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• The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid

  G. K. Chesterton

• A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

  Daniel Webster

• Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?

  C. D. Tavares

• "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice that it always coincides with their own desires."

  Susan B. Anthony

• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

  Stephen F Roberts

• It's amazing what can be accomplished when you don't care who gets the credit.

  Harry S. Truman

• When looking for independent evidence of oppression of a group of people most researchers look for things like:-

  • higher levels of crime
  • higher incidence of suicide
  • higher rates of alcoholism, drug addiction etc
  • disproportionate number in prison
  • higher proportion sent to war to die
  • laws which directly discriminate against them

  If we took the relative male/female figures for these indicators of oppression, they would surely show that men are the most oppressed group in the world.

  Steve Palmer

• First Job of Government: Protect people from govermment.
  Second Job of Government: Protect people from each other.
  It must never be the job of government to protect people from themselves.
  

• To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censored, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

  Phillip K. Dick

• "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

  Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

• "People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons."

  Ayn Rand, from _Atlas Shrugged_

• There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance.

  Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts", April 26, 2002

• The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

  Robert Heller

• Politics is like coaching a football team. you have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.

  Unknown

• As conservatives, we must first understand that the liberal mind doesn't operate on facts and logic, rather it is a slave to pure and often irrational emotion. I've found that the best way to communicate with a liberal is to address them as if they were a teenage girl concerned that her nose is too big.

  Amused on politics, 2001

• Banish the use of four letter words
  Whose meanings are never obscure
  The Angles, the Saxons, those hardy old birds
  Were vulgar, obsene and impure.
  But cherish the use of the weasling phrase
  That never quite says what you mean
  You'd better be known for your hypocrite ways
  Than as vulgar, impure and obscene.
  

  "Legacy of Heorot.", Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes.

• "A clear statement is a statement to which the opposite is either true or false. A deep statement is a statement to which the opposite is another deep statement."

  Niels Bohr

• To you this may be a shoving match in defense of some cherished notion, but to me it's a discussion from which I either give or get useful knowledge or leave.

  Tom Breton

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

  William James

• Stupidity is Evil waiting to happen.

  Keith Thernes

• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

  Voltaire

• ... The only way women could have equal rights would be to surrender some.

  Unknown

• Feminizm and Naziism were both created by a small band of malcontents who told lie after lie to create the myth that one group of people was being victimized by another. "Gentiles were the victims of Jews" was the Nazi lie. "Women are the victims of men" is the lie of the feminizt.

  Gary Clark

• Most women throw away more real love than most men get in their lifetimes

  The Eyehome

• When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

  Will James

• While praising the optimist who created the airplane, let us not forget the pessimist who created the parachute.

  Anon.

• If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

  Pam Shaw

• "If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances."

  Julia Sorel

• "If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."

  Chinese Proverb

• A farmer asked his neighbor if he might borrow a rope. "Sorry," said the neighbor, "I'm using my rope to tie up my milk."
  "Rope can't tie up milk."
  "I know," replied the neighbor, "but when a man doesn't want to do something, one reason is as good as another."
  

  From an Arabic proverb

• "The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides."

  Henri Frederic Amiel

• "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."

  A. A. Milne

• "I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters."

  Martin Buber, German Jewish Philosopher, in response to Mahatma Gandhi's suggestion that passive resistance be used to combat the Nazi government in Germany, as was used against the British in India.

• "My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."

  Adlai Stevenson

• "Don't believe what they say - watch what they do!"

  Unknown

• An optimist is someone that has never had much experience

  Richard Schultz

• Any reform that is acceptable to the educational establishment, and that can gain a majority in a legislature, federal or state, is bound to be worse than nothing.

  Irving Kristol's first law of educational reform:

• The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

  Thomas Jefferson

• It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

  Arnold Bennett

• If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

  Anatole France.

• Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.

  Barry Goldwater

• Every advance in civilization has been denounced while it was still recent.

  Bertrand Russell

• "Time makes more converts than reason."

  Thomas Paine

• "It is almost impossible for anyone outside this damn beltway to really understand how the Congress works. If you aren't here, walking the halls of Congress, sitting at bars and attending parties where you get to knock back some brews with Hill staffers, you don't have a handle on the almost numbing amount of bullshit that goes on."

  _CWD_ and _Comm_Daily_ journalist Brock Meeks, post to com-priv mailing list forum, 10/22/94

• "The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power, and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous, or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest..."

  William S. Burroughs, author (censored by the U.S. government; his comments apply now to the underground e-press as well)

• "Information wants to be free."

  Stewart Brand, EFF boardmember, founder of Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. (Among others. No telling who really said this first.)

• "But programmers and authors want to get paid."

  source unknown

• "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." --

  Don Knuth

• "You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal."

  John De Armond <jgd@dixie.com>, _Performance_Engineering_Magazine_, 1994

• "It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead."

  Thomas Jefferson

• "The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

  John Adams, "Notes for an Oration at Braintree", 1772

• "I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire."

  Bruce Sterling, remarks on commercial use of private information, at Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference IV, Chicago IL, Mar. 26, 1994. [full transcript available at ftp.eff.org, /pub/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/cfp94_sterling.speech]

• "A trickle-up model for the new information economy could be effective with the proper filters (our own). Ideas bubbling up instead of homogenizing memes raining down."

  Scott Marshall, from FringeWare mailing list commentary, March 14, 1994

• "There happened in the Middle Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the beneficiaries of the established order were bent on defending it, not so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their interests, as because it seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society."

  Henri Pirenne, _Medieval_Cities,_Their_Origins_and_the_Revival_of_Trade_, 1925

• "Did you learn how to think or how to believe?"

  father of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who asked the young Nader this while questioning him on what he had learned in school one day. Nader describes this as a seminal event in leading him to become a critic of corporate and government policies. (from an interview with Ralph Nader by David Barsamian)

• "There are no guilty women - only women we haven't understood"
  "There are no innocent men - only men who haven't offended yet"

  Unknown

• Teaching self interest without teaching ethics, is teaching crime.

  Jay Hanson (jhanson@ilhawaii.net )

• One can be instructed in society, but one is inspired only in solitude.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• A good slogan can stop analysis for years. A GREAT one can stop it forever.

  Ashish Gulhati, hash@well.sf.ca.us

• 7. No plan survives the first contact intact.
  13. Natural laws have no pity.
  21. Always remember that stupidity is the only Universal Capital Crime.
  26. If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.
  36. Opening your mouth does create a space that your foot can fill all too easily.
  37. Even Murphy's Law doesn't work all of the time.
  39. Discretion is the better part of SURVIVAL.
  41. There is a certain freedom in being totally screwed. It means that nothing you do is going to make it any worse.
  

  "Excerpts from the Universal Survival guide", Unknown

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

  George Bernard Shaw

• Imagine that all our chairs of Astronomy had been founded in the 14th century, and that their incumbents were bound to sign Ptolemic articles. In that case, with every respect for the efforts of the persons thus hampered to attain and expound the truth, I think men of common sense would go elsewhere to learn astronomy.

  Thomas Henry Huxley

• The religionist may be foolish, but he must not be obviously foolish to himself.

  Chapman Cohen

• Is your point so weak that you have to resort to assuming the grossest extremes in order to make it?

  Anonymous Usenet poster

• Policing the net would be like trying to police a jungle for malignant insects.

  priss@tcp.com (Lisa Richardson)

• Without education, we are in the horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously"

  G. K. Chesterfield

• Feminism=The man is wrong.
  Equalism=Equality for both genders.
  

  jazzman419@aol.com (Jazzman419)

• First set the goal. Then set the criteria.

  Anonymous Usenet poster

• No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.

  Turkish Proverb

• "The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions."

  Anonymous ('Hacker's Law')

• "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

  Benjamin Franklin, _Historical_Review_of_Pennsylvania_, 1759.

• "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."

  P.J. O'Rourke, _Parliament of Whores_

• "Official truths are often powerful illusions."

  John Pilger, _Distant_Voices_, 1992

• "Digital technology is the universal solvent of intellectual property rights."

  Tom Parmenter (from _Desperado_, issue 12).

• "When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
  When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
  When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
  Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
  

  Myhr Lyle (myhr@mspost.ulinear.com), email signature file, 1995.

• People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

  Calvin

• the word "scientific" isn't just a meaningless adjective that can be arbitrarily slapped onto any statement to make it sound more convincing.

  kgpl@uno.edu

• Abracadabra, thus we learn
  The more you create, the less you earn,
  The less you earn, the more you're given,
  The less you lead, the more you're driven,
  The more destroyed, the more they feed,
  The more you pay, the more they need,
  The more you earn, the less you keep,
  And now I lay me down to sleep.
  I pray the Lord my soul to take
  If the tax collector hasn't got it before I wake.
  

  Ogden Nash

• People who accord themselves enormous virtue for saying 'horizontally impaired' instead of 'gimpy' - these people are assholes, not to put too fine a point on it.

  P.J. O'Rourke

• My enemy is he who would discredit rather than disprove.

  mblaise@umich.edu (Michael David Hayden)

• "The probability of one person being right increases in a direct porportion to the intensity with which others try to prove him wrong"

  Michael O'Connor - Modern Renaissance Man

• Modesty is NOT a virtue; It's simply an easier vice to endure than conceit.

  adrian@southwind.net

• Be not intimidated, by any terrors, from publishing with utmost freedom... Nor suffer yourself to be wheedled out of your liberty with a pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.

  John Adams

• The effective IQ of a group is determined as being the lowest IQ in the group divided by the number of people in the group.

  anonymous

• Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

  George Washington

• Our law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg on the street, and steal bread.

  Anatole France

• "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."

  Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars"

• Cease then to fashion state-made sin,
  and give not your children cause to doubt
  that virtue springs from iron within --
  not lead without
  

  Kipling

• Music is Art, Art is Discovery, Discovery is Thrilling

  billb58027@aol.com (BillB58027) (Bill Bailey)

• "The trouble with the legal profession is that 95% of its members give the rest a bad name."

  jcrowe@zaphodmpd.tandem.com (Joseph Crowe)

• The demand for equality has two sources. One of them is among the noblest. The other is the basest of human emotion. The noble source is the desire for fair play. The basest other source is the hatred of superiority.

  C. S. Lewis

• Freedom by permission is a contradiction in terms

  asouthwick@vnet.ibm.com (Andrew Southwick)

• "There are four things required for the nourishment of the soul: passion, delight, stability, and meaning.

  Brian Siano - siano@cceb.med.upenn.edu

• It's okay to disagree with me. However, once I explain where you're wrong you're supposed to become enlightened & change your mind. Congratulating me on how smart I am is optional.

  ug837@freenet.Victoria.BC.CA (Karl F. Johanson)

• It's amazing how 6 months in the lab can often save you 1 day in the library.

  An anonymous old scientist

• Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

  Aesop

• People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices

  Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

• The passing of an unjust law is the suicide of authority.

  Pastoral Letter of the American Roman Catholic Herarchy, Feb., 1920

• Outrageousness and the law are sometimes very comfortable bed fellows.

  majebens@msmail2.hac.com (Mark Jebens)

• "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

  Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon, _Scientific_American_, Sept. 1995.

• The media is biased towards those ideologies that can be expressed in a few column inches or in between commercials.

  jgjohnso@students.wisc.edu (Jeff Johnson)

• A gatekeeper is any person (or group) who has control over what material eventually reaches the public.

  Joseph R. Dominick: The Dynamics of Mass Communication.

• Don't put another quarter in, it might play another song.

  ndanger@crash.cts.com, advice on responding to flamebait.

• "If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything."

  A. L.

• The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim.

  Edsgar Dijkstra

• Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)

  Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975 from http://www.cbi.umn.edu/inv/burros/ewd498.htm

• The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.

  T.H. Huxley, Science and Morals

• Hard work never scared me. Oh, sure, it has startled me from a distance.

  Professor Fishhawk

• Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels to govern him?

  Thomas Jefferson, 1st Inaugural Address (1801).

• If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master,
  If you can think -- and not make thought your aim,
  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
  And treat those two imposters just the same...
  

  "If", Rudyard Kipling

• Psychiatry is like any religion. People in it decide who is insane and who is not.

  "Twelve Monkeys"

• Everything comes down to one of two things: biology or math.

  Dr. Stephen Franklin, "Babylon 5" : "Exogeneis"

• The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

  "The Roman Rule", Anonymous

• Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

  Samuel Johnson, 1759.

• `But the Emperor has nothing on at all!' cried a little child.

  ---Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes

• I'm not exactly sure what an anti-feminist is, but I know that I'm called one when I say anything that agrees with something a feminist said before 1975.

  pepke@scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke)

• An optimist will assume a solution will be found, a pessimist will look for one.

  Sphinx (K956793@crystal.king.ac.uk)

• If the world's men can make friends, the world's women can't make war.

  J. R. Molloy

• The most ignorant person is one who doesn't know, but thinks she does.

• Medical scientists use the word `iatrogenic' to refer to disabilities that are the consequence of medical treatment. We believe that some such word might be coined to refer to philosophical difficulties for which philosophers themselves are responsible.

  -Peter Brian Medawar and Lady Jean Shinglewood Medawar

• "They don't want truth. It's not often obvious what the truth is. It can be complicated, and then not turn out to be what they want to hear. They want simplicity and certainty. People are never more ferocious than when their prejudices are being threatened. Then truth becomes the enemy and and they'll die fighting it."

  _Paths_To_Otherwhere_ by James P. Hogan

• Show me a cultural relativist at thirty-thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite

  Richard Dawkins

• Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

  James Gleick

• The Politician's Slogan
  You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Fortunately only a simple majority is required.

  Mad Hamish <h_laws@postoffice.utas.edu.au>

• There is only one war, and it's not the rich against the poor, the blacks against the whites, the Federation against the Borg, or the Democrats versus the Republicans. It's those of us who aren't complete idiots against those of us who are.

  bigbill@kruse.demon.co.uk (Big Bill)

• Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

  Euripides

• If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

  Ernest Hemingway

• Democracy, n.:
  

  A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.

  U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932), since withdrawn.

• Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

• Tyranny of woman is the history of the worst tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that ever lasts.

  Oscar Wilde

• What we are seeing in this headless misandry is a grand display of the Tyranny of the Underdog: 'I am a wretchedly longstanding victim; therefore I own no burden of adult accountability, nor need to honor any restraint against my words and actions. In fact, all efforts to restrain me are only further proof of my oppressed condition.' It is the most perfect trump-card against accountable living ever devised.

  Gladden Schrock, in "The Tyranny of the Underdog"
• Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence. Judith Levine

• The important questions are the following:

  1. What exactly do you want to do?
  2. What are you willing to give up in order to be able to do that?
  3. How hard are you willing to work in order to be able to do that?
  4. What risks are you willing to take in order to be able to do that?
  5. How much pain are you willing to feel in order to do that?

  If you can figure out clear answers to these questions, then the rest is relatively trivial.

  Eric Pepke

• The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope

  Aristotle's definition of happiness

• It is as morally bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

  Edmund Way Teale, "Circle of the Seasons", 1950

• (The terms of doublespeak) have two meanings. One is the dictionary meaning, and the other is a meaning that is useful for serving power - the doctrinal meaning... (doublespeak's) effect is to make it impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance in a coherent way.

  Noam Chomsky

• Female Accountability
  But really she's good when she seems bad
  You just don't understand
  Didn't you see her outstretched arms
  Or just the machine gun in her hand?
  Even when she does commit a crime
  Some man is to blame, its known
  Lady Justice may well be blind
  But she sure as hell knows her own.
  

  Hombre

• "Great spirits have always had trouble with mediocrities, for the latter cannot understand when a man doesn't thoughtlessly submit to heriditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

  Albert Einstien

• "In those instances in which the heriditary prejudices are treated as sacred beliefs, the mediocrities become quite belligerent in their attempts to put a stop to any analysis or examination which isn't intentionally biased in its favor."

  Hombre

• We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.

  Inscription, 6000 year-old Egyptian tomb (quoted in R.Buckminster Fuller's I Seem to be a Verb)

• "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alley, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist."

  (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 743 BC

• If by some wild and implausible stretch of the imagination, I end up before some Grand Divine Being after death, the first words out of my mouth will be, "WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT ALL ABOUT, YOU MANIAC!"

  Kristopher <eoslives@net-link.net>

• All of us are ignorant, if not misinformed, on vast numbers of things. What makes experts different is that they dare not admit it. That is also what makes experts dangerous.

  Thomas Sowell, column of 11 Apr 2003

• Ask anyone who is suffering the agonies of some terrible disease whether he believes that there is such a thing as reality, or whether he thinks it is all just a matter of "perceptions." The pompous but silly notion that it is all a matter of how you choose to look at things is an indulgence for those who are insulated from suffering, from accountability, and from reality.

  Thomas Sowell, column of 11 Apr 2003

• The political left often acts as if it has discovered and exposed the evils of our times and our society, when what they have really done is twisted and distorted the evils of the ages and of the whole human race to make them seem like something peculiar to our times and our society -- even when these evils have been far worse elsewhere.

  Thomas Sowell, column of 11 Apr 2003

• It is amazing what complicated lies some people will believe, even when the truth is simple and obvious. Indeed, the truth is often rejected as "simplistic" by those who are dedicated to some complicated lie.

  Thomas Sowell, column of 11 Apr 2003

  Well, it was a really good column!

• New York's Sullivan Act, the original gun control law, was passed in response to the criminal lobby in New York's Red Hook district. Robbers objected to the right of their intended victims to carry concealed weapons and succeeded in getting the right outlawed.

  Paul Craig Roberts, column of 23 April 2003

• ...the sort of bozos who are so eager to find a contradiction that if you say, "There's an apple and two oranges", they'll say "You contradicted yourself!! Make up your mind whether there's one fruit or two!!"

  Tom Breton (Myself)

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