Jim’s Quote of the Day:
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.” – Mark Twain, in a letter, 1908
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.” – Mark Twain, in a letter, 1908
“Be not deaf to the sound that warns! Be not gull’d by a despot’s plea! Are figs of thistles or grapes of thorns? How should a despot set men free? Form! form! Riflemen form! Ready, be ready to meet the storm! Riflemen, riflemen, riflemen form!” – Afred Tennyson, “The War”
“Thus the men of democratic times require to be free in order to procure more readily those physical enjoyments for which they are always longing. It sometimes happens, however, that the excessive taste they conceive for these same enjoyments makes them surrender to the first master who appears. The passion for worldly welfare then defeats itself and, without their perceiving it, throws the object of their desires to a greater distance. There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education …
“ ‘Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, “How do we rob you?” In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—the whole nation of you—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.’ ” – Malachi 3:8-10
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country" – Benjamin Franklin
“Inflation is a special concern over the next decade given the pending avalanche of government debt about to be unloaded on world financial markets. The need to finance very large fiscal deficits during the coming years could lead to political pressure on central banks to print money to buy much of the newly issued debt.” – Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, from commentary in The Financial Times, June 26, 2009
“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.” – James Yorke
"…the Constitution does not repose in the Congress the power to bail out individuals or private industry: Bailouts violate the Equal Protection doctrine because the Congress can’t fairly pick and choose who to bail out and who to let expire; they violate the General Welfare Clause because they benefit only a small group and not the general public; they violate the Due Process Clause because they interfere with contracts already entered into… Worse still, Congress lacks the power to let someone else decide how to spend the peoples’ money. "- Judge Andrew Napolitano, November 25, 2008
"The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money can not be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; …
“The LORD will guide you continually, And satisfy your soul in drought, And strengthen your bones; You shall be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail” – Isaiah, 58:11, NKJV
“Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence in understanding its properties.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.” – Cormac McCarthy (author of the disaster novel The Road )
"How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" – Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, December 5, 1996
“And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.” – Nathan Fillion as Captain Mal Reynolds, Serenity , 2005. (Screenplay by Joss Whedon)
"Economists were created to make weather forecasters look good." – Rupert Murdoch