Mark Wood - Personal Homepage

Quotes:

"Men enslave themselves, forging the chains link by link, usually by demanding protection as a group. When businessmen ask for government credit, they surrender control of their business. When labor asks for enforced "collective bargaining," it has yielded its own freedom. When racial groups are recognized in law, they can be discriminated against by law." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. This is demonstrably true; nor could it occur otherwise. The percentage of positively malignant, vicious or depraved persons is necessarily small, for no species could survive if its members were habitually and consciously bent upon injuring one another. Destruction is so easy that even a minority of persistently evil intent could shortly exterminate the unsuspecting majority of well-disposed persons. Murder, theft, rapine and destruction are easily within the power of every individual at any time. If it is presumed that they are restrained only by fear or force, what is it they fear, or who would turn the force against them if all men were of like mind? Certainly, if the harm done by willful criminals were to be computed, the number of murders, the extent of damage and loss, would be found negligible in the sum total of death and devastation wrought upon human beings by their kind. Therefore, it is obvious that in periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object. When they are not the immediate executants, they are on record as giving approval, elaborating justifications or else cloaking facts with silence, and discountenancing discussion..." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"No one person, though his income be $10 million dollars a year, can take care of every case of need in the world. But supposing he has no means of his own and still imagines that he can make "helping others" at once his primary purpose and the normal way of life, which is the central doctrine of the humanitarian creed, how is he to go about it? ... There is only one way, and that is by the use of the political power in its fullest extension. Hence, the humanitarian feels the utmost gratification when he visits or hears of a country in which everyone is restricted to ration cards. Where subsistence is doled out, the desideratum has been achieved, of general want and a superior power to "relieve" it. The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action. ... Why do kindhearted persons call in the political power? They cannot deny that the means for relief must come from production. But they say there is enough and to spare. Then they must assume that the producers are not willing to give what is "right." Further, they assume that there is a collective right to impose taxes, for any purpose the collective shall determine. They localize that right in "the government," as if it were self-existent. But if taxes are to be imposed for relief, who is the judge of what is possible or beneficial? It must be either the producers, the needy or some third group. To say it shall be all three together is no answer; the verdict must swing upon majority or plurality drawn from one or other group. Are the needy to vote themselves whatever they want? Are the humanitarians, the third group, to vote themselves control of both the producers and the needy? (That is what they have done.) The government is thus supposed to be empowered to give "security" to the needy. It cannot. What it does is to seize the provision made by private persons for their own security, thus depriving everyone..." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"If the full roll of sincere philanthropists were called, from the beginning of time, it would be found that all of them together by their strictly philanthropic activities have never conferred upon humanity one-tenth of the benefit derived from the normally self-interested efforts of Thomas Alva Edison, to say nothing of the greater minds who worked out the scientific principles which Edison applied. Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors and organizers have contributed to the comfort, health and happiness of their fellow men - because that was not their objective." - Isabel Paterson. (The God of the Machine, 1943)

"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence." - Christopher Hitchens.

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?" - Frederic Bastiat, The Law.

"As for libertarian, I've been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term 'philosophical anarchist' or 'autarchist' about me, but 'libertarian' is easier to define and fits well enough." - Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century (1975).

"At the time I wrote Methuselah's Children, I was still politically quite naive, and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes... "It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. "And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws...I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces - with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now." - Robert Anson Heinlein.

"Science is about what is; engineering is about what can be." - Neil Armstrong.

"Okay. We're going to be busy for a minute." - Neil Armstrong.

"Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand" - Neil Armstrong.

"I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine" - Neil Armstrong.

"Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10." - Neil Armstrong.

"Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying." - Neil Armstrong.

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food." - Anthony Bourdain.

"My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg." - Boris Johnson.

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." - Boris Johnson.

"The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas." - Boris Johnson.

"My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet "Right-wing" to mean "something undesirable" is a small but important example." - Daniel Hannan.

"Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse. It's because you get older, your responsibilities are different. Now I'm taking care of children instead of being a child. It makes the world look scarier. That happens to everyone." - Penn Jilette.

"My friend Richard Feynman said, "I don't know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill's Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know."

I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don't know. I try to remember to say "I don't know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn't always work, but I try." - Penn Jillette.

"The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you." - Penn Jillette.

"I love people. And I think if you take the 7 billion people on the planet and you round it off, about 7 billion of them are good. To find bad people is really difficult. Not people doing bad things, but really bad people who get up in the morning and say, How can I fuck people up? That's a really rare thing." - Penn Jillette.

"There are really good sociobiological reasons for why we evolved to cooperate. It really is good for all of us. You can be a hard ass and just run common sense, you know, what is the most effective way for people to interact and you do better if you treat people well, you just do. And on top of that the whole world does better if you treat people well. It works out on any level." - Penn Jillette.

"Luck is probability taken personally." - Chip Denman.

"It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint." - Penn Jillette.

"Government is force - literally, not figuratively. I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone. The fact that the majority thinks they have a way to get something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don't want to pay for it. If you have to use a gun, I don't believe you really know jack. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid." - Penn Jillette.

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort." - Robert A. Heinlein.