Notable Quotes

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

--Emma Goldman

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

--Theodore Roosevelt

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

--Winston Churchill

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

--Seth Godin

During the war, Lincoln overheard someone remark that he hoped "the Lord was on the Union's side." Lincoln responded with this sharp rebuke:
I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.

--Abraham Lincoln

You can safely assume you’ve made God into your own image, when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.

--Anne Lammott

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

--G.K. Chesterton

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

--Frédéric Bastiat

Permanent mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people, who, having finished their training for work, are forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed. In their ranks the soldiers of the coming revolutions are recruited. This indeed is the tragedy of our situation. It is not Capitalism which is responsible for the evils of permanent mass unemployment, but the policy which paralyzes its working.

--Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

Democratic government, inevitably beholden to majority opinion, will never cease to war against controversial cultural innovations.

--Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture

The liberal critique of the argument in favor of war is fundamentally different from that of the humanitarians.  It starts from the premise that not war, but peace, is the father of all things.  What alone enables mankind to advance and distinguishes man from the animals is social cooperation.  It is labor alone that is productive:  it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.  War only destroys; it cannot create.  War, carnage, destruction, and devastation we have in common with the predatory beasts of the jungle; constructive labor is our distinctively human characteristic.

--Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition

Freedom regularly makes ridiculous anyone who thinks he has figured out the limits of what is possible.

--Charles Murray

Perpetual boredom is an unattractive state. So is perpetual nonboredom.

--Nicholas Carr, in The web expands to fill all boredom

It\u2019s not that the free market has been tried and found wanting, it is wanting to be found tried.

--Chris Brady

Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.

--Frederic Bastiat

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

--Madeleine L'Engle

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

Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise.  It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”

--Thomas Sowell

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

--Murray Rothbard

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

--Thomas Sowell

In the academic world, you think now and decide never; and in the government, it's just exactly the other way around.

--G. Warren Nutter

First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. ... If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of the collective whole. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members' actions.

--Ludwig von Mises in "Human Action"

Rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations

--Chinese saying

We either render service of some kind or suffer the consequence. Government, on the other hand, is completely outside the competitive field, and thrives not in proportion to the service it renders but in proportion to the power it wields.

--Frank Chodorov, Psychology of the Political Class

Efficiency in a public business is not reflected in any profit or loss statement; it shows up at the polls.

--Frank Chodorov, Psychology of the Political Class

If markets fail, governments fail too. Government is the only enterprise on earth that when it fails, it merely does the same thing over again, just bigger

--Don Luskin, TrendMacro

The circumstances of our lives have as much power as we choose to give them.

--David McNally

Companies that operate in a free market generally work as hard as they can to make that market not free.

--Seth Godin

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

--Thomas Sowell on Politics Government

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

All solutions have costs and there is no reason to suppose that government regulation is called for simply because the problem is not well handled by the market or the firm.

--Ronald Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost"

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

--Bertrand Russell

Trust doesn't develop from always doing the right thing. It comes from taking responsibility when you do the wrong thing.

--Simon Sinek

When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.

--Fredric Bastiat

Man thinks not only for the sake of thinking, but also in order to act.

--Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 37

Nobody knows how bad they are until they have tried very hard to be good.

--C. S. Lewis

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero.

--Voltaire

Discipline is the middle name of the wealthy.

--Dave Ramsey

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

--Thomas Babington Macaulay

...it is more important, and more difficult, to check one outburst of temper, however trivial, than to engage in any number of public demonstrations against brutality and injustice.

--Malcolm Muggeridge

Maladjustment to cliche is prerequisite an authentic awareness of things as they actually are.

--Abraham Heschel, "God in Search of Man - A Philosophy of Judaism"

The government can't give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

--Dr. Adrian Rogers

You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealth out of prosperity.

--Dr. Adrian Rogers

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.

--Thomas Szasz, 1973

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intellignet man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

--Leo Tolstoy

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

--F. A. Hayek in "The Fatal Conceit"

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

--Howard Aiken

Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.

--Thomas Sowell, "Intellectuals and Society", page 17

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

--Voltaire

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. [...] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. [...] You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

--Michael Crichton

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

--John Dalberg-Acton aka Lord Acton

Poor is a state of mind. Broke is just passing through.

--Dave Ramsey

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

--Voltaire (translated) in "Money" (1770)

Blaming the crisis on "greed" is like blaming plane crashes on gravity

--Various

It may be precisely because the politicians rendered themselves so ineffectual in Thailand that the country has prospered.

--David Warren in "Feed the world"

When a politician announces, at the beginning of a major speech, that he is going to be entirely honest with you, you should stop trying to protect your wallet. For it is time to defend your soul.

--David Warren in "The Cairo Disaster"

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

--C. S. Lewis in "Present Concerns"

I will not be a party to stealing money from one group of citizens to give to another group of citizens. No matter what the need or apparent justification, once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again.

--Former US president Grover Cleveland

Learning by example isn't the best way to learn — it's the only way to learn.

--Albert Einstein

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

--Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

[Economics] is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence... Economics deals with society's fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.

--Ludwig von Mises, "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, The Place of Economics in Learning"

The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

--Henry Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson, The Lesson"

If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

--Ludwig von Mises, "Planning for Freedom"

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

--Frédéric Bastiat

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

--Milton Friedman

The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamoring to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

--Henry Louis Mencken

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.

--G. K. Chesterton

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

--P. J. O'Rourke

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

--Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

I think there's no greater indictment of the welfare state than the fact that the black family held together through centuries of slavery and discrimination, but fell apart in the liberal welfare state.

--Thomas Sowell

Democracy is not freedom; democracy is the tyranny of the majority. When the majority is free to oppress the minority, nobody is free, because in some aspect of their life, everybody is a minority.

--Russell Nelson, aka The Angry Economist

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

--Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

--G. K. Chesterton

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

--Ronald Regan

There are two clear and present dangers to liberty in America. One is known as the Left, and the other is known as the Right.

--Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

--Thomas Jefferson

if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens."

--Bruce Schneier

Today, wanting someone else's money is called 'need', wanting to keep your own money is called 'greed', and 'compassion' is when politicians arrange the transfer.

--Joseph Sobran

Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.

--Dick Armey

Nobody spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own.

--Milton Friedman

I dare not commit myself with politicians. No one knows what they will be next year by what they are this year.

--Francis Wayland (1796-1865)

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

--Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

--Noam Chomsky

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

--Thomas Jefferson

There is no getting around the fact that the institution that is the source of funding will ultimately make the decisions on how resources are used.

--Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

--Charles Krauthammer

The state ... need not interact with people justly or with any concern for their preferences or rights at all, much less actually arrive at mutually satisfactory terms with them. It may act unilaterally, and the individual has no recourse other than to accept whatever the state determines with regard to how much of his property will be expropriated, what his children will be taught in school, or where he must be sent to fight and die.

--Thomas Woods

[C]ompetition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at.

--F.A. Hayek, Nobel Prize-winning economist

Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.

--Melisa Schoeppler, burn victim

During this [last] century's wars, there were some 38 million battle deaths, but almost four times more people -- at least 170 million -- were killed by governments for ethnic, racial, tribal, religious, or political reasons. I call this phenomenon democide, and it means that authoritarian and totalitarian governments are more deadly than war.

--R.J. Rummel

Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class. This, at least, is its inevitable consequence, if not the immediate result.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

In China we can question Darwin but we can't question the government; in America, you can question the government but you can't question Darwin.

--a Chinese scientist

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

--Barry Goldwater

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

--James Madison

Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.

--Will Smith

Patents don't encourage innovation; they take it out into a back alley and beat it senseless.

--Jim Rapoza

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

--C.A.R. Hoare

The Libertarian Party is at best an effort to do the least bad possible, and who would vote for that?

--Russell Nelson, aka The Angry Economist

A strong government has the effect of infantizing adults. This cannot be a good thing.

--Russell Nelson, aka The Angry Economist

You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it.

--attributed to Feynman, borrowed from von Neumann.

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

--Bruce Schneier in an Interview by ITConversations

Power can be used for good or evil, but it's usually used for evil. Better not to concentrate it.

--Russell Nelson, aka The Angry Economist

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

--Plato

Chill, folks. Markets are public places where makers and vendors offer users and customers lots of choice. Not coliseums where gladiators kick and stab each other to death while the rest of us cheer over bruises and blood.

--Doc Searls

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

--Benjamin Franklin

Chance is a word void of meaning, nothing happens without a cause.

--Voltaire; Philosophy Dictionary

Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that's horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing. It's just bibble-babble.

--Harlan Ellison

... the borrower is servant to the lender.

--Proverbs 22:7

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

--George Bernard Shaw

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

--Hermann Goering, Nazi and war criminal, 1883-1946

Rights that apply only to some are not rights in the best sense of the word at all.

--Sigrid Klaus (Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial March 30 2004)

If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

--Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution ... is patenting as much as we can. ... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

--Bill Gates

If you can't say what you mean, you can never be trusted to mean what you say.

--Character on Babylon 5

The world is changing every day. The only question is, who's doing it?

--Character on Babylon 5

Character is doing the right thing when nobody is looking.

--Congressman J. C. Watts (R Oklahoma)

Our problem today is not that we have lost our way. Mankind is forever losing his way. Our problem is that we have lost our address.

--G. K. Chesterton

Reason is not useless, but reason is not enough. [...] Reason and faith are like two shoes -- you can get a lot further with both than with just one.

--Character on Babylon 5

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

--Networking truth #12, Ross Callon, RFC 1925

A person, who is nice to you and rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

--Unknown

The most important things in life are not for sale.

--Unknown

Honestly, security experts don't pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft's poor products are one of the reasons we're in business. We pick on them because they've done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products' security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft. Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind of nonsense from Microsoft and its products.

--Bruce Schneier

A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines.

--Alan Cox

If you think you need threads then your processes are too fat.

--Rob Pike

I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou.

--Paul Tomblin

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.

--Indira Gandhi

Schools may have eliminated winners and losers, but life hasn't.

--Hugh Arscott

If we thought this was a trap, we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know, we have a lot of lawyers.

--Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an I.B.M. vice president, in response to the latest Microsoft attack on open source software.

Bloat is not about being big. Bloat is about being slow and stupid and not realizing that it's because of design mistakes.

--Linus Torvalds

It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

--Erik Naggum

It's hard to be prejudiced against someone you love.

--Winton Marsalles, in interview on CBC, March 20, 2001

If the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) will deliver democracy, why do concerned citizens not currently have access to the FTAA text? Why is the Canadian government preparing the largest police and security operation in the country's history, estimated to cost $30 million? Does our democracy not entitle us to demonstrate against something we believe is so fundamentally wrong?

--Martin Olszynksi

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

--Thomas Jefferson

If you try to solve problems you don't already know that people have, you create unnecessary complexity. Always start with the simplest possible program.

--Russell Nelson

The new glue is, unfortunately, ignored by recent versions of the BIND cache; the detailed technical explanation for this is that the BIND company is a bunch of idiots.

--D. J. Bernstein, discussing yet another BIND failing.

Just wait, My crystal ball is infallible.

--Linus Torvalds, discussing the future of smart I/O hardware.

The axfr-get output is designed to work. It is not designed for people to read.

--D. J. Bernstein, discussing perceived problems in automated data transfer tools.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

--Perlis's Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept. 1982

Warren [Buffett] is famous for driving older-model cars. In the early days of his partnership he drove a VW Beetle. People observing this attribute it to a general lack of interest in acquiring material items. What they fail to see is how his compounding influences his spending habits. An automobile that costs $20,000 today will be worth little or nothing in ten years. But Warren knows that he can get a 23% annual compounding rate of return on his investments. This means that $20,000 invested today will be worth $158,518 in ten years. In twenty years it will be worth $1,256,412, and in thirty years it will be worth $9,958,257. To Warren, $9,958,257 is just way too much money to throw away on a new car.

--Mary Buffett & David Clark, "Buffettology", (C) 1997, p.76

Experience is a teacher that gives the examination first and the lesson afterwards.

--Unknown

Has political correctness turned us all into a bunch of ninnies? Joe Lieberman ...[is] a deeply religious and observant Jew. Terrific. But a similar Christian would be described as evangelical at least and probably as a fundamentalist. Just imagine the outrage over a fundamentalist Christian as VP. I find the hypocrisy hair-raising.

--Barbara Amiel, "Hypocrisy in politics", Maclean's September 4, 2000

Think of it this way: threads are like salt, not like pasta. You like salt, I like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta.

--Larry McVoy, a Linux kernel developer

Parts that don't exist can't break.

--Russell Nelson

Those who know that it cannot be done should not be allowed to interfere with those who are doing it.

--Unknown

Things can only really be scientifically true if they could also be false with different data.

--Karl Popper

Worry is interest paid before a debt is due.

--Unknown

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

--Albert Einstein

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

--Henry Spencer

An open mind, like an open mouth, does have a purpose: and that is, to close it upon something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.

--G. K. Chesterton

The only way to live happily with people is to overlook their faults and admire their virtues. That's what they are doing for you...

--Unknown

Zero Defects, n.:
   The result of shutting down a production line.

--Unknown

If users are made to understand that the system administrator's job is to make computers run, and not to make them happy, they can, in fact, be made happy most of the time. If users are allowed to believe that the system administrator's job is to make them happy, they can, in fact, never be made happy.

--Paul Evans

As widely reported in the popular media, NT 5.0 [AKA Windows 2000] is the last nail in the Unix coffin. However, Unix isn't in the coffin. It's putting in an honest day's work and looking down into the grave, wondering what the heck is sealing itself into a wooden box 6 feet underground...

--Unknown

Microsoft shapes NT to respond to competitive threats. To commit to NT means to commit to a relatively unknown future, since new threats to Microsoft appear on a regular basis.

--Nicholas Petreley from "The Last 10 Minutes", NC World June 1998

When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone." ... Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.

--Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope"

The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

--Bill Gates from "The Road Ahead," p. 265.

The past is inaccurate. Whoever lives long enough knows how much what he had seen with his own eyes becomes overgrown with rumor, legend a magnifying or belittling hearsay. "It was not like that at all!" -- he would like to exclaim, but will not, for they would have seen only his moving lips without hearing his voice.

--Czeslaw Milosz (translated)

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

--Douglas Adams in Guardian, August 25, 1995

Practically all the major technological changes since the beginning of industrialization have resulted in unforseen consequences ... Our very power over nature threatens to become itself a source of power that is out of control ... Choices are posed that are too large, too complex, too important and comprehensive to be safely left to fallible human beings.

--Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener as quoted in Wired 5.06 (page 110)

Markets are self-correcting. That's why I trust markets more than governments. Governments usually aren't self-correcting, until too late.

--Interview with Walter Wriston as reported in Wired 4.10

Money goes where it is wanted and stays where it is well treated, and that's all she wrote. This annoys governments to no end.

--Interview with Walter Wriston as reported in Wired 4.10

Should the US government lift the export controls on strong encryption? Yes, I think so. You can buy better stuff in Europe than you can here. We don't have a monopoly on brains.

--Interview with Walter Wriston as reported in Wired 4.10

It takes a lot of hard work to made something easy. Then when you're done, people look at it and ask, "Oh, it's so simple; what was the big deal?"

--Ralph Johnson

Additions? Comments? Corrections? Questions? Mail me!