Saturday, April 7. 2007
John 15:18-19 "If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love his own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you."
Tuesday, April 3. 2007
There are familiar forms of self-righteousness in which people become so suffused with the virtue of their cause that they cease to care about intellectual honesty. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (h/t, Done with Mirrors)
Monday, April 2. 2007
I never learned from a man who agreed with me. Robert A. Heinlein
Friday, March 30. 2007
20 I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. 21 This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. 22 The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. 23 Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. From his Farewell Address
Thursday, March 29. 2007
It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? George Washington, Farewell Address
"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." Kingsley Amis
Tuesday, March 27. 2007
“Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.” Aristotle "Hope is not a plan." Bird Dog
Monday, March 26. 2007
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind. Eric Hoffer
Friday, March 23. 2007
"That's the problem with moralistic, messianic crusading - people expect you to live up to it." Glenn Reynolds, re Al Gore's refusal to reduce his energy use
Thursday, March 22. 2007
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. Robert A. Heinlein
Wednesday, March 21. 2007
Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy. Robert A. Heinlein
Tuesday, March 20. 2007
"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.” Ayn Rand, as quoted in Atbashian's piece posted yesterday
Monday, March 19. 2007
"They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war- as though the absence of war was the same as peace." Dorothy Thompson (h/t, Flopping Aces)
"From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness." Philip Stott, in a piece at ABC News. Yes, the Flood is engraved in our consciousness, isn't it? Not only in the Bible, but in every fourth old blues song.
Friday, March 16. 2007
“After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." Fred Thompson, early in his Senate career. (H/t, Dinocrat)
Thursday, March 15. 2007
Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. . . . The division would have to be re-made every three years or it would do the communist no good. Mark Twain, as quoted in Mankiw
The mantra that we must upend the health care arrangements and economics of the 85% of us with insurance, polls usually showing 80% satisfaction, in order to subsidize the inflated, undeserving and irresponsible bulk of the uninsured 15% is public policy insanity, driven by the Left’s obsession with enlarging government and bureaucrats’ power over us via a government-run, nationalized health care system. Bruce Kesler, at Democracy Project Yes, that is the pattern. Create a sense of crisis, and then bring in Daddy Government to take over. Same with global warming - same with everything.
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
Maggie's Farm is one of my favorite blogs because they are the only blog that would post an article on rubber boots. A loyal reader. (Appreciate that comment, because 99% of political blather is ephemera. On the other hand, that remaining 1% can really get you. We try to catch that 1%, plus some of the other stuff in life that really matters - like boots, and God, and fishing, etc.)
Saturday, March 10. 2007
"I was in the drawing room, enjoying my dinner," said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote."What!" interrupted Rochebriant; "eating dinner in a drawing-room?" " I must beg you to observe, monsieur," explained the great gastronome, "that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before." h/t, Roger de Hauteville, King of Sicily
Thursday, March 8. 2007
... if there's one thing I've learned in nearly four years of blogging, it's that defeating the logic of an argument does not defeat the argument. Eric at Classical Values
Thursday, March 1. 2007
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance. G.K. Chesterton (h/t, Samizdata)
Wednesday, February 28. 2007
“Drink deep…or taste not,” is a direction full as applicable to Religion, if we would find it a source of pleasure, as it is to knowledge. A little Religion is, it must be confessed, apt to make men gloomy, as a little knowledge to render them vain: hence the unjust imputation often brought upon Religion by those whose degree of Religion is just sufficeint, by condemning their course of conduct, to render them uneasy; enough merely to impair the sweetness of the pleasures of sin, and not enough to compensate for the relinquishment of them by its own peculiar comforts. Thus these men bring up, as it were, an ill report of the land of promise, which, in truth, abounds with whatever, in our journey through life, can best refresh and strengthen us. William Wilberforce (h/t, Middlebrow)
Tuesday, February 27. 2007
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves. Eric Hoffer
Saturday, February 24. 2007
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt, 1783 (h/t, our cousin Mr. Free Market)
Friday, February 23. 2007
The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind. Eric Hoffer
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