Category: Thought

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966).

We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.

Pythagoras, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers,

We’re here to make space more accessible to all. We want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow. We’ve all us on this stage have had the most extraordinary experience, and we’d love it if a number of you can have it, too. . . . If you ever had a dream, now is the time to make it come true — and I’d like to end by saying welcome to the dawn of a new space age.

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born July 18, 1950), upon returning from his “first billionaire in space” flight on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity, July 11, 2021.

The difference is Michael Cohen’s been convicted. I haven’t been.

Michael Avenatti, upon being asked about being charged with more crimes than his favorite target in his harassment campaign against President Trump, for which Avenatti became a darling of the mainstream media. Avenatti was sentenced, last week, to two and one half years in prison for extortion. Other cases are pending.

For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood.

Magna Carta Libertatum (“Great Charter of Freedoms”), commonly called Magna Carta (also Magna Charta; “Great Charter”), Clause 20, as signed by King John of England at Runnymede, first drafted by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.

George Reisman, “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian,” Mises Institute, 11/11/2005.

The gold standard alone makes the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups. The gold standard alone is what the nineteenth-century freedom-loving leaders (who championed representative government, civil liberties, and prosperity for all) called ‘sound money.’

Ludwig von Mises, “The Gold Problem,”  p. 185.

Competition is merely the absence of oppression.

Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (posthumous, 1850), par. 10.4.

Some people say we will never know, not until China confesses, or unless there’s a whistle blower — but, well, we have a whistle blower: it was the virus itself. It came here; it came out of China; and it carried [to] us genetic information. . . . Yes, it was a laboratory leak.

Dr. Richard Muller, after discussing how China blacklists scientists who would gather and publish evidence for a laboratory leak hypothesis for origins of the CCP virus, before the GOP House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing, June 29, 2021. “China has managed to interfere, to break, United States’ freedom of expression freedom of investigation, freedom of thought.” He advanced five facts to show the gain-of-function origin of SARS-CoV-2: (1) Lack of pre-pandemic infections; (2) absence of a host animal; (3) unprecedented genetic purity; (4) no known way for the spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory; (5) optimized to attack humans, “again something that had never happened in … natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”

Note: the bracketed word is in place of a sic notice. Dr. Muller misspoke and said “with us” instead of what he obviously intended, “to us” or, perhaps, “with itself.”

Melius est bene mori, quam male vivere . . . qui mortem metuit, amittit gaudia vitae; super omnia vincit veritas, vincit, qui occiditur, quia nulla ei nocet adversitas, si nulla ei dominatur iniquitas.

It is better to die well, than to live wrongly . . . who is afraid of death loses the joy of life; truth prevails all, prevails who is killed, because no adversity can harm him, who is not dominated by injustice.

Jan Hus, Letter to Christian of Prachatice, as quoted in John Huss: His Life, Teachings and Death, After Five Hundred Years (1915) by David Schley Schaff, p. 58. “Super omnia vincit veritas” (Truth Prevails All) was adopted as the motto by Hussite warriors, and centuries later this motto was inscribed on the banner of the Presidents of the Czechoslovakia and now (in Czech translation) is inscribed on the banner of the President of the Czech Republic.