A "pacificistic male" is a contradiction in terms. Most self-described "pacifists" are not pacific; they simply assume false colours. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger.
Robert A. Heinlein
Pacifism is simply undisguised cowardice.
Adolf Hitler
The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.
Bill Mauldin
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me."
George Orwell
The issue is not sexual attraction; it is sexual action. A healthy 20-year-old male with heterosexual interests is likely to be powerfully attracted to every halfway pretty woman he sees. This does not mean that he has, or attempts to have, sexual congress with these women, especially against their will. The entire psychiatric literature on what used to be called "sexual perversions" is permeated by the unfounded idea — always implied, sometimes asserted — that "abnormal" sexual impulses are harder to resist than "normal" ones.
Thomas Szasz
I don't have a pager of any sort; I am simply not that important. No one ever needs to reach me immediately. But if I had one, I'm not sure I'd want one that vibrated; it would be like having a convulsing hamster in your pocket. No, I want the model that plunges a small needle into your thigh instead of beeping or shaking. The caller is informed that completion of the call will result in a needle shooting into my leg: if you want to continue, press 1. Most people would not press 1. So if the pager does sting me, I'll know it's important, and if not, I can shout — in the movie theater, of course — "you jabbed a hot needle in my leg for THAT?" I'd have the upper hand in that conversation, to be sure.
James Lileks
This has been a test of the Emergency Screaming System. This was only a test. Had this been an actual emergency, the scream you just heard would have been followed by more like it, and louder.
Steve Jackson
Some people glibly toss off the phrase "panic attack" to indicate overwhelming twitchyness, but anyone who's had the real thing knows it's a corker. A real four-alarm delight, with all sorts of peculiar chemicals firing down your brain stem like a roman candle held in a bucket of gasoline.
James Lileks
There is no one as paranoid as an unpublished poet.
Theodore Dalrymple
Nothing unnerves the far, far fringe like the One-Worlders — a dark cabal composed of Masons, Jewish bankers, gay Greenpeace activists and a million cloned Janet Renos to enforce authority. If this unholy group has its way, we'll all shuffle around in beige jumpsuits with tracking implants in our necks, paying for gruel with tin euros, driving rickshaws to our jobs in the Black Helicopter factories.
James Lileks
[W]e live in an era of non-contiguous information streams. I believe one thing; someone else believes another — and the bedrock assumptions are utterly contradictory. This is what drives me nuts about discussing current events with some people. It's like discussing the Apollo program with people who think it was all faked, or discussing archeology with those who believe the world is six thousand years old. I think the Iraq Campaign was part of a broad war against Islamicist fascism and the states that enable it; others think it's all about oil and Halliburton jerking the strings of a Jeebus puppet. No. Middle. Ground.
James Lileks
[E]verybody knows somebody who knows somebody who . . . (etc.), and it's the easiest job in the world to ink-in those pencilled lines; to speculate tha the surprisingly few handshakes that separate the obscure from the famous are all funny handshakes. . .
Ken Macleod
Do not meddle in the affairs of paranoids, for we are heavily armed and have no sense of humour.
Eric Oppen
[R]ealize this: if your worldview requires all sorts of secret kingdoms, unknowable motives, and unseen forces moving behind the veil of normal human experience, then you have taken yourself from the realm of a free citizen responsible for his own destiny and that of his nation, to a frightened caveman quivering in fear of distant Thunder Gods: immobilized, helpless and in a state of abject surrender. You have thrown away the hard work of millions and millions of your fellow human beings who have worked and studied their entire lives to raise you from those very depths.
Shame on you.
Bill Whittle
No one's much interested in talking policy these days, for the same reason that so little policy is being made: The civil war that has broken out within the Liberal party among the various leadership contenders. Paralysis has set in, as the conventions of Cabinet solidarity are discarded for the pleasures of petty intrigue. It's all who slagged who, which minister contradicted which other minister, and whose pet policy just got knifed in the alley. This isn't a government. It's the palace of the Borgias.
Andrew Coyne
Nobody can compel me to be happy in his own way. Paternalism is the greatest despotism.
Immanuel Kant
Patience (n): A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce
Beware the wrath of a patient man.
John Dryden
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
Abraham Lincoln
Patriotism (n): Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Ambrose Bierce
Patriot (n): One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Ambrose Bierce
Immigrant (n): An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.
Ambrose Bierce
Flag (n): A coloured rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships. It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees on vacant lots in London "Rubbish may be shot here."
Ambrose Bierce
Patriotism: Serving something greater than yourself.
George W. Bush
When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Winston S. Churchill
Human nature changes slowly. The modern world seeks to pursuade us that we are better off without nationalism, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", but, in our hearts, we reject this, and when the opportunity arises, we cheer for our own side.
W.F. Deedes
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What makes a country great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Pensioner: A kept patriot.
H.L. Mencken
Patriotism, though it is based upon the natural and indeed instinctive love of home, has been elevated in the modern world into an unparalleled congeries of imbecilities. What it demands of the individual citizen, as a practical matter, is that he yield not only his judgement but also his property and even his life to whatever gang of scheming politicians happen to be in power. The essence of his virtue as a patriot is that he ask no questions, once the band is set to playing.
H.L. Mencken
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
H.L. Mencken
Samuel Johnson's saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has some truth in it, but not nearly enough. Patriotism, in truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels, and its annual output is probably greater than that of even religion. Its chief glories are the demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels and false history. Its philosophy rests firmly on the doctrine that the end justifies the means — that any blow, whether above or below the belt, is fair against dissenters from its wholesale denial of plain facts.
H.L. Mencken
The worth of the State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals comprising it.
John Stuart Mill
To mind your own business and do the square thing with your neighbors is an extremely high order of patriotism. If every man were to do this, flags, governments, powers, dominations and thrones might all take and indefinite vacation.
Puck
I'm not a demonstrative patriot; I don't believe in putting God in the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance. I don't believe in making people pledge at all — there's something collectivist about it.
Ron Rosenbaum
It is right to prefer one's own country to others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
George Santayana
Patriotism: Your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
Mark Twain
Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
Bill Vaughan
Guard against the postures of pretended patriotism.
George Washington
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.
Malcolm X
Those who beat their swords into plowshares, often do the plowing for those who did not.
Anonymous
Bella suscipienda sunt ob eum causum, ut sine injuria in pace vivatur. (Wars are to be undertaken in order that it may be possible to live in peace without molestation.)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
It must be obvious, therefore, that periods of tranquillity are rich sources of friction between soldiers and statesmen, since the latter are forever trying to find ways of saving money, while the former are constantly urging increased expenditure. It does, of course, occasionally happen that the lesson recently learned, or an immediate threat, compels them to agree.
Charles de Gaulle
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
We believe that the maintenance of an overwhelming superiority of force on the side of peace is the best guarantee today of the maintenance of peace.
Lester B. Pearson
Peace is the name of the ideal we have deduced from the fact that there have been pauses between wars.
Jerry E. Pournelle
Eternal peace lasts until the next war.
Russian Proverb
If we have to have an incoherent, self-loathing "peace" movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it's gonna get.
Mark Steyn
It is only with the heart that one can see truly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is . . . the higher acheivement.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Perfection is the exclusive attribute of God, and it is indescribable, untranslatable. I do believe that it is possible for human beings to become perfect. It is necessary for all of us to aspire after that perfection but when that blessed state is attained, it becomes indescribable, indefinable.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefullly enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.
Anne Lamott
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Perspective Theory (aka Ice Ball Theory): Against the backdrop of an ageless universe, everyday problems have little significance. For best results, just hang loose and enjoy the challenge of solving them.
Robert J. Ringer
If you're feeling good, don't worry, you'll get over it.
Anonymous
No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.
Charlie Brown
Things are going to get worse before they get a lot worse.
Herb Caen
Always borrow money from a pessimist. They don't expect to be repaid.
Sharon Croke
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then give up. No use being a damned fool about it.
W.C. Fields
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Helen Keller
In most cases the light at the end of the tunnel is just the headlight of an oncoming train.
Craig Werner
If DDT were 100 percent safe, it would be the only 100 percent safe thing on the planet.
Thomas Sowell
Esoteric (adj): Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.
Ambrose Bierce
Gnostics (n): A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.
Ambrose Bierce
Material (adj): Having an actual existence, as distinguished from an imaginary one. Important.
Ambrose Bierce
Nihilist (n): A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoy. The leader of the school is Tolstoy.
Ambrose Bierce
Peripatetic (adj): Walking about. Relating to the philosophy of Aristotle, who, while expounding it, moved from place to place in order to avoid his pupil's objections. A needless precaution they knew no more of the matter than he.
Ambrose Bierce
Philosophy (n): A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Ambrose Bierce
Innate (adj): Natural, inherent as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have given it "a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilization, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.
Ambrose Bierce
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Will Durant
[I]f we now object to the view of Plato and Aristotle, it may be because we have lost empathy with the horny-handed farmer himself and his cargo of self-reliance, hard work, and a peculiar distrust of rich and poor alike.
Victor Davis Hanson
Never say never. Absolutes are almost always false.
Robert A. Heinlein
The only department of so-called philosophy that shows any general utility is epistemology — the study of the nature of knowledge, and the means of attaining it. All the rest is mere logic-chopping, and as lacking in genuine significance as a series of college yells.
H.L. Mencken
The Philosopher's Drinking Song
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable. Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'bout the raisin' of the wrist. Socrates himself was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Plato, they say, could stick it away, 'alf a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, and Hobbes was fond of his Dram. And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Monty Python
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Oscar Wilde
The laws of physics, as we understand them, are statistical laws. They have a lot to do with the natural tendency of things to go over into disorder.
Anonymous
Freebooter (n): A conqueror in a small way of business, whose annexations lack the sanctifying merit of magnitude.
Ambrose Bierce
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken
Pity (n.): A failing sense of exemption, inspired by contrast.
Ambrose Bierce
Plan (vt): To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.
Ambrose Bierce
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Burn your bridges only if you can walk on water.
Ed Gregory
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago — the second best time is now.
K'ang Fu-tze
In early 1996, about a year into the Republican takeover of Congress, I met with a Capitol Hill insider who tried to explain what had gone wrong, not just tactically but ideologically, with Newt Gingrich's "revolution". The problem, he said, was that most members of Congress — "revolutionary" Republicans included — couldn't really imagine life without central, presumably governmental, direction. "They're good conservatives, so they want to reduce government," he said. "But they think of that as getting as close to the abyss as possible without falling off."
Virginia Postrel
In their quest for efficiency and expertise, technocrats too assume a sort of omnicompetence. Although they may draw on "the best experts," they presume that someone in charge can assimilate all relevant information. They issue prescriptions that depend on their own imagined "topsight" — the notion that everything important can be seen from above.
Virginia Postrel
We are not ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur
Dan Quayle
Sure Theory: There's only one way to make sure that your plans are carried out: Take matters into your own hands and don't expect any help from anyone.
Robert J. Ringer
You need to choose the right time and place to do battle. . . . You need to be confident of your battle tactics, know when to attack, when to withdraw, and how to conserve ammunition.
Arnold Schwarzeneggar
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
Seneca
We have become accustomed to the idea that a natural system like the human body or an ecosystem regulates itself. To explain the regulation, we look for feedback loops rather than a central planning and directing body. But somehow our intuitions about self-regulation without central direction do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society. I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief always expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvellously patterned systems that had mostly just "grown" in respons to myriads of individual decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose fiat it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as "naturally" as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer!
Herbert Simon
What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials.
Thomas Sowell
And, of course, there is the truck factor. When choosing less satisfaction in the present in trade for more satisfaction in the future, you always need to factor in the possibility of being run over by a truck before the future arrives.
Janet Valade
Crash programs . . . fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
Werner von Braun
Do not take the first step without considering the last.
Karl von Clausewitz
Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Asgoths of Crea. During a recitation by their poetmaster Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging and the president of the mid-galactic Arts Knobbling Council survived only by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.
Douglas Adams
Humanity (n): The human race, collectively, exclusive of the anthropoid poets.
Ambrose Bierce
Writing a poem With seventeen syllables Is very diffi
James Bryant
A poem is never finished, it is given up in despair.
John Ciardi
For the vast majority, writing poetry is like chicken pox: once you've gone through it, you're immune for life. But, like the chicken pox virus, which can lie dormant in the body to erupt again in the form of shingles several decades later, usually at a time of bodily or mental stress, so the poetic muse can revive in exceptional circumstances — such as incarceration. The medical records of a significant minority of prisoners contain copies of poems they have written while in jail.
Theodore Dalrymple
The English are a nation of poets. I am not speaking now of Keats or of Milton but of millions of my contemporaries. Surveys have established that three-quarters of the English now living have written poetry at some time, usually during adolescence. The same surveys have established that (increasingly) the English can hardly read, cannot spell or do arithmetic, and know nothing of their own history; but they do not let mere ignorance get in the way of self-expression.
Theodore Dalrymple
People say there's no money in poetry, but on the other hand there's no poetry in money.
Robert Graves
While I'm on the subject, haikus are stupid, too. They don't rhyme, they have no punchline, and they feed into that whole Zen/Tai Chi/Tofu/Chakra/Acupressure racket that threatens to turn the world into Venice Beach. It's all horse manure. There is no such thing as "chi." "Chicharrones," definitely. Also "Cheetos." But not "chi." And Zen was invented by a marketing firm in San Luis Obispo. Want to hear the sound of one hand clapping? Come here and I'll slap your face.
Steve H.
First they came for the poets, and I not only said nothing, I gave them directions to Rod McKuen's house. I can't stand that guy's work.
James Lileks
Laura Bush canceled a White House poetry event upon learning that some invited guests planned to use the podium to denounce the administration. The disinvited poets have struck back with their most fearsome weapon — a Web site of anti-war poetry.
Visit www.poetsagainstthewar.org and you'll find poetry by the cubic ton. Five thousand poems; one or two ideas. It's poetry in the modern sense — namely, arbitrary line breaks, apocalyptic shrieking, hysterical metaphors and unmediated shouts from the sweaty id. If poets are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it's time for term limits.
James Lileks
A pig's eye view of literature
Byron and Shelley and Keats Were a trio of lyrical treats. The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls, And Keats never was a descendant of earls, And Byron walked out with a number of girls, But it didn't impair the poetical feats Of Byron and Shelley, Of Byron and Shelley, Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
Dorothy Parker
Polish is essentially a light form of Russian that even Germans can master.
Jay Bowks
Polish is essentially Russian spoken by a Frenchman.
Daniel von Brighoff
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Sir Robert Peel
My parents were decent people, and I was raised, like my friends, to believe that Police were our friends and protectors — the Badge was a symbol of extremely high authority, perhaps the highest of all. Nobody ever asked why. It was one of those unnatural questions that are better left alone. If you had to ask that, you were sure as hell Guilty of something and probably should have been put behind bars a long time ago. It was a no-win situation.
Hunter S. Thompson
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
Winston S. Churchill
That's one of the reasons I like living here. When you confront the government, you're not always met with a glacial wall of indifference. Maybe I'm just on a lucky streak — the last several times I've had to deal with anyone behind a desk, be it the rental car agency, the car-repair garage, the mortgage closer, various receptionists and clerks, I've been treated with brisk friendly efficiency. Even the gas station clerk who gave me the Powerball ticket said "good luck!" Yes, yes, it's all a mask, a facade, a way of hiding the deep & malignant parochialism and passive-aggressiveness that lurks at the heart of the Minnesota soul, but I'll take a cheerful civic lie over bald flat prominent disinterest any time. They're necessary falsehoods, and civilization depends on them. Who believes that hypocrisy is somehow the greatest sin of all? Adolescents. Which ought to tell you something.
James Lileks
[O]ur universities [are] so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony.
John Perry Barlow
Besides snobbery, there is a worse reason for being more outraged by western vulgarity than non-western murderousness. It might be called moral obtuseness, or even moral racism. The assumption appears to be that Africans or Asians can't be held to our own elevated standards. They are more like wild animals, whose savagery should not be provoked by our foolishness. When we do provoke them, the consequences are entirely our fault. It would be as misplaced to apply our moral standards to their behaviour, as it would be to expect tigers to talk. The murder of Nigerians or Indian Muslims, or Iraqi Kurds, is par for the course, unless we did it, or Americans, or Israelis.
Ian Buruma
Doublethink — the ability to hold two contradictory ideas and assent to both — is with us, too, and will remain so as long as we have large bureaucracies that claim to act for our own good while pursuing their own institutional interests. And what is political correctness but Newspeak, the attempt to make certain thoughts inexpressible through the reform of language?
Theodore Dalrymple
[P]olitical correctness [does] violence [. . .] to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. [. . .] without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.
Theodore Dalrymple
I think the post-modernist lit-crit left has redefined "success", and it's come back to trap them.
In many academic settings now, the true test of value of some assertion is no longer based on utility, or quality, or correctness, or even consistency. The value is viewed as being proportional to the sincerity with which it was created or embraced, especially if by someone who is not "majority" (read "white male").
That's why you have the almost ludicrous situation where everyone's opinions are supposed to be accepted and given credence solely because they're sincerely held by someone else. "Acceptance" and "sensitivity" are paramount, and any attempt to point out that a given opinion can be demonstrated empirically to be wrong is a form of censorship. After all, empirical reality is a myth; truth is socially constructed; and you're a boor for trying to crush the person's spirit by pointing out that their assertion can be directly disproved. Away to the sensitivity-training gulag with you!
Steven Den Beste
These new Jacobins are powered by a genuine faith that they are working for an undeniable good — creating and sustaining true equality on campus by eradicating speech that makes minorities, women, and gays feel unwanted. Convinced that they are occupying the moral high ground, they see their opponents as using free speech as a cover for their own racism, sexism, or disgraceful indifference.
Nat Hentoff
Discontent: the sign of a Serious Person. If you're Deep and Real and Concerned with the way things are, you're pissed off. Unless you're angry about taxes, race-based government policies and the inefficiencies of the public education system, in which case you are an Angry White Male who has to pick gravel out of your knuckles every night. Remember: the Right is full of people who are Resentful and Angry, but the Left is Pissed and Discontented, which is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.
James Lileks
An automatic hush of respect falls over a discussion whenever someone declares herself to be a victim. I know. I was severely beaten by a boyfriend and my victimization — if announced — makes me an incontrovertible expert on domestic violence. Only it doesn't. Being on the wrong end of a hurled fist doesn't make me an expert on anything except how much it hurts. I know no more about domestic violence — and arguably less — than the woman who chose to walk out at the first signs of physical abuse. Society's canonization of suffering is unhealthy and bizarre.
Wendy McElroy
The politically correct arrogantly expropriate "the truth" and deny the possibility of honest disagreement. To them it is a given: anyone who dissents does so because of ill motives — e.g. economic greed, patriarchal power-lust, racism. To the PC, society is a battleground on which classes of people representing good and evil conflict: black versus white, female versus male, Western culture versus the "emerging nations." The coin of the realm is collective victimhood, not individual responsibility.
Wendy McElroy
What does "the Personal is Political" mean? The theory underlying the motto is that all actions and attitudes, however personal they may seem, have political significance and impact society. Therefore, almost in self-defense, society should encourage proper actions and attitudes; it should discourage improper ones by force of law if necessary. This is the stripped-down core of political correctness.
Wendy McElroy
What could be more steadily mirth-provoking than the endless battle of the Puritans to make . . . joy unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the sidelines than any or all of the joys that it combats.
H.L. Mencken
I live and work in northern California. Now and then I try to remember how I ended up here, but it's all just too depressing. I work in a no-smoking, multi-ethnic office that's so gosh-darn correct a girlie tool calendar would spontaneously combust if it were ever so foolish as to pass through the door. I'm from Detroit, ma'am. My idea of a mixed drink is ice in my whiskey, and my closet doesn't contain designer anything. I'm so obviously the token angry white guy that just showing up for work regularly is an act of social aggression.
Joel Simon
PC [Political Correctness] advocates have strict rules for what they call Hate Speech, and using such speech essentially makes you a criminal. [. . .] Implicit in this belief is that I have the power to harm you by my use of language. Notice that all the responsibility falls on the speaker; the listener, the subject, is completely powerless, and has achieved the highest status with the group: victim. Note also that this worshipping of the victim, is in essence, the elevation of the most powerless and the least responsible to divine status. It is a very basic sleight of hand, that allows the controlling elites to maintain that they are only trying to help the poor and downtrodden, when in reality their actions are clearly nothing more than a naked grab for power that would shame the most ruthless corporate CEO.
Bill Whittle
In other words, if this is "another Whitewater," it's a bipartisan one: In Monica terms, it's as if, in between oral sex with the president, she was squeezing in bondage sessions with Newt Gingrich and rounding out the day lap dancing with Strom Thurmond.
Mark Steyn
If pro is the opposite of con, then what is the opposite of progress?
Anonymous
If you expected it to be easy, you should have become a politician.
Anonymous
Figures lie — and politicians figure.
Anonymous
Automatic Gain Control: Wage and Price regulations.
Anonymous
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
Anonymous
The Prime Minister can count on the support of all government MPs who entertain hopes of promotion or fears of dismissal. These amount to 90%. The other 10% are dangerous.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Prime Minister is off drumming up votes in marginal constituencies. But since he calls it "Prime Ministerial visits to schools and hospitals" he is able to use government staff and travel in a government car.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The higher the level of office, the higher the level of paranoia.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Prime Minister says he does not want to multiply the divisions in the Cabinet. However, if you multiply divisions you get back to where you started.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
One of the principal political skills is making bad news sound like good news.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The purpose of Cabinet minutes is not to record the discussion; it is to choose from a jumble of ill-digested ideas, incoherently expressed, a version that presents the Prime Minister's views as he would, on reflection, have liked them to emerge.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Secrecy is vital to politicians. Without it they would have to spend their whole time explaining the inexplicable, justifying the unjustifiable, and defending the indefensible.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
When the government does something popular, all the Cabinet leak the fact that it was their idea. When it does something unpopular, they all leak that they opposed it. This is known as the principle of Collective Irresponsibility.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Prime Minister was wondering whether to tell the Cabinet the truth, or to tell them what he told the House of Commons. I advised him to treat his Cabinet colleagues as he would expect them to treat him. So he is telling them what he told the House of Commons.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "The government will not put the security of the nation at risk by penny-pinching and false economies!" Translation: "We have failed to get the Ministry of Defence to make any cuts."
Sir Humphrey Appleby
First rule of politics: As soon as you see you're in a hole, stop digging.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
A cassette recorder is a Prime Minister's best friend, since it performs the two functions he values above all others: it listens to him uncritically for as long as he cares to talk, and then it repeats his own ideas back to him word for word.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Chief Whip will never dare to assure the Prime Minister that there is no plot against him, because there probably will be soon.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
If God had intended politicians to think, He would have given them brains.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Loyalty in a Cabinet Minister simply means that his fear of losing his job is stronger than his hope of pinching the Prime Minister's.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
MPs should be breathalysed before being allowed to speak in the House. Then hardly any debates would go on past 10 p.m..
Sir Humphrey Appleby
To a politician, the truth is not what happened: it is the most favourable explanation of what happened that cannot be disproved by publicly available facts.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Politicians can bear any number of crosses so long as they are in the right box on the ballot paper.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The politician's syllogism: Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
If any proposal will not stand up to expert scrutiny, mark it "For the Prime Minister's Eyes Only." That clinches it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
If a politician wants to get into the Cabinet he should learn how to speak. If he wants to stay in the Cabinet he should learn how to keep his mouth shut.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "Compassion" — the indiscriminate buying of votes with other people's money.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "We must build a better world for our children and our children's children." Translation: "There is no prospect of improvement in our lifetime."
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "We're spending more than ever to make our Health Service the best in the world." Translation: "Costs are totally out of control."
Sir Humphrey Appleby
In politics, gratitude is merely a lively expectation of favours to come.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Most ministers' ideas can be squashed by discrediting the facts they are based on. But if they are political ideas, facts don't come into it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
Plots against Prime Ministers are rare, but not as rare as Prime Ministers not paranoid enough to believe any rumour that they are being plotted against.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The papers are saying the Prime Minister cannot ignore facts. This is nonsense. If he cannot ignore facts he has no business being in politics.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
No Prime Minister will ever reform the electoral system. You do not kick away the ladder that got you where you are. Especially while you're still standing on it.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "We shall make the attack on rising prices our top priority." Translation: "We have let inflation get completely out of control."
Sir Humphrey Appleby
The Language of Politics: "Both sides of industry must strive to work together for the good of the country." Translation: "We're in this mess because of greedy unions and spineless managers."
Sir Humphrey Appleby
[Visiting Washington is] like going to Mars. When you come back out no one is talking about any of the things the people in Washington are talking about.
If we're spending $853 trillion on some program now, and next year we spend any less, that's "budget-cutting" to them. For them, the question is always, "What kind of government intervention should we impose on the world?" They never think that maybe we shouldn't.
It gives me a real advantage as a humorist because I get credit for having insight and understanding — and I don't. I don't have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it' s stupid — which is the one perspective that's almost completely lacking in Washington.
Dave Barry
With the federal deficit running at several hundred billion dollars per year, Congress passed a transportation bill that, according to news reports, includes $30 million for a 'hightech' moving sidewalk in Altoona, which happens to be in the district of Rep. 'Bud' Shuster, the ranking Republican on the surface transportation subcommittee.
I don't know about you, but as a taxpayer, I am outraged to discover that, in this day and age, Altoona residents are still being forced to walk around on regular low-tech stationary sidewalks. I'm thinking of maybe organizing a group of us to go there and carry Altoonans on our backs until they get their new sidewalk. I'm also thinking that maybe we should donate an additional $10 million or so to build them a high-tech computerized Spit Launcher that will fire laser-guided gobs onto the moving sidewalk, so the Altoonans won't have to do this manually. "What have I done today to help keep 'Bud' Shuster in Congress?" is a question we all need to ask ourselves more often.
Dave Barry
Recount (n): In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to the player against whom they are loaded.
Ambrose Bierce
Politics (n): A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
Conservative (n): A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wants to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
Pandemonium (n): Literally, the Place of All Demons. Most of them have escaped into politics and finance, and the place is now used as a lecture hall by the Audible Reformer. When disturbed by his voice the ancient echoes clamour appropriate responses most gratifying to his pride of distinction.
Ambrose Bierce
Nominee (n): A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honourable obscurity of public office.
Ambrose Bierce
Politician (n): An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.
Ambrose Bierce
Nepotism (n): Appointing your grandmother to office for the good of the party.
Ambrose Bierce
Flop (v): Suddenly to change one's opinions and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.
Ambrose Bierce
Arena (n): In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
Ambrose Bierce
Representative (n): In national politics, a member of the Lower House in this world, and without a discernable hope of promotion in the next.
Ambrose Bierce
Rostrum (n): In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In American, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue, and power of the rabble.
Ambrose Bierce
Honourable (adj): Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies it is customary to mention all members as honourable; as, "the honourable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
Ambrose Bierce
Multitude (n): A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than its most foolish.
Ambrose Bierce
Populist (n): A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as "The Matter with Kansas."
Ambrose Bierce
Troglodyte (n): Specifically, a cave-dweller of the paleolithic period, after the Tree, and before the Flat. A famous colony of Troglodytes dwelt with David in the Cave of Adullam. The colony consisted of "every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented" — in brief, all the Socialists of Judea.
Ambrose Bierce
Nominate (v): To designate for the heaviest political assessment. To put forward a suitable person to incur the mudgobbing and deadcatting of the opposition.
Ambrose Bierce
Harangue (n): A speech by an opponent, who is known as an Harangue-outang.
Ambrose Bierce
Strom Thurmond has died at 100.
No announcement yet on whether he plans to quit politics.
Tim Blair
The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
George Carlin
Politics is show business for ugly people.
James Carville
A man that is born a Tory hath but a short time to live, and is full of Humbug; he springeth up like a fungus, and withereth like a cauliflower; and is seen no more.
Joseph Chamberlain
An honest politician is a contradiction in terms.
Frank Chodorov
A man who is not a liberal when he is young has no heart. A man who is not a conservative when he is old has no brain.
Winston S. Churchill
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow
Interviewing a member of Rome's revered patrician order was likely to introduce pure chaos of the kind that is believed by some philosophers to comprise the outermost limits of the eternally whirling universe: a vortext of limitless and fathomless darkness. In short, political ignorance, commercial deceit, and blatant lies.
Lindsey Davis
The fact is that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with intelligence, or with other varieties of stupidity.
John Derbyshire
[Roosevelt's renomination for President in 1936] The platform was crowded with politicians from every corner of the land. One after another, they got in on the act with seconding speeches. This went on for hours and hours and was carried into the night. The floor emptied of delegates, who went off to the ball game, to the saloons, to any place less depressing and boring than the Convention Hall. For on that day the record for an all-time low in the history of political oratory was undoubtedly established. Not one cliche was missed. The platitudes were deadly. The English language was raped. [Mencken] nudged me. "Farrell, do you see all of those politicians up there?" He pointed. "Every one of them thinks that he can be President of the United States."
James T. Farell
Politics: Formed from the Latin "poly", meaning many, and "tic",meaning little bloodsucking insects.
J. Fielek
The end move in politics is alway to pick up a gun.
Buckminster Fuller
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Jane's Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.
Jane Galt
Every time the Republicans and Democrats agree, you can just be sure that you're going to get screwed. What is it with these guys? [. . .] I think "bipartisan" is just a nice word for "bend over".
Grant Gould
Politics, even more than misery, makes strange bedfellows.
Francis W. Grey
I don't want the truth. I want something I can tell Parliament!
James Hacker
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex - but Congress can.
Cullen Hightower
Random action produces random political results . . . why waste even a rock?
Abbie Hoffman
A "Demopublican" is a jackass with a trunk to carry away all your money.
Barbara Hutchinson
Republicans are like phone sex: they say what you want to hear, but nothing ever really happens and you get stuck with a huge bill.
Tom Isenberg
Given that your vote is as statistically relevant as a mosquito burp in a hurricane, and Given that your vote (or non-vote) does not cause anyone else to vote (or not vote), and Given that computerized ballot counting [is] not independently verifiable (like the old "lever" ballots were), and Given that your risk of dying in a car accident en route is infinitely higher than your chance of casting a deciding vote, . . . Why don't you go bowling instead?
Tom Isenberg
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
Thomas Jefferson
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
Thomas Jefferson
Politicians have the most to fear from satirists, because public deflation of their swollen egos can crash-land them from their lofty heights in a heartbeat. Insults can be parried in kind, but one is helpless against the micro-terrorism of ridicule. In this respect, political cartoonists are the grand masters.
Barbara Kay
. . . it's one of those stories that confirms the suspicions of those who wake every day believing the worst. Sure, they say the sun rises in the east, but that's just to keep you from looking west where the real action is. Each side is guilty of this — in the 90s a substantial contingent of the right was convinced that Gov. Bill Clinton ran coke out of Mena. It's almost as if you have two options:
I disagree with my opponent's position on taxation, and therefore I shall oppose it.
I disagree with my opponent's position on taxation, and therefore I believe he has sex with goats.
James Lileks
I think that's the difficulty in politics. You are always bound to lose supporters once you take a stand on an issue.
John F. Kennedy
A politician these days has to sit on the fence and keep both ears to the ground.
Allan Lamport
The politicians were talking themselves red, white, and blue in the face.
Clair Booth Luce
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
Politics is just a branch of Animal Husbandry.
M. Kirk McKusick
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
H.L. Mencken
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H.L. Mencken
Politician: Any citizen with influence enough to get his old mother a job as a charwoman in the City Hall.
H.L. Mencken
A good [politician] is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H.L. Mencken
Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
H.L. Mencken
Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.
H.L. Mencken
The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
H.L. Mencken
Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
H.L. Mencken
Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
H.L. Mencken
We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are more concerned with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across.
Monty Python
Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
Richard Milhous Nixon
The average term length of a member of congress is approaching 15 years, and the average term length of a convicted criminal is less than three. We've got that backward.
Oliver North
Among the 100 reasons why Jimmy Carter was a better President than Bill Clinton: "Carter had once held a job . . . Carter never in his life got a haircut that cost more than $2.50, if appearances are anything to go by . . . It took Carter months to wreck the economy . . . Carter hardly ever hugged or kissed anyone in public except Leonid Brezhnev . . . Carter spent his time doing things like figuring out the White House tennis court playing schedule — the man knew his intellectual limitations . . . Carter passed out while jogging, and the nation was safe for a moment.
P.J. O'Rourke
Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.
P.J. O'Rourke
Clinton's health care plan: "I gather, from the president's sales pitch, we're supposed to come up with a large sum of money to invest in a vaguely described deal that's going to have a huge payoff someday. Isn't the SEC trying to crack down on this sort of thing?"
P.J. O'Rourke
Democrats are also the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.
P.J. O'Rourke
People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty — their power and privilege — to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by . . . politicians.
P.J. O'Rourke
Republican takeover of Congress: "Men risk having their taxes slashed in broad daylight. "
P.J. O'Rourke
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
P.J. O'Rourke
Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
P.J. O'Rourke
When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
P.J. O'Rourke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P.J. O'Rourke
When you looked at the Republicans, you saw the scum of the top of business. When you looked at the Democrats, you saw the scum of the top of politics. Personally, I prefer business. A businessman will steal from you directly instead of getting the IRS to do it for him. And when Republicans ruin the environment, destroy the supply of affordable housing and wreck the industrial infrastructure, at least they make a buck off it. The Democrats just do these things for fun. Also, the Democrats wanted the federal government to solve every one of Americas problems, from AIDS to making sure the kids wipe their feet before they come in the house. For chrissake, the federal government can't even deliver mail, and how hard is that? The stuff's got our address right on it and everything.
P.J. O'Rourke
You say we're distracting [the President] from the business of government. Well I hope so. Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
P.J. O'Rourke
If anything proves that we are not inherently rational beings, it's our hunger for bad news, for someone to blame, for believing evil of our neighbors. Rational beings would prefer to interpret events hopefully. Yet even Americans delight in hearing about a neighborhood scandal or believing that "something's going on" behind the scenes of the political stage (there is — a vast conspiracy of mediocrity).
Ralph Peters
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, the reverse is true.
Polish Proverb
If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.
Will Rogers
Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians and I love to watch both of 'em play either back home in their native state or after they have been captured and sent to the zoo or to Washington.
Will Rogers
The country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
Will Rogers
The way to judge a good comedy is by how long it will last and have people talk about it. Now Congress had turned out some that have lived for years and people are still laughing about them.
Will Rogers
Republicans and Democrats are halves of the same evil political entity I call the "Boot on Your Neck" Party. This one-party system consists of nothing but parasites who want to get elected or re-elected so they can steal your life, liberty, and property.
L. Neil Smith
All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith
A common charge against immigrants . . . is that they take jobs from native-born workers. But there is no fixed number of jobs from which those going to immigrants can be subtracted.
Thomas Sowell
Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying from others akin to treason.
Thomas Sowell
Few mixtures are more volatile than race and politics. The normal frictions and resentments among individuals and groups seldom approach the magnitude of frenzy and violence produced by the politicization of race.
Thomas Sowell
Political "solutions" are often long on immediate symbolism and short on lasting results.
Thomas Sowell
There is no such group as "Hispanics" anywhere in the world except in the United States, because only in the U.S. do government programs recognize such a category.
Thomas Sowell
What is scary about our times is how easy it is to get Americans to give up our most basic rights if you just use some pretty words. You can violate the "equal protection of the laws" provided by the 14th Amendment if you use the word "diversity" and you can violate the free speech protections of the First Amendment if you call it "campaign finance reform."
Thomas Sowell
The president has kept all of the promises he intended to keep. [speaking of Bill Clinton]
George Stephanopolous
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I am proposing, as a mark of respect to our current Prime Minister, to rename my bottom after him, secure in the knowledge that this seems likely to catch on. ("I see Steyn is talking out of his Chretien again.")
Mark Steyn
Marvin [Bush] has always kept a low profile, eschewing politics entirely, except for a crack during the 2000 Presidential campaign that "that great sucking sound you hear is the sound of the media's lips coming off John McCain's a . . .", at which point he was dragged off by Dubya's minders.
Mark Steyn
Sartorially, Jordanian politics seems to be the opposite of American: in the New Hampshire primary, smooth, bespoke, Beltway types who've been wearing suits and wingtips since they were in second grade suddenly clamber into the old plaid and blue jeans and work boots, and start passing themselves off as stump-toothed inbred mountain men who like nothing better than a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sister. Evidently, in rural Jordan the voters are savvy enough not to fall for such pathetically obvious pandering.
Mark Steyn
Political TV commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds.
Alvin Sylvain
Sooner or later, every person must ask himself: What should I make of my life? Which is the same as asking: What shall I make IN it? One can make money, or machines, or food, or works of art, or children, or many other things. The person who feels or finds that he doesn't want to, or can't, make anything at all, can always fall back on making trouble — the product in which psychotics, psychiatrists and politicians specialize.
Thomas Szasz
We are going to be governed whether we like it or not . . . We must therefore concern ourselves with politics. . . to mitigate as far as possible the damage done by the madness of our rulers.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau
Special interest groups normally have an interest in diminishing the information of the average voter. If they can sell him some false tale which supports their particular effort to rob the treasury, it pays. They have resources and normally make efforts to produce this kind of misinformation. But that would not work if the voter had a strong motive to learn the truth.
Gordon Tullock
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
Suppose you were an imbecile and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
To my mind, Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.
Mark Twain
Hypocrisy is the Vaseline® of political intercourse.
Peter Dirk Uus
Politicians are like diapers — they should be changed often, and for the same reason.
John Wallner
[I]t's a waste of time trying to elect "good" politicians because everybody will behave roughly the same when faced with the same restraints. It's like gravity. Republicans fall at 32 feet per second squared, and so do Democrats.
Walter Williams
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Mao Zedong
Planet Bog — pools of toxic chemicals bubble under a choking atmosphere of poisonous gases. But aside from that, it's not much like Earth.
Bill Watterson
I get bored with the monthly parade of doltish doxies on the covers of the lad mags, all wearing the same go-thither mask of Attitude while yanking down their drawers. It's blunt rote tripe for adolescent wankers — no cheer, no mystery, no beauty, no love.
Since the consumer of these pictures has nothing to be intimate with, this genre of pictures devalues intimacy altogether, and that's an interesting development. In the past these magazines had to provide the illusion of intimacy, because the viewer still had some residual attachment to the idea, still thought it had a place in the mechanics of lust. But that lie got old. Now the denial of intimacy is alluring. Let's use each other together.
James Lileks
I have just never heard any distinction between "pornography" and "erotica" that didn't basically come down to "the bad stuff" vs "the good stuff" (or "the dull stuff" vs "the interesting stuff", or . . . )
So I figure either it's all erotica (though some of it is surely not very erotic) or it's all pornography . . . though out of love to Tom Lehrer and for short pithy words, I still like "smut" best.
Marna Nightingale
If a person likes sexy entertainment, I wish they'd have the guts to just say so; it would make the lives of the people who work to produce openly erotic material far, far, better if we stopped with the divide-and-marginalize nonsense.
Maybe it's stretching a point to say that if all of the people who devour romances and loved 9 1/2 Weeks and saw Secretary six times would just get over their need to pointedly distance themselves from people who read Califia and go to strip bars and rent XXX movies, that alone would make it possible to improve labour conditions for sex workers and exotic dancers and nude models and pornography writers — but it would be a darned nice start.
Marna Nightingale
Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
Camille Paglia
The history of pornography is you'd find it in your uncle's stuff when you were cleaning up after he died and you'd burn it. People would just destroy it. "Omigod, he had all this indecent stuff!" And you'd kind of whisper about it later. But there were these cleansing fires. You could burn it and there were only so many copies. A privately printed edition of Autobiography of a Flea, or Fanny Hill. Now it's pig easy to go on the Internet and just grab the planet's most scabrous excesses — absolute debauchery — you lay it out there with the complete sterile access of a surgeon or a medical test. By what means do we repress this information? Any red-blooded guy with 80 megabytes of rancid porn on his hard disk can be a publisher on a CD-ROM in seconds.
Bruce Sterling
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as "porn-worthy." Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
Naomi Wolf
For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images' power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.
Naomi Wolf
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject [of pornography] comes up: They can't compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman — with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond "More, more, you big stud!") — possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer's least specification?
Naomi Wolf
Sometimes the best thing to get off your chest is your chin.
Anonymous
Common Sense: an oxymoron.
Anonymous
Positive (adj): Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce
It's true that attitude can make a difference. However, the causality flows both ways. It doesn't matter whether you bring a good attitude to being mugged; it's still going to hurt and humiliate you, no matter how much positive thinking you do.
Bruce Byfield
Cogito ergo sum . . . cogito? (I think, therefore I am . . . I think.)
Don McCaig
Change your thoughts and you change the world.
Norman Vincent Peale
Sustenance-of-a-Positive-Attitude Theory: Acknowledge the reality that, due to factors beyond one's control, most deals do not work out. Thus, to sustain a positive attitude, always assume a negative result. By anticipating many short-term setbacks, you deflate their potential impact and, as a result, pave the way for long-term victory.
Robert J. Ringer
I was going to buy a copy of the power of positive thinking, and then I thought what the hell good would that do?
Ronnie Shakes
It's not where you are. It's where you're headed that matters.
Joey Smallwood
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
Anonymous
Poverty (n): A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
Ambrose Bierce
Ejection (n): An approved remedy for the disease of garrulity. It is also much used in cases of extreme poverty.
Ambrose Bierce
[I]t is far from evident that our society in the abstract is indifferent to homelessness. Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless.
For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian church, I discovered that there were 91 residents and 41 staff members, only a handful of whom had any direct contact with the objects of their ministrations.
The homeless slept in dormitories in which there was no privacy whatever. There was a rank smell that every doctor recognizes (but never records in the medical notes) as the smell of homelessness. And then, passing along a corridor and through a door with a combination lock to prevent untoward intrusions, one suddenly entered another world: the sanitized, air-conditioned (and airtight) world of the bureaucracy of compassion.
Theodore Dalrymple
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Eric Hoffer
He who knows how to be poor knows everything.
Jules Michelet
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P.J. O'Rourke
We Athenians hold that it is not poverty that is disgraceful but the failure to struggle against it.
Pericles
Because of the neglect of history in our educational system, most people have no idea how many of the great American fortunes where created by people who were born and raised in worse poverty then the average welfare recipient today.
Thomas Sowell
Some people say great power gives great responsibility. This is nonsense. "Responsibility" means you have to take the blame for your own mistakes. "Power" means you can make someone else take the blame for your mistakes.
Cerebus the Aardvark
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
. . . the answer is that one would like to be both one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. [. . .] Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared. The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so; but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective.
Niccolo Macchiavelli
An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens than a republic armed by foreign forces. Rome and Sparta were for many centuries well armed and free. the Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom. Among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible. It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willingly one who is unarmed; or that any unarmed man will remain safe among armed servants.
Niccolo Machiavelli
I conclude that since some men love as they please but fear when the prince pleases, a wise prince should rely on what he controls, not on what he cannot control.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Obedience is not enough. Unless [a man] is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell
Better a friend in the Court than gold on thy finger.
Welsh Proverb
There is no Evil under the Sun but what is to be dreaded from Men, who may do what they please with Impunity: They seldom or never stop at certain Degrees of Mischief when they have Power to go farther.
John Trenchard
Lord Acton wrote centuries ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He wasn't quite right. A better saying is, "Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts."
Bob Wallace
The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our prayers, you know. Prayer is a dangerous business. I think it should be outlawed.
Lois McMaster Bujold
God punishes us mildly by ignoring our prayers and severely by answering them.
Richard J. Needham
The only thing predictable with total reliability is the past.
Malcolm Forbes
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
Anonymous
Prejudice (n): A vagrant opinion, without visible means of support.
Ambrose Bierce
The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road — long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammed Ali
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Anonymous
One of life's most painful moments comes when we must admit that we didn't do our homework, that we are not prepared.
Merlin Olsen
I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed, And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
Alexander Hamilton
In matters of principle, stand like a rock. In matters of taste, swim with the current.
Thomas Jefferson
Important principles must be inflexible.
Abraham Lincoln
Relying on government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
John Perry Barlow
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping, and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbour's shoulder or fly at his throat.
Eric Hoffer
My wife thinks that I'm too nosy. At least that's what she keeps scribbling in her diary.
Blake Satner
"My cigarette smoke mixed with the smoke of my .38. If business was as good as my aim, I'd be on Easy Street. Instead, I've got an office on 49th Street and a nasty relationship with a string of collection agents. Yeah, that's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye. Suddenly my door swung open, and in walked trouble. Brunette, as usual."
Bill Watterson
Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen.
Rich Rosen
Every solution includes at least two more problems.
Anonymous
Logical methods, at best, rearrange the way in which personal bias is to be introduced into the problem.
Anonymous
Hit: A change for the worse. Thus, "Take a hit," be changed so. "If we use that chip, we'll take a hit of two months," would mean that making that decision would set the schedule back.
Anonymous
Finagle's Law: Once something is in trouble, anything done will make it worse.
Anonymous
Whenever we meet with any defect in the means we are contriving for accomplishing a given object, that defect should be noted and reserved for future consideration, and inquiry should be made whether that which is a defect as regards the object in view may not become a source of advantage in some totally different subject.
Charles Babbage
There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night.
Ernest Bramah
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Never do yourself what you can con an expert into doing for you.
Lois McMaster Bujold
You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.
Winston S. Churchill
Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?
Calvin Coolidge
A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Hofstadter's Law: Everything takes longer than Hofstadter's Law would predict.
Douglas Hofstadter
Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to kill a fly with a sledge hammer.
Major I.L. Holdridge
A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work.
Anatol Holt
Horton's Laws: If you think everyone will like it, no one will. If you think no one will like it, you are probably right.
Horton
Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
David Lloyd George
When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.
Abraham Maslow
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
For every complex problem there is a simple solution - that won't work.
H.L. Mencken
If you stare at something long enough, eventually you'll figure it out — or die. Either way, you'll be at peace.
Andrew Plato
No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.
Charles Schultz
Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation, I ask myself "What Would Jesus Do?" The mental image of my opposition being cast into pits of hellfire for all eternity *is* comforting, but probably not what the inventors of the phrase had in mind.
David Zeiger
Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
Anonymous
The first Christian gets the hungriest lions.
Anonymous
The early bird suffers from insomnia.
Anonymous
Never put off 'till tomorrer what yer wife can do today.
Andy Capp
Not to decide is to decide.
Harvey Cox
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Don Marquis
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
Anonymous
C Language: Yuppie Assembler.
Anonymous
Computer Programmer: One who passes himself off as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable debugs, an infinite series of incomprehensible answers calculated with micrometric precision from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to have asked for the information in the first place.
Anonymous
Law of Programming: Variables won't; constants aren't.
Anonymous
Program: The footprints of bugs; all that remains after the bugs are removed.
Anonymous
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
In the beginning was the word all right, but it didn't contain a fixed number of bits.
R.S. Barton
I recognize that a class of criminals and juvenile delinquents has taken to calling themselves "hackers", but I consider them irrelevant to the true meaning of the word; just as the Mafia calls themselves "businessmen" but nobody pays that fact any attention.
Robert Bickford
A Hacker is any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.
Robert Bickford
[Programmers] cannot successfully be asked to design for users because . . . inevitably, they will make judgments based on the difficulty of coding and not on the user's real needs.
Alan Cooper
A feature is a bug with documentation.
William E. Davidsen
Let the machine do the dirty work.
Elements of Programming Style
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.
Jim Horning
The actual Average User is kept in a hermetically sealed vault at the International Bureau of Standards in Geneva.
Steve Krug
Our first foray into Artificial Intelligence was a program that did a credible job of solving problems in college calculus. Armed with that success, we tackled high school algebra; to our surprise, we found it much harder. Attempts at grade school arithmetic, involving the concept of number, etc., provide problems of current research interest. An exploration of the child's world of blocks proved insurmountable, except under the most rigidly constrained circumstances. It finally dawned on us that the overwhelming majority of what we call intelligence is developed by the end of the first year of life.
Marvin Minsky
APL is a jewel, Lisp is a bowl of mud. You can't add to a jewel. Adding more mud to a bowl of mud gives you a bigger bowl of mud.
Ted Nelson
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. I dub this: "Linus's Law".
Eric S. Raymond
UNIX® is simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity.
Dennis Ritchie
FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Seybold Report
Fableware: A computer product introduced at a show, whose chances of making it to market are directly proportional to the number of people who, after seeing them at a show, believe that they should become products.
Seybold Report
Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
Larry Wall
A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.
Anonymous
The cultural transformation of modern society is due, singularly, to the rise of mass consumption, or the diffusion of what were once considered luxuries to the middle and lower classes of society. In this process, past luxuries are constantly redefined as necessities, so that it eventually seems incredible that an ordinary object could ever have been considered out of the reach of an ordinary man . . . Taken all together, mass consumption meant the acceptance, in the crucial area of life-style, of the idea of social change and personal transformation, and it gave legitimacy to those who would innovate and lead the way, in culture as well as in production.
Daniel Bell
Malefactor (n): The chief factor in the progress of the human race.
Ambrose Bierce
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become. In this way the idea of progress reinforces the restless discontent that is one of the diseases of modernity, a disease symptomatically expressed in Hayek's nihilistic and characteristically candid statement that "Progress is movement for movement's sake". No view of human life could be further from either Green thought or genuine conservative philosophy.
John Gray
You must have faith in the creative spirit for it is creativity that gets things created.
Mike Jittlov
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings".
John Kula
The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.
John Stuart Mill
If every hairbrained technological idea were tried and implemented, the costs would have been tremendous. Like [biological] mutations, most technological innovations are duds and deserve to be eliminated. Yet overcoming the built-in resistance is the key to technological progress: if no harebrained idea was ever tried, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
Joel Mokyr
Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilisation?
Gerard O'Neill
The form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers. And there follows a corollory: Since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a "perfected" artifact; the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing.
Henry Petroski
The vast number of things that exist in the world today ensures that there will be ever more tomorrow, for virtually every existing thing is fair game to come under the scrutiny of someone restless and discontented who does not think "well enough" is sufficiently free of faults. The reactionary call to leave well enough alone is a futile one, for the advancement of civilization itself has been a history of the successive correction (and sometimes the overcorrection) of error and fault and failure.
Henry Petroski
The dynamist concept of trial-and-error evolution is very different from the concept of progress popular earlier in [the 20th] century — the goal-directed progressive ideal. We make progress not toward a particular, certain and uniform destination but toward many different, personally determined, and incremental goals. In a global sense, "progress" is the product of those parallel individual searches: the extension of knowledge and the gradual improvement of people's lives — an increase in comfort, in life options, in the opportunity for "diversified, worthwhile experience". Progress is neither random Darwinian evolution nor teleological inevitability.
Virginia Postrel
The endless pursuit of knowledge — or of improved paper clips, new musical forms, or better management practices — that delights dynamists appalls the stasis-craving social critics who have shaped the Western Zeitgeist for decades.
Virginia Postrel
[Progress] is driven not just by "techno-nerds" but by everyone who solves problems, adopts new products or new ideas, or combines familiar things in unfamiliar ways. Not every experiment or idea is a good one, but only by trying new ideas do we discover genuine improvements.
Virginia Postrel
"Better" is the enemy of "Good Enough".
Jerry E. Pournelle
The tendency in all societies is to convert more and more of their output into structure until all is static and the parasites and rent takers and officials have stifled initiative. Every now and then there are technological breakthroughs that let society leap ahead of the regulators and structure makers, but after a while the structuralists catch up.
Jerry E. Pournelle
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress.
Terry Pratchett
For the past century the world has got steadily better for most people. You do not believe that? I am not surprised. You are fed such a strong diet of news about how bad things are that it must be hard to believe they were once worse. But choose any statistic you like and it will show that the lot of even the poorest is better today than it was in 1903. Longevity is increasing faster in the poor south than in the rich north. Infant mortality is lower in Asia than ever before. Decade by decade per-capita food production is rising.
Here at home, we are healthier, wealthier and wiser than ever before. Pollution has declined; prosperity increased; options opened.
All this has been achieved primarily by that most hated of tricks, the technical fix. By invention, not legislation.
My point? Simply this: if you asked intellectuals at almost any time since Malthus to talk about the future, they would have been pessimistic and they would have been wrong. The future (actual) has consistently proved better than the future (forecast).
Matt Ridley
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
The unreasonable man is the one who expects the world to adapt to his needs, the reasonable man is the one who adapts himself to suit the world. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world?
William Butler Yeats
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime, It don't prohibit worth a dime, It's filled our land with vice and crime. Nevertheless, we're for it.
Franklin P. Adams
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
Albert Einstein
Most urban men (not women) agreed with Mencken that Prohibition was the work of "ignorant bumpkins of the cow states who resent the fact they have to swill raw corn liquor while city slickers got good wine and whiskey." It had "little behind it, philosophically speaking, save the envy of the country lout for the city man, who has a much better time of it in this world".
Paul Johnson
Prohibition also illustrated Karl Popper's Law of Unintended Effect, America being the ideal arena in which this law, one of history's great ironies, operates. Ultra-American Prohibitionists proclaimed that it was directed chiefly at the "notorious drinking habits" of "immigrant working men". In fact, far from driving alien minorities into Anglo-Saxon conformity, it enbled them to consolidate themselves. Prohibition was one of the turning-points in a long process whereby the Anglo-Saxon-descended possessing class was driven from its position of pre-eminence. In New York, for instance, bootlegging was half-Jewish, one-quarter Italian, and one-quarter Polish and Irish. Those of Anglo-Saxon descent were merely consumers.
Paul Johnson
Prohibition offered matchless opportunities for "aliens" to subvert society, particularly in Chicago under the corrupt mayorality of "Big Bill" Thompson. John Torrio, who ran large-scale bootlegging in Chicago 1920-4, retired to Italy in 1925 with a fortune of $30 million. No one in the history of the world had made this kind of money from organizing crime before. Then and later it made the young ambitious, and criminally inclined think furiously about career-prospects.
Paul Johnson
Socially, the experience was a catastrophe for the United States. It brought about a qualitative and permanent change in the scale and sophistication of American organized crime. Running large-scale beer-convoys required powers of organization which were soon put to use elsewhere. From the early 1920s, gambling syndicates used phone-banks to take bets from all over the country. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel adapted bootlegging patterns to organize huge nationwide gambling empires. Prohibition generated enormous funds which were then reinvested not only in gambling, but in other forms of large-scale crime such as prostitution and drug-smuggling. It was the "takeoff point" for big crime in America, and of course it continued after the Twenty first Amendment, which ended Prohibition, was finally ratified in December 1933.
Paul Johnson
Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and make crime out of things that are not crimes.
Abraham Lincoln
What lies under it [Prohibition], and under all the other crazy enactments of its category, is no more and no less than the yokel's congenital and incurable hatred of the city man — his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better time than he is.
H.L. Mencken
[T]he battle for Prohibition was more than a struggle for a moral reform: it was also a clear-cut combat between cities and the country, between the civilized centres and the areas of cornbread and revival.
H.L. Mencken
And whom do you draft in a war against drugs? Certainly not eighteen-year-old boys. They're the enemy.
P.J. O'Rourke
Our society has had a lot of experience with legal dangerous drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco, and we can draw on that experience when we legalize marijuana, cocaine, and heroin.
James C. Paine
Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
James C. Paine
[T]he War on Drugs has dragged on since the 1870s, when a handful of do-gooding idiots demanded that alcohol be outlawed, until today, when an entire nation finds itself in chains, every one of its once-trusted institutions corrupt beyond redemption, its populace being relentlessly watched, searched and probed at the slightest excuse, breathing, bleeding, and urinating on the command of jackbooted thugs and corporate neckties, helpless to prevent their children from being indoctrinated by the same gang of criminal scum, and forced to pay for it all with the highest taxes — and most intrusive taxation system — in civilized history.
L. Neil Smith
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors . . .is hereby prohibited. . . (Eighteenth Amendment, ratified January 16, 1919)
The Eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed . . . (Twenty-First Amendment, ratified December 5, 1933)
U.S. Constitution
The Project Uncertainty Principle [Dilbert]: The Project Uncertainty Principle says that if you understand a project, you won't know its cost, and vice versa. [Tina]: You just made that up. [Dilbert]: That doesn't make it wrong.
Scott Adams
The Six Phases of Project Management:
Enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Panic
Search for the guilty
Punishment of the innocent
Praise and honours for non-participants
Anonymous
The project manager's version of the Pareto Principle is that the first 20% of the deliverables require 80% of the effort, and the last 80% of the deliverables require 80% of the effort, too!
John Banks
Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule, or under budget.
Robert A. Heinlein
Q: How do you know when a project is finished? A: When you're out of time.
Beth Kane
I reflected upon the meaning of the propaganda I had witnessed in the Communist world before its downfall. The function of this propaganda was not to persuade, much less to inform, but rather to humiliate. To have the grossest lies poured into your ears and eyes all the time, day and night, and yet not to protest their untruth, but on the contrary to participate in their propagation, and to behave as if you believed they were true — that is the ultimate dehumanization of man, for it robs him of meaningful language.
Theodore Dalrymple
The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly. . .it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.
Joseph Goebbels
[T]he rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be simple and repetitious.
Joseph Goebbels
What is propaganda? Lies? Not necessarily. Sometimes it's just carefully screened truth.
Steve H.
The broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one
Adolf Hitler
I saw Bowling for Columbine in a small art house in Santa Monica, attended by what I think was a small knot of NPR movie club pass holders. This is like watching Triumph of the Will in Nuremburg stadium seated between Goebbels and Himmler. You know before the lights go down that they're gonna love it.
Bill Whittle
This is how you lie by telling the truth. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that they advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky. And the key to this misdirection, the one essential element, is the way I skewed the story from the very first paragraph: I guarantee you this story will make you angry.
Bill Whittle
Property is as surely a right of mankind as liberty.
John Adams
Material possessions: The more you own, the more they own you.
Anonymous
Resident (adj): Unable to leave.
Ambrose Bierce
Mine (adj): Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.
Ambrose Bierce
Portable (adj): Exposed to a mutable ownership through vicissitudes of possession.
Ambrose Bierce
It is to the established administration of property, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-love, that we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, all the finer and more delicate emotions of the soul, for everything, indeed, that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage state.
Thomas Robert Malthus
Digital technology is the universal solvent of intellectual property rights.
Tom Parmenter
The chief danger to property has not been from the covetous neighbour nor from the habitual thief. It has been from the acquisitive and confiscatory activities of rulers. The Will to power, the temptation to exercise power simply because one has it, has led rulers to arbitrary interferences with liberty of the person. Covetousness has led them to arbitrary seizure of property. Both have joined to bring about arbitrary interferences with the liberty of using property. It is significant that the current of thought which is giving up the idea of property is also giving up the idea of liberty. As the two grew up together they are a common subject of attack by those who conceive the one must go with the fall of the other.
Roscoe Pound
The future isn't what it used to be.
Arthur C. Clarke
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
John Scully
The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.
Mark Twain
Prostitution: The intersection of sex and free enterprise.
Anonymous
Why is prostitution illegal unless the acts are filmed?
Tom Isenberg
The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.
Camille Paglia
At least there was the customary hotch-potch of causes and grievances to be relied upon. Socialist Workers, Young Socialist Workers, Old Socialist Workers, Retired Socialist Workers, Communist Revolutionaries, Trade Unionists, Environmentalists, Gay Rights, Animal Rights, Anarchist Rights, a whole slew of ageing CND veterans, a mere smattering of Islamic banners and one po-faced old duffer demanding "Subsidies For The Arts Now!". No, this was pretty much a whitebread event. Or, more accurately, a redbread event. It was if the Guardian has disgorged the contents of its subscription database onto the streets of London.
David Carr
Some literary wag (and I think it was Gore Vidal but I am sure I will corrected in short order if it wasn't) once quipped that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Regardless of the provenance of the quote, I am quite sure that it must have been coined in honour of the Stop the War Coalition. Never in all my days have I cast my gaze upon such a motley collection of bedraggled, unsightly, grotseque and snaggle-toothed specimens as gathered today in Central London. An alarmingly high number looked as if they had been dragged from the wreckage of a motorway pile-up.
David Carr
Having passed a few antiwar demonstrations in my time, I'll just note that drumming seems to be a hallmark of the skanky pierced-for-peace sorts who think that whapping upended pickle-buckets will cause some sort of karmic alignment that makes Rumsfeld fall to his knees, clutching his chest and crying out for Moloch and Baal to save him.
James Lileks
The anti-war movement is curiously impervious to the sort of scandal that could sink, say, the career of a popular evangelist. Find a preacher in a fleabag motel with a hooker, and his empire sags, groans and collapses. Prove that the outfit orchestrating all the big anti-war rallies has more communists on board than a 1930s Works Progress Administration documentary called "Paul Robeson Visits a Soviet Grain Co-Op" and the world yawns. Shrugs. Moves on.
James Lileks
These people want "freedom", but only for themselves. Freedom to preen. Freedom to flatter themselves that they are somehow committing an act of bravery by Speaking Truth to Power. But they're speaking Nonsense to Indifference. Pictures of Bush as Hitler sieg-heiling away would get them killed if this was truly the country they insist it is. Nothing will happen to them. They know it. They would be killed for doing this in Saddam's Iraq, of course; they know that too. Doesn't matter. Bush is worse than Saddam, in the macro sense. Saddam's sins are an inconvenient obstacle; hard to defend the fellow, but you have to concentrate on the real villains here, the people who truly threaten progressive transnational peace and solidarity and justice and human rights and —
James Lileks
"How come," I asked Andy, "whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?"
"We have jobs," said Andy.
P.J. O'Rourke
The rituals of Vienna have been replaced with the blandishments of Oprah: to vent is to heal. Therapy is a personal talk show with an audience of one.
James Lileks
Psychology, of course, is not an issue any more. We discovered that if you're crazy you can take drugs. Unless you're crazy because you've been taking drugs. In that case you can stop taking drugs and start taking other drugs.
P.J. O'Rourke
Thirty years ago, I suggested that there is, and can be, no such thing as mental illness. Since then, with increasing frequency, psychiatrists have announced that this or that form of human behavior — for example, homosexuality — is not a mental illness. Such claims attract much popular attention, perhaps because they simultaneously assert and deny the validity of the concept of mental illness: By asserting that X is not a mental illness, they imply that although X is not, Y and Z are. As formerly people wanted both to believe and disbelieve in the existence of witches, so now they want both to believe and disbelieve in the existence of mental illness.
Thomas Szasz
Psychiatrists say that the homosexual who doesn't like being a homosexual suffers from an illness called "ego-dystonic homosexuality". But psychiatrists do not say the Jew who doesn't like being Jewish suffers from "ego-dystonic Judaism"; or that the woman who doesn't like being a woman suffers from "ego-dystonic femininity"; or that the poor person who doesn't like being poor suffers from "ego-dystonic poverty".
Thomas Szasz
"An Arkansas appeals court recently ruled that bipolar disorder is a physical, not mental, illness." Comments Paul Fink, M.D., President-Elect of the American Psychiatric Association: "The Arkansas case gives psychiatrists an extraordinary window of opportunity . . ."
It is deeply revealing of the nature of psychiatry that psychiatrists look to the law, not science, to validate them as scientists; to judges, not patients, to validate them as healers. Plus ca change: Inquisitors looked to the church to legitimize their fantasies as facts, and to the prince to validate the torturing of bodies as the saving of souls.
Thomas Szasz
One of the arguments against my claim that there is no mental illness has hardened into a line that seems to convince people that I must be wrong. It goes like this: "We believe in the medical approach to mental illness. There are others (and they may or may not mention me by name) who prefer the social approach. But they are wrong, because . . ." — and then they cite studies about the genetic determinants of schizophrenia, or the effectiveness of drugs for controlling it.
I am often confronted with this argument, sometimes by reporters or others from the news media, and have concluded that it is founded on so successful a distortion of my position that it is virtually impossible to counter it. For if a well-meaning questioner does not see the point on which this riddle turns, no amount of fresh explanation about the mythology of mental illness is likely to make him see it. Still, I try to answer it, along this line:
"Let us go back four hundred years. Then, people believed in witches, and the official explanation of witchcraft was theological. Now, suppose someone came along and said: 'There are no witches. Witch is merely a name we often attach to poor and helpless people, usually women.' Would it be proper to call this person's position on witches a 'social approach to witchcraft' as against the official 'theological approach' to it? Of course not. What this person offers is not a sociological approach to witches, but a moral and philosophical criticism of the people who call other people 'witches.'"
Since everyone now knows that there are no witches, this explanation satisfies everyone about witchcraft. And since everyone now knows that there are mental diseases, this explanation satisfies no one about psychiatry.
Thomas Szasz
You are a psychiatrist. It's springtime. A young man comes to you complaining of boredom, fatigue and lethargy. You diagnose "spring fever" and prescribe a drug (amphetamine). Soon the patient reports that he feels better and behaves better (whatever that means). You conclude that "spring fever" is a disease. (Doesn't the patient's response to the treatment prove it?)
You are a psychiatrist. A mother brings her son, in the springtime of his life, to you, complaining that he has dropped out of college and shows little interest in himself or his surroundings. You diagnose "schizophrenia" and prescribe a drug (Thorazine). Soon the mother reports that her son feels better and behaves better (whatever that means). You conclude that "schizophrenia" is a disease. (Doesn't the patient's response to the treatment prove it?)
Mental illness is a neurochemical imbalance: Q.E.D.
Thomas Szasz
A clarification is not to make oneself clear. It is to put oneself in the clear.
Sir Humphrey Appleby
To make a speech immortal you don't have to make it everlasting.
Anonymous
No speech can be entirely bad if it is short enough.
Anonymous
"In closing" is always followed by the other half of the speech.
Anonymous
Blessed are the brief for they will be invited again.
Anonymous
Oratory (n): A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.
Ambrose Bierce
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
George Jessel
When I started doing live TV ten years ago, I went to the studio as though walking to my own execution. I feared losing my tongue to the stammering nullity of stage fright. In the theater, a friend told me, it's called "going up" - becoming inordinately aware of yourself and your performance, and having your brain empty of everything, including the script and the ability to improvise. It happened to me once on the radio - I started stammering, a great wet bolt of fear shot up my spine and blew every circuit; my heart rate went to about 200 BPM and I shut off the mike. It was awful. Never happened since, although I never forgot it. This is the fear everyone has: they won't know what to say, and they will greet the camera with a frozen smile while yesterday's meal uncoils in their drawers. I usually have a TelePrompter, so there's always something to say. But it's hard to read the words if your brain is screeching an Emergency Broadcast System tone.
James Lileks
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
