When I get out of here, I am getting off the stage. I have had my time in the Klieg lights."
George Bush. God bless him. I still don't think he ever really wanted or enjoyed the job and the power and visibility all that much. I think he took it on as a duty while his personal core lay elsewhere - with God, family and pals, and his ranch - which I think is entirely to his credit. No grandiosity or narcissism at all in him, as befits his Yankee heritage, which is why he's always been a half-hearted pol: he is a man, not a political pimp. A kind, caring, self-deprecating man with a great sense of humor, plenty of humility and plenty of balls - and plenty of good AA under his belt. Some of us have met the guy, and agree. But go ahead and argue with that if you want to.
Tuesday, January 13. 2009
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain (via LGF)
Friday, January 9. 2009
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Rev. William Boetcker, 1873 - 1962
Tuesday, January 6. 2009
God wants to be the one in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).
Saturday, January 3. 2009
Our post about Office Romance: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar prompted this little bit of research. Freud on smoking: "[Cigars have] served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life...I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control." Another: "My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you." Via Cigar Aficionado
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