George's Favorite Quotes

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

--W. Somerset Maugham

Politics/Government

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

-- H.L. Mencken

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

-- George Washington

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

-- Ambrose Bierce

... once you go down the road of collectivism, has any bureaucrat ever said "No, please, don't give us any more money or power. Clearly this is not a problem that government can solve."

-- Vin Suprynowicz

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

-- Charles de Gaulle

I have nothing else to say. We -- we did -- if -- the -- the -- I -- I -- the stories are just as they have been said.

-- Bill Clinton, when asked if there was any truth in the stories about his extramarital affairs when he was the governor of Arkansas

(Looking at busts of the founding fathers while visiting Monticello): Who are all these guys?

-- Al Gore

A leopard never changes his stripes

-- Al Gore

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.

-- David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes.

They gave me a book of checks. They didn't ask for any deposits.

-- Congressman Joe Early (D-Mass) at a press conference to answer questions about the House Bank scandal

He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.

-- Richard Darman, director of OMB, explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual

-- Thomas Jefferson

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

-- Thomas Jefferson

On every question of construction [of the Constitution], let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p.322

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civiliztions has been 200 years.

-- Alexander Tyler

The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right.

-- Ayn Rand

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

-- Otto von Bismarck

Did you ever hear anyone say "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very dangerous to me?"

-- Joseph Henry Jackson

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.

-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

-- Eric Hoffer

The more laws, the less justice.

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws.

-- Cornelius Tacitus

A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.

-- Finley Peter Dunne

The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.

-- Helmut Schoeck

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

-- William H. Borah

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

-- H.L. Mencken

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would you replace it with?" When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

-- Thomas Sowell

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.

-- Ayn Rand

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

-- H.L. Mencken

The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.

-- John Jay

...when the federal government takes away the ability to fail, they also take away the desire to succeed.

--Doug Thompson

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

- Thomas Jefferson, First inaugural address, 1801

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

-- Robert Heinlein

I predict happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

-- Thomas Jefferson

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.

-- James Fenimore Cooper

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

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.

-- F.A. Hayek

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

-- Thomas Jefferson

No people has ever been ignorant and free.

-- Thomas Jefferson

The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

-- Frederic Bastiat

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday.

-- H. L. Mencken, on FDR

Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work -- i.e., by applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labour-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery -- i.e., the appropriation of the labour-products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land-ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.

-- Albert Jay Nock

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

-- Benjamin Franklin

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

-- Thomas Sowell

Geek

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.

-- Anonymous

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

-- Maurice Wilkes