"There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously." – Thomas Schelling
"We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality." – Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
"Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God, but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." – 3 John 11
“I am fortunate for a wonderful graduate education in the PhD program at Stanford, but I learned more about the way the world works in two months of farming (which saved a wretch like me) than in four years of concentrated study.” – Victor Davis Hanson
"Take hope from the heart of a man and you make him a beast of prey." – Marie Louise de la Ramée
“Survival begins not with guns, gold, and a garden. It starts with self-reliance, strong family and communal bonds, a plan of subterfuge, and clandestine acts centered in the refusal to be subdued. You can’t have it all so you had better spend the scarce time, energy and resources you have left to prepare.” – Tim Case
“For the record, every program the government put in place in 2009 has failed. Yet, we keep doing the same thing, at a cost of literally trillions of dollars. This is madness to the nth power.” – Editor of The Investor’s Business Daily, December, 2009
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." – Mark Twain
"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." – Aldous Huxley
“Unattended children will be given an espresso and a puppy.” – Sign seen posted at the Real Goods store, Hopland, California
Vizzini: “He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!” Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” – Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, and Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride (1987). Screenplay by William Goldman
“Gold – the ultimate money – Why? Because it is the only monetary asset that isn’t someone else’s liability. It doesn’t represent a promise to pay and it isn’t dependent up the survival of a particular power or group of powers. In a word, it is valuable because it is.” – C. M. Allen, 1974
"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
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." – U. S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in the Public Utilities Commission v. Pollack decision, 1952