Quotes

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Epictetus

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

Mark Twain

If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.

Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Michel de Montaigne

The only acceptable form of socialism in America is socialism for the rich.

John Kenneth Galbraith

In the emergency of war our nation’s powers are unbelievable. The strength we have spread around the world is appalling even to those who make up the individual cells of that strength. I am sure that in the past two years I have heard soldiers say a thousand times, “if only we could have created all this energy for something good.” But we rise above our normal powers only in times of destruction.

Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, page 492 (1944)

We should expect several military conflicts in the Middle East under President Bush, and while this may not be great for the economy it will be terrific for my energy holdings.

Legendary legendary oil trader T. Boone Pickens, New York Times, July 9th 2000

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

Michel de Montaigne

I think we have no reason to be anything but grateful to those geniuses who are genius and who don't exercise what I call, in a bad sense, power over us. That is, they offer us something which have the right to refuse, and which everybody refuses. They're not like politicians, who impose their wills on us. In fact the greatest artists, as I say, have no will; they're pure imagination. And to represent these people as deficient in some way is it seems to me a kind of sin against human nature. These are the greatest human beings who have ever lived, and if we don't respond to what they've done, well, that's tough. There are certainly plenty of geniuses to whom I don't respond, I mean there are arts to which I don't respond--painting, for instance, is one of them. But certainly in the arts to which I do respond I am nothing but grateful to the persons who have created these works, because they have literally brought something out of nothing. They have made human life more bearable. And how you be anything but grateful to them, and how can you fail to want to understand that what they've done represents the highest achievement that human beings are capable of?

Marvin Mudrick

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

Michel de Montaigne