The simple truth is that the areas where this nation finds the greatest distress are the very areas where federal power has expanded the most.
“Are you Smarter than the Constitution?” by Richard Epstein
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Ave Maria
"Nothing breeds vice like an attempt to promote virtue by force."
-- Moman Pruiett (1927)
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-- Sir John Dalberg (Lord Acton) (April 1887)
"The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life..."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."
-- Charles Péguy
"Granted, other factors are also at work."
-- Mickey Kaus
"Libertarians favor limiting the size and scope of government precisely because they believe that approach will offer the greatest opportunity for people to seek their own happiness, whether as individuals, parents, church-goers, or, yes, even as business owners."
-- Damon Root
"Onward and upward."
-- James Buchanan
"Even rabid partisans ought to strive to see past the next election cycle and recognize that the powers forged in one administration usually do pass on to the next."
-- Gene Healy
"Irish Democracy" - the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people.
-- James Scott
[I]n the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well.
-- Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels)
The government owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
-- Paraphrasing Richard Feynman
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
-- The Micawber Principle (from Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens' 1850 novel, David Copperfield)
"Enjoy yourself, it pisses all the right people off."
-- Jonah Goldberg
"I’ve been wrong so often I don’t find it extraordinary at all."
-- Ronald Coase
"If America was a house, the left would root for the termites."
-- Greg Gutfield
"Even narcissists have the right to express themselves, even if nobody cares."
-- Scott H. Greenfield
"Offending, as the high priests of correctness have informed us, is the gravest and darkest of all sins."
-- Dennis Byrne
"We should not unduly restrain experimentation, because we are not sure we are right about very much. In order for such a system to avoid becoming completely undisciplined, however, we must not prop up failed experiments. And in order to induce people to take such risks, we must not unduly restrict huge rewards for success, even as we recognize that luck plays a role in success and failure."
-- Jim Manzi
"Life is a dash between two numbers on a tombstone, and everybody should enjoy that dash."
-- Dr. Neil Shulman
"[H]orrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens."
-- C.S. Lewis
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as 'bad luck.'"
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
-- Milton Friedman
"Correlation does not prove causation."
-- Any good scientist
"The real conflict in political theory ... is not between individualism and community. It's between voluntary association and coerced association."
-- David Boaz
"Forget Mexico’s imaginary Reconquista of the American Southwest; the real conquest of North America is a peaceful and consensual affair, taking place one tortilla at a time."
-- Gustavo Arellano
"The war on arithmetic never ends well."
-- Walter Russell Mead
"Why do you people love the state so much? It doesn’t love you."
-- Michael Munger
"When did the government become a paragon of telling the truth?"
-- Andrew Napolitano
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-- James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788 in: History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, vol. 1, p. 130 (H.B. Grigsby ed. 1890).
"We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being."
-- GK Chesterton
"Sinners think they are saints, but saints know they are sinners."
-- Peter Kreeft
"Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'."
-- JRR Tolkien
"First they came for the religious freedom of the Catholics, and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic…."
-- Stephen Macklin
"The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do."
-- Oscar Wilde
"You are not allowed to pay us back in clunkers."
-- Chinese Pres. Jiantao to US Pres. Obama
"Sinners make the best saints."
-- graffiti
"Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
-- GK Chesterton
"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."
-- Fred Allen
"Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."
-- Joel Spolsky
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
-- Susan Ertz
"Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor."
-- Mark Twain
"Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity."
-- GK Chesterton
"Sometimes maximum impact requires minimum drama."
-- Lizzy Goodman
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C. S. Lewis
"Permissiveness is not the same thing as liberty. Permissiveness suggests a master loosening a leash, not an individual charting his own course."
-- Jesse Walker, "Beyond Pleasantville," Reason, January 2010
"Racial slander is like duct tape: There’s no limit to what you can do with it."
-- Jonah Goldberg
"I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University."
-- William Buckley
Most pundits, professional and amateur, consider a genius as someone who can articulate one's platform more effectively than themself. An idiot is someone who effectively articulates the other side.
-- Eric Falkenstein
"There is at the present day too great a disposition to regard the will of the majority as that of each individual of the community."
-- Simon Newcomb
"Innocence is ever simple and credulous. Conscious of no designs itself, it suspects none in others."
-- Excerpt from William Wirt's Defense of Harman Blennerhassett in the Burr Trial
"Malice is ever complex and paranoid. Conscious of its own designs, it suspects only malice in others."
-- Chug Roberts
"you don’t need a college degree to understand that it’s never a good idea to get your party planning tips from a Jackass movie."
-- Joslyn Gray
"Serendipity is grossly under appreciated."
-- Chug Roberts
"The law of gravity can take care of itself, the law that you go on green and stop on red needs all the help it can get."
-- Mark Halpern