Maggie's Farm

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Richard Feynman, via The Difference between ‘True Science’ and ‘Cargo-Cult Science’ at Pajamas

This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill's last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: "It makes you proud to be British."

via Samizdata

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.

Mother Teresa

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.

Frederic Bastiat

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Warren Buffett

Lord Acton, arguing against the 1870 promulgation of the concept of Papal Infallibility:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

“I pretty much have my bad inclination [‘yetzer hara’] under control; it’s my good inclination [‘yetzer hatov’] that always gets me into trouble.”

Rabbi Wolfe Kelman (h/t, Vanderleun). I suppose that's the Yiddish version of "No good deed goes unpunished."

"We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey."

Stephen Covey (h/t Retriever)

It's an oldie -

The old farmer is late serving breakfast to the animals. Pig says to chicken "So, what will we have for breakfast?"

Chicken replies "I suggest eggs and bacon."

"There's no such thing as a single lie."

Via Wizbang's A Tangled Web. It's not just that one lie leads to another; it's that liars tend to lie. It's part of who they are. See People of the Lie, a book about which Amazon quotes:

Scott Peck is a psychiatrist turned author and lecturer. His name is a household word with the self-help crowd. In People of the Lie, Peck takes on the topic of evil. The"volume" cited is not an abridgment but a group of case studies from the first chapters of the book, along with commentary. The presentations are consistently well done. Peck reads with a soft, yet strong voice that is both self-assured and reassuring.

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."

Frederic Bastiat

The New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution.

Whittaker Chambers (h/t, Dr. Bob)

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement.  They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty.  They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship.  They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.  They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. 

Ludwig von Mises, 1944, via Am Thinker

"Is democratic behavior that which democracies like to engage in, or is it behavior that will preserve a democracy?"

Aristotle. Discussed at Reb

Now, the pursuit of power is a zero-sum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

Irving Kristol, as quoted in Chicago Boyz' Paying Higher Taxes Can Be Very Profitable. How many times have we said the same thing here at Maggie's? The pursuit of power is what is sordid and sick, but everybody has to make an honest living.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Frederic Bastiat

Stolen from Chicago Boyz:

"There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority."

F.A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom.

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall.  Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day.  Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down.  And this is all life really means.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. 

Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420

"Self-respect requires fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues; self-esteem encourages emotional incontinence that, while not actually itself a cardinal sin, is certainly a vice, and a very unattractive one. Self-respect and self-esteem are as different as depth and shallowness."

Ted Dalrymple, via Dr. Sanity's BAD ROMANCE

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

John F. Kennedy, via Media Mythbusters 

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.

GK Chesterton (h/t, Dr. Bob). Indeed. We alluded to that topic in our Two Americas on Saturday.

When I was in high school, our Headmaster never praised intelligence in his homilies on God and life in daily Chapel, but he did praise what he called "stick-to-it-iveness" and "going the extra mile" all the time. I thought "banal nostrums" at the time, but now I know better -

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength,  but through persistence.

Buddha

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Edison

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

W.C. Fields

Nullius in verba

Motto of the Royal Society.

To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.

"I suspect that nationalism became unfashionable not because of Germany, but because it interfered with the spread of communism."

AVI. Germany was sort-of racially imperialistic, not nationalistic in the usual sense. Like Jihad, had they a modern army. We here at Maggie's prefer nationalism, federalism, and localism. Whatever is closest to the real people who pay the tax bills. No "New World Order," thank you. We fear centralism because we know those statist folks are crafty but aren't wise, and that they have their own interests in mind. Our Florentine hero Niccolo understood all that very well.

Alas, the man's name does a disservice to the brilliant Florentine Renaissance political scientist and student of human nature that he was.

However, I did not know that he wrote comedy on the side. Another Renaissance Man, as it were.

I like his face: shrewd and discerning, but ready to laugh.

"Princes and governments are far more dangerous than the other elements within society.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli

"It's not that some people need more sleep than others, it's that some people sleep faster than others."

Peter DeVries

It's a classic, often misquoted as Wimpy saying "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." However, that may have been from a different Popeye episode.

It's Here. I love it.

(This was clearly before credit cards were widespread.)

I've been a kid, and I've been an adult. Adult's better.

Robert Parker, quoted at Wash. Rebel

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

H.L. Mencken

Apparatchiks who pretend to be revolutionaries — that’s an awful lot of the press these days.

Prof. Reynolds, here.

There’s nothing like Lent for reflecting on the sins of other people.

A sarcastic Mead, linked here. Oscar Wilde could have said that.

Re humanitarians,

"They are compassionate to it (humanity) doubtless, as one may be compassionate to the most revolting animal. But their dislike of it appears to be general and fundamental."

G K Chesterton "Humanitarian Hate," 1908, from AVI's Chesterton, Conrad, and HG Wells