Mark Wood - Personal Homepage

Quotes:

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife." - Douglas Adams.

"Our universe isn't just described by math, but it is math in the sense that we're all parts of a giant mathematical object." - Max Tegmark.

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain." - Frederic Bastiat, The Law.

"I am a fool, but I know I'm a fool and that makes me smarter than you." - Socrates.

"Since delusional political beliefs are free, the voter consumes until he reaches his "satiation point," believing whatever makes him feel best. When a person puts on his voting hat, he does not have to give up practical efficacy in exchange for self-image, because he has no practical efficacy to give up in the first place." - Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, p.132

"Only a weak man needs to show force." - Myuran Sukumaran.

"the kind of information they conceal in books" - Oliver Platt as Hector Cyr in Lake Placid (1999).

"Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don't fight for slaverym, fight for liberty! You the people have the power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . ." - Charlie Chaplin.

"A communist is someone who reads Marx and Lenin. An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin." - Ronald Reagan.

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu (1641).

"Never say anything in an electronic message that you wouldn't want appearing, and attributed to you, in tomorrow morning's front-page headline in the New York Times." - Colonel David Russell, former head of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office.

"Those who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so." - Friedrich Hayek.

"Creative writing is both natural and a skill set. The more you do the better you get. Think of it like shagging" - Irvine Welsh.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process, he does not become a monster." - Friedrich Nietzsche.

"A man is a god in ruins" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." - Robert Firth.

"I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless." - Henry David Thoreau.

"As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind." - The Epic of Gilgamesh.

"Hold my hand in yours, and we will not fear what hands like ours can do." - The Epic of Gilgamesh.

"Even the gods Cowered like dogs at what they had done." - The Epic of Gilgamesh.

"Nine out of ten eugenicists in the 20th Century were also Progressives or "Socialists, as central to the eugenic creed is the desire to engineer and centrally plan human reproduction and heredity. These were not people that believed in individual liberty. They certainly didn't believe the individual had the right to chose their own mate freely. They were statists. They were totalitarians at heart." - A.E. Samaan.

"There is no means by which "the rich" can be taxed without ultimately taxing "the poor" far more heavily. And one tax tends to increase all other taxes, instead of lessening them, because tax expenditure goes into things which require upkeep and yield no return (public buildings and political jobs)." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Political power has a ratchet action; it works only one way, to augment itself. A transfer occurs by which the power cannot be retracted, once it is bestowed. In the lowest illustration of this, a candidate for office may promise the voters that he will reduce taxes, or the number of offices or the powers of office. But once he is elected, he can use the taxes, the officeholders or the powers to ensure re-election; therefore, the motive of the promise is no longer operative. By cutting down expenditure or the number of officeholders or graft, he will certainly create enemies, so the reverse motive, impelling him to evade his promise, is doubled. The voter can only vote the incumbent out; but the next officeholder will come into those augmented powers, and be still harder to get rid of in turn." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Government cannot "restore competition," or "ensure" it. Government is monopoly; and all it can do is to impose restrictions which may issue in monopoly, when they go so far as to require permission for the individual to engage in production." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This is the reason why private property belongs to man as a creative being (a right both natural and divine)." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"The free economy produces its money as it produces steel, by going and getting it, digging the ore out of the ground..." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Gold was not and is not given value by fiat, any more than cheese or cotton or leather were given value by fiat. It has value because it serves a vital need. Nothing can be given value by fiat. If a gold coin of the Roman Republic were dug up now, it would have its original value, though the Roman Republic perished two thousand years ago. So would a Russian gold ruble minted under the czars, or a gold coin of Germany or France dated before 1914; though the last czar was shot in a cellar, the last German emperor fled the country and died in exile and France has suffered invasion and conquest. But paper currency of Russia, Germany or France before 1914 is now waste paper." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"When paper currency is depreciated, the difference has to come out somewhere; and the main cut is in wages. The fact is that heavy government expenditure must always be taken from the workingman's wages; there is no other possible source. But the depreciation in currency comes out of wages immediately; whatever anyone gets in his pay envelope will simply buy him that much less in goods." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"All the inventions of man have individualism as their end, because they spring from the individual function of intelligence, which is the creative and productive source..." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Because man is not deterministic, there can be no set order of his discoveries. Progress is always possible, but it depends upon the unpredictable use of intelligence. From the known record, it does not appear that men have ever wholly lost any important body of knowledge once attained; though it might lie unused for a time, until the moral principles were affirmed by which material science could be applied beneficially. The precedence of the moral order is clear, since useful discoveries occur only when men secure liberty by restraint of the political power. Such discoveries were made at various times and places, and brought together; but the principles involved are universal." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)