Category: Thought

“Even good men in office, in time, imperceptibly lose sight of the people, and gradually fall into measures prejudicial to them.”

The Federal Farmer, 1788

“A central bank is not a natural product of banking development. It is imposed from outside or comes into being as the result of Government favours. This factor is responsible for marked effects on the whole currency and credit structure which brings it into sharp contrast with what would happen under a system of free banking from which Government protection was absent.”

Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking (1936)

“Right now, there is agreement, sort of, on both sides, or maybe even all sides, that . . . . people are successful now not because they’re good, but because the system is rigged. . . .

“The difference is that the Left looks at a rigged system and says we need a bigger system.”

Andy Levy, February 20, 2016

“Criminalizing offensive speech is a far greater and essential danger to freedom than terrorism is. Anybody who wants to criminalize speech that they find offensive differs from the terrorists only in degree, not in kind.”

“When both parties agree, grab your wallet.”

John Stossel, February 19, 2016

There weren’t ever hearings on any judicial nomination until the 1930s.

Kevin Gutzman, February 17, 2016

I do not like the idea of happyness — it is too momentary — I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness.

Georgia O’Keeffe, a corrective note marked in Anita Pollitzer’s mss. biography of the artist.

Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united under the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government, and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. . . .

Thomas Jefferson, Kentucky Resolutions (November 1798).

Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Anita Pollitzer (December 1915)

There is a moral in the ‘Nominalist and Realist’ that will prove all sums. It runs something like this: No matter how sincere and confidential men are in trying to know or assuming that they do know each other’s mood and habits of thought, the net result leaves a feeling that all is left unsaid; for the reason of their incapacity to know each other, though they use the same words. They go on from one explanation to another but things seem to stand about as they did in the beginning ‘because of that vicious assumption.’ But we would rather believe that music is beyond any analogy to word language and that the time is coming, but not in our lifetime, when it will develop possibilities unconceivable now, — a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.

Charles Ives, in Essays Before a Sonata (1920).