Category: Thought

However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.

Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities” (1928).

Freedom, privileges, options must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox — finally irregulationary. Sometimes the person who insists upon his prerogatives seems shrill and contentious — but actually he performs a service for all. Freedom naturally should never become license; but regulation should never become restriction.

The character Amiante, in Jack Vance, Emphyrio (1969).

It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one’s time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea shops.

We’re not earning any money by ‘saving.’ The government is manipulating the economy for nobody’s good but its own. Republicans and Democrats both do this; probably Democrats do it for worse purposes than Republicans.
But it’s about time that we all learned what’s going on. Call it a lesson in economic reality.

R.W. Bradford, “Why Don’t Americans Save?” Liberty (June 2005), pp. 23–25. In this essay, Bradford proposed a new statistical measure of economic life, the True Yield on Savings (TYS), with which he calculated, several years before the financial crisis of the late aughts, that, at that time, “you lose money when you save.”

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.

This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.

From the Prologue to the 1384 translation into vernacular English of the Vulgate Bible, by scholastic philosopher John Wycliffe and his colleagues. On May 4, 1415, The Council of Constance posthumously declared Wycliffe a heretic, and commanded his writings be burned. In 1428, by order of Pope Martin V, his corpse was exhumed from consecrated ground and cremated, his ashes scattered into the River Swift.

The market is like a lake agitated by the wind, where the water is incessantly seeking its level without ever reaching it.

Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

Finley Peter Dunne, writing as “Mr. Dooley.”