I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995, p. 180.
Tag: Quotes
The Revolution Will Be Complete When . . .
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
–George Orwell, 1984
At First, Freedom Seems Like A Good Trading Chip
At first, freedom seems like a good trading chip. First it’s traded for food, then for things not getting worse (stability), then for safety–and only much later does it turn out that you have no food, safety, stability, or freedom.
-Vladimir Voinovich
We Always May Be What We Might Have Been
No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.-Adelaide Anne Procter, The Ghost in the Picture Room, 1859.
Milton Friedman on the Drug War
If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.
-Milton Friedman, America’s Drug Forum Interview, 1991
Eisenhower on Leadership
And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it’s usually called “assault”–not
“leadership.”–Dwight Eisenhower, quoted in The Ordeal of Power: a political memoir of the Eisenhower years, Emmet John Hughes, 1963, p.124.