Mr. Jeeves
Since Jun 27, 2001
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Mr. Jeeves
Since Jun 27, 2001
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“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.” -
-- Gail Wynand, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
-- Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
"One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"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."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Natural laws have no pity."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"There is a ready solution for anyone on the public payroll who feels that he is not paid enough: He can resign and work for a living. This applies with equal force to Congressmen, Welfare 'clients', school teachers, generals, garbage collectors, and judges."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
-- James Madison, The Federalist #10
"…democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all, and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel."
-- John Adams
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined... The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun."
-- Patrick Henry
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear".
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans... "
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to R. Livingston, April 18th, 1802
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pense'es, #894
"Jurors should acquit even against the judge's instruction....if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong."
-- Alexander Hamilton, 1804
"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
-- Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors …Were women to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”
-- Queen Victoria, 1870
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
-- Mark Twain
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder...the state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
-- Frederick Bastiat
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. "
-- Daniel Webster
"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. "
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin … would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"There is room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we must assure that the crucible turns out Americans and not some random dwellers in a polyglot boarding house."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money."
-- Margaret Thatcher
"The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men."
-- Winston Churchill
"During the past 20 years, the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English Left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it? attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy League of Nations that these people imagined. In an age of führers and bombing planes, it was a disaster."
-- George Orwell
" The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States"
-- George Orwell
" We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-- Adolf Hitler
"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."
-- Nikita Khrushchev
"No Communist, Fascist, or any other totalitarian committed to the destruction . . . of the principles and practices of democracy should be permitted to teach in a democracy. Freedom does not imply freedom to destroy freedom."
-- Dr. Clarence R. Decker, President of the University of Kansas City, 1949
"Violence never settles anything."
-- Genghis Khan, 1162-1227
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H. L. Mencken
"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Men start out with high ideals and end with secure jobs."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Modern life in Western countries has also become so privileged and protected that it is hard to convince affluent suburbanites that shooting and bombing your way to power remains a norm in much of the world. Wealthy moderns too often imagine that issues of governance, religion, and tribal affiliation are solved through talk shows, lawsuits, or 60 Minutes reports. Mostly, though, these conflicts abroad continue to be settled through violence."
-- Victor Davis Hanson
"There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "
-- Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service; in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
"(Al Gore) is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science. Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
-- Professor Bob Cook, from the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia.
"Most of the world's Muslims are not terrorists. But most of the world's terrorists are Muslims."
-- Michael J. Bowers
"When I come back to Britain I see a pretty good multicultural society. The only element that is not fitting in is Islam."
-- Martin Amis
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
-- Flannery O'Connor
"The music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
-- Thelonious Monk
"Steve Vai's guitar wizardry is so profound that in earlier times he would have been burned as a witch."
-- Brad Tolinski, Editor, Guitar World
"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base."
-- Dave Barry