Mark Wood - Personal Homepage

Quotes:

"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing." - Emo Philips.

"After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box." - Old Italian proverb.

"When the white missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land." - Desmond Tutu.

"Lawyers believe a person is innocent until proven broke." - Robin Hall.

"Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million and you're a conqueror." - Jean Rostand.

"Having more money doesn't make you happier. I have 50 million dollars but I'm just as happy as when I had 48 million." - Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"In hotel rooms I worry. I can't be the only guy who sits on the furniture naked." - Jonathan Katz.

"If life were fair, Elvis would still be alive today and all the impersonators would be dead." - Johnny Carson.

"I don't believe in astrology. I am a Sagittarius and we're very skeptical." - Warren Tantum.

"The first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone." - George Roberts.

"If God had intended us to fly he would have made it easier to get to the airport." - Jonathan Winters.

"I love Liberty, of course. That's why I'm a Libertarian. But liberty is absolutely toxic if not accompanied by a strong sense of responsibility. For some years, failure to recognize this has been a widespread failing among progressives -- not universal, but depressingly common. And lately, I've been seeing it seeping into the libertarian community. Pardon me for repeating the obvious, but actions have consequences. This can't be escaped. Sometimes, the consequences can be shifted onto the backs of someone else, but this is never right, never fair, and in the long run, it never works." - John K. Fockler, Jr.

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones." - Niccolo Machiavelli.

"Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality." - Sam Harris.

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit." - Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit.

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

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." - H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman.

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." - Robert A. Heinlein.

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." - Dante Alighieri.

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something." - Henry David Thoreau.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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.

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong." - C.G. Jung.

"Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions." - T.S. Eliot.

"A quiet conscience makes one strong!" - Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

"There is no underwear in space." - George Lucas.

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it" - Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader.

"There are three questions that I think would destroy most of the arguments on the left. The first is, "Compared to what?" The second is, "At what cost?" And the third is, "What hard evidence do you have?" - Thomas Sowell.

"Our tax system penalizes those who are producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are only consuming it." - Thomas Sowell.

"The current hysteria over "fake news" - including hysteria by people who have done more than their own fair share of faking news - shows the continuing efforts of the political left to stifle free speech in the country at large, as they already have on academic campuses." - Thomas Sowell.