Category: VAULT Quotes

I’ve spend a lot of time thinking about systems and engineering lately.  These are some of the more thoughtful quotes I have kept juggled in my head.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

-John Gall

Simple rules produce complex behavior.
Complex rules produce stupid behavior.

-Andrew Hunt

Rather than thinking in product categories and market segments, ask what is the job the customer is hiring this product to do?

-Clayton Christensen

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

-Goodhart’s Law

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

-John Turkey

Over the course of the last year of two I’ve slowly been removing news, current events, and politics from my daily life.  Thomas Jefferson talked about the importance of a well informed electorate, and I strongly believe in the truth of such a statement; but I’ve basically decided that news and current events doesn’t actually do much to make us “well informed.”

The solution to this conundrum is that I find myself reading more history and intellectually grounded politics from many different sides of the political divide.  Honestly I believe more sociologists, philosophers, and economists should study history; otherwise they run the risk of looking foolish.  History is the test for all the soft ideas of mankind; Twitter is the extrament.

One of my favorite political economists is Thomas Sowell and his books “Intellectuals and Race” was my favorite for this round.  Other books not listed in the quotes below include an amazing kids books discussing the history of mankind called “A Little History of the World” by E.H. Gombrich, The Iliad (which I must admit I hadn’t read in its entirety before), and more history about Catherine the Great, William Marshal, and Hannibal.  Checkout my Goodreads list for February through March here.

13 Things mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin

You only as good as your worst habits

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.

Could you easily list your top five values off the top of your head? Most people can’t. But if you aren’t really clear on your values, how do you know where to put your energy, and how to make the best decisions?

The Naval War of 1812 by Theodore Roosevelt

…from which date two distinct schools in the naval affairs of the 18th century: one of these was all for promptness and audacity, which were regarded as the indispensable conditions for victory; the other, on the contrary, praised skilful delays and able evolutions, and created success by science united to prudence. But these two schools were true only according to circumstances, not absolutely… The only school always true is that one which, freed from all routine, produces men whose genius will unite in one, in knowing how to apply them appropriately, the audacity which will carry off victory, and the prudence which knows how to obtain it in preparing for it.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, is an abomination against the very origins of life on earth.  Our ancestors evolved first in the oceans of the young planet, and while some organisms managed to adapt to life on the land, our bodies retain a genetic memory of their watery origin. Fertilization for all animals takes place in some form of water; embryos float in the womb; human blood has almost the same concentration as seawater.

Iberall observed that human societies appeared to cycle through comparable phase transitions, as the energy harnessed by the society increased: moving from the gaseous state of roaming hunter-gathers, to the more settled configuration of agrarian farming, to the crystalline density of the walled city.

When the supply of surplus energy spiked, thanks to the slave labor and transportation networks of the Roman Empire, the city of Rome itself surged to more than a million people, and dozens of towns connected to the networked reached populations in the hundreds of thousands. But when the imperial system crumbled, the energy supply dried up, and the cities of Europe vaporized in a matter of centuries.

…indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.

They were not hacks working surreptitiously for Victorian interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambitions. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

so the Christian too belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes… whom wants to be among friends, to sit among  roses, not with the bad people but with the devout people… if Christ had done what you are doing, who would have ever been spared.

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium.  The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion; no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear.

Self justification and judging others goes together; as justification by grace and serving others goes together.

Brotherly love with find any number of extenuation for the sins of others, only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever.  Therefore my sin is the worst….  How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own.

The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham.  The sin confessed has helped him find true fellowship with the brethren of Jesus Christ.

Why is it that it is often easier to confess our sins to God than to a brother?  But if we do we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God.  Whether we have not rather been confessing to ourselves, and therefore granting absolution to ourselves.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Spirit:  Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm.

Ghost: To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Spirit: If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully.  There would be nothing to hope for.

George MacDonald:  The action of Pity will live for ever, but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth,  the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.

Intellectuals and Race by Thomas Sowell

By intellectual what is meant here is a people in a particular occupation mainly people whose work begin and end with ideas… Chemists or chess grand masters may have an equal or greater mental accomplishment but they are not intellectuals because their work ends with a outcome subject to empirical verification by known standards while the outcomes of intellectuals are subject to essentially peer consensus.

There is no need to replace genetic determinism with geographic determinism. While there are other factors which operate against the presumed equality of developed capabilities among people with equal potential, the point here is that geography alone is enough to prevent equality of developed capabilities, even if all races have identical potentialities and there is no discrimination. Nor is it necessary to determine the relative weights of geographic, demographic, cultural and other factors, when the more fundamental point is that each of these factors makes equal outcomes among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species less likely,

Historian A.J.P Taylor has said the first stage of nationalism is led by university professors and that the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world.

By contrast, in the twentieth century a whole generation of future Third World leaders who went to study in the West seldom concentrated on studying the science, technology, and entrepreneurship that produced Western prosperity, but instead concentrated on the social theories and ideologies in vogue among Western intellectuals in academia and elsewhere.

a common pattern among intellectuals has been to seek, or demand, equality of results without equality of causes or on sheer presumptions of equality of causes

January is always windy in Oklahoma, and the cold it carries finds its way between zippers, and seams in ways that make it more intense than even people from colder climates expect. Unfortunately this seldom brings snow, which is the very best reading weather.

So by the numbers; 6 books, only one of them fiction.  My favorite authors this January were David McCullough and Barbara W. Tuchman.  Uncle Toms Cabin was the most famous book of the month and the only fiction book I read.  What stood out to me about Uncle Toms Cabin was that 19th century religious dogma was so ingrained into the daily life of people (this was, after-all, the time of the Third Great Awakening in North America.)  My least favorite book was The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins which honestly wasn’t bad; but I read a lot of good books in January.

Below are some of the quotes that stood out and that I’m likely to want to reference.

The Great Bridge by David McCullough

Human reason is the work of God, and he gave it to us so we could recognize him.

When a demagogue want to effect an object, he always raises the cup of public virtue; and under the cover of the smoke he raises slips in himself.

The Ascent of Money by Neil Ferguson

Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that those who make their living from lending money are somehow parasitical on the ‘real’ economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing.

It is partly because debtors have tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial crises and scandals occur  frequently enough to make finance appear to be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by members of ethnic or religious minorities, who had been excluded from land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and trust.

Hunter-gatherers do not trade. They raid.

What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief,  even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not  metal. It is trust inscribed.

A bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty . . . would be to  look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners . . . For the black poor, real  progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society. People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their  society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of  tenancy do not. . .

…the Nobel prize winners had known plenty of mathematics, but not enough history.

I remain more than ever convinced that, until we fully under­ stand the origin of  financial species, we shall never understand the fundamental truth about money:  that, far from being ‘a mon­ster that must be put back in its place’, as the German president recently complained, financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.

It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place.

A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening”on a lucky day”without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.

When piety and virtue, the supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously sought.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

I’m exceedingly late to posting this, but here is some some of my favorite quotes from my fall and winter of 2017 reading list.  Authors include Walter Isaacson, David McCullough, the glorious Barbara W. Tuchman, and Leo Tolstoy.

Most of my reading at the end of 2017 was history.  Honestly the single biggest genre of literature I read is almost always history, but the end of 2017 especially so.  Partly that is due to a single book (War and Peace) filling so much time in my fiction category that I needed to read 10 other books to “even the playing field” so to speak.

I’m going to totally ignore The Story of Civilization by Will & Ariel Durant because every one of their books is one of my favorites and it doesn’t seem fair to the other books I read.  Some of my favorite books were The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman, Freedom from Fear by David M Kennedy, and Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick.  Non of the books I read was especially bad this time.

Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley

Today the word hero had been diminished, confused with celebrity but in my father generation the word meant something.  Celebrities seek fame.  They take actions to get attention.  Most often the actions they take have no particular moral content.  Heroes are heroes because they have risked something to help others.  Their actions involve courage. Often those heroes have been indifferent to the public’s attention but at least the hero could understand the focus of the emotion.  However he valued or devalued his own achievement it did stand as an accomplishment.

There are no great men, just great challenges which ordinary men out of necessity are forced by circumstances to meet.

–William F. “Bull” Halsey

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the Korean brand of Totalitarianism.

North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down.  It is not easy for someone who has escaped a Totalitarian country to live in the free world.  Defectors have to re-discover who they are in world that offers endless possibilities.  Choosing where to live, what to do, even which close to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustom to making choices.  It can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.

Freedom from Fear by David M. Kennedy

Despite the new deals exertions and innovations, and contrary to much later mythology, in no subsequent year in the 1930 would the unemployment rate fall below 14%.  The average for the decade as a whole was 17.1%.  The depression and the new deal in short were Siamese twins enduring together in a painful but symbiotic relationship that stretched to the end of the decade.

If the aroma of radicalism clinging to the CIO repled many so increasing did its reputation fro a kind of undisciplined wildcat unionism permitting unauthorized work stoppages to break out repeatedly.  The sit down tactic in particular was so easily emulated that scatter groups of workers began employing it indiscriminately after the spectacular victory at flint.

The radical potential of the sit down tactic had always rattled middle class Americans.  2/3rd of respondents in a gallop pole in Feb 1937 believed that  GM was right not to negotiate with the sit-downers and strong majorities sympathized with employers.

Just as workers ensued the overthrow of capitalist to embrace bread and butter unionism; so did they repudiate radical politics and attach themselves one of the existing mainstream parties.  In the processes they wrote the epitaph for American socialism and stifled American communism in its cradle.

Its (the New Deal) failure to produced economic recovery.  Much mythology and New Deal rhetoric not withstanding.  It did not substantially redistribute the national income.  Americas income profile in 1940 closely resembled that of 1930, and for that matter 1920.  The falling economic tide of the depression lowered all boats but, by in large, they held their relative positions.  What little economic leveling there was resulted more from depression diminished returns to investments, not redistribution tax policies.

The war was a contest between two systems of organization.  The Americans, he insisted, knew how to act with organizationally simple methods and therefore achieved greater results.  Whereas we were hampered by superannuated forms of organization and therefore could not match the others feats.  If we did not arrive at a different system of organization it would be evident to posterity that our outmoded, tradition bound, and arthritic organizational system had lost the struggle.  –Albert Speer

In the long sweep of time Americas half  century long ideological, political, and military face-off with the Soviet Union may appear far less consequential than Americas leadership in inaugurating an era of global economic interdependence.

Who could deny that globalization, the explosion in world trade, investment, and cultural mingling was the signature and lasting international achievement of the post war era.  One likely to overshadow the cold war and it’s long term historical consequences.

The Age of Louis XIV, The Story of Civilization Volume 8 by Will & Ariel Durant

Probably it is social and not biological hereditary that makes civilization.

It had taken him almost half a century to discover that to be loved is worth monogamy.

The historian, like the journalist, tends to loose the normal  background of an age in the dramatic foreground of his picture for he knows his readers will relish the exceptional and will wish to personify processese and events.

Wealth is necessary to great art, but wealth is disgraceful and art is unpleasant when they flourish at the expense of widespread poverty and debasing superstition

The beautiful cannot long be divorced from the good.

If later he graduated from politics to statesmanship it was because the difference between politics and statesmanship is philosophy. The ability to see the moment and the part in the light of the lasting and the whole.

That transformation had to be economic as well as political, for no purely agricultural society could long maintain its independence against states enriched and armed by industry.

A nation exporting chiefly raw material and agricultural products would soon become vassal to states producing and exporting chiefly manufactured goods.

History is a race between art and war.

If there were no ignorance, there would be no history.

So, year by year, and mind by mind, the impenetrable immensity surrenders some teasing, luring fragment of its mystery.

The absolutist polity is a child of war and democracy is a luxury of peace.

Every art should accept the moral obligation to be intelligible… or silent.

Political supremacy naturally and rightly follows economic supremacy; only in that accord can a state enjoy stability.

The larger souls, that have traveled the diverse climates of opinions, are more cautious in their resolves and more sparing to determine.

Three stages in the revolt of business against birth, of money against land.

Persecution comes from lust for power and from jealousy mascaraing as religious zeal.  Persecution creates hypocrites,  toleration promotes knowledge and truth.

Reason can teach us to doubt but it rarely moves us to act.

Progress too is a delusion; we mistake movement for advance, but probably it is merely oscillation.

In poetry and art there had been no visible progress, for these depend upon feeling and imagination, which hardly change from generation to generation; but in science and learning, which depend upon the slow accumulation of knowledge, we may expect to surpass antiquity.

For in modern states the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things; and the men who can manage money manage all.

That a  mans vices are usually the influence of his time while his virtues are his own.

Vitium est temporis potius quam hominis  (aka Vices are of the age rather than of the man.)

The Bonfire by Marc Wortman

Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.

–Thucydides

Captive Paradise, A History of Hawaii by James L. Haley

Modern academic studies have been rooted in the reigning politically correct paradigm of race, gender, and exploitation which as it turns out are highly appropriate lenses through which to view the islands’ history.

Early in the process I had coffee with a distinguished history professor friend of mine, to discuss my possible return to graduate study, looking toward completing along-abandoned Ph.D. He asked how my Hawai’i work was coming, and I said that while I was finding little to change my opinion that the 1893 overthrow was indefensible, I was also increasingly surprised and troubled by the pervasive oppression of the common people by their own chiefs and kings before Americans ever showed up.  I cited several examples; the professor nodded and allowed that this was indeed the case, but he warned me that if I if I wrote the book that way and did not œposition the Hawaiians as victims of American racism and exploitation, as he said,  it won’t help you get accepted back into grad school,”

It also seemed clear that when the actual facts or history connect with the reigning theoretical model, it may fall to nonacademic writer to disseminate a more nuanced narrative.

People who espouse reincarnation always fancy themselves to by Henry VIII or Marie Antoinette. No one channels his past as some humble, downtrodden medieval plowman.

Modern cultural sensitivity obscures an important fact.  Hawaii never was a paradise.

The Age of Voltaire, The Story of Civilization Volume 9 by Will & Ariel Durant

Word peddlers tend to idealize the countryside if they are exempt from its harassments, boredom, insects, and toil.

There would be no great mistake, at least in politics, in expecting every man to pursue his own interest as he sees it; let us suspect any politician who pretends anything else.

There are few histories without lies and none without some mistakes.  The lying spirit has gone forth from ecclesiastics to other historians but the resolute student, by confronting liar with liar, can wriggle his way between them to the truth.

The heart is a faculty of which we despoil ourselves everyday by giving it no exercise while the mind is continually sharped and refined.

History is full of religious wars but it is not the multiplicity of religions that have produced wars.  It is the intolerance spirit animating that one which believed itself in the ascendant.

Nearly all democracies are oligarchies.  Minorities can organize for action and power, majorities cannot.

By philosopher we shall mean anyone who tries to arrive at reasoned opinions on any subject whatever as seen in a large perspective.  …we shall apply the term to those who seek a rational view of the origin, mature, significance, and destiny of the universe, life, or man.

Conservatives stress the differences and influence of heredity, and the need for caution in changing institutions rooted in natural and native inequalities of ability and character.

Reformers stress the differences and influences of environment, by which inequalities of ability, power, and wealth seem due to chance–to the accidents of birth and the privileges of condition rather than to innate merit.

…in philosophy nearly all original ideas are foolish, and lack of originality is a sign of wisdom.

…for when a religion consents to reason it begins to die.

Heaven and utopia are the rival buckets that hover over the well of fate: when one goes down the other goes up; hope draws up one ar the other in turn.  Perhaps when both buckets come up empty a civilization loses heart and begins to die.

It is difficult to be brilliant and conservative; there is little char, for active minds, in standing for tradition and authority; it is tempting to be critical, for then you can feel the pleasure of individuality and novelty.

But in philosophy it is almost impossible to be original without being wrong.

Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the snapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness

…universal love is the delusion of children who do not know the universal enmity that forms the law of life…

I believe that we should be allowed to question traditions and institutions, but with care that we do not destroy more than we can build… and always with a modest consciousness that experience of generations may be wiser than the reason of a transitory individual.

Reason is the noblest gift that God has given us. No; love is.

They have discovered that your philosophy has no answer but ignorance and despair.

man is born with individualistic instincts formed in thousands of years of primitive conditions; that his social instincts are relatively weak; and that a strong code of morals and laws is needed to tame this natural anarchist into a normally peaceful citizen.  Our theologians called those individualistic instincts original sin, inherited from our “first Parents” –that is, from those harassed, lawless men, ever endangered hunters, who had always to be ready to fight and kill for food or mates

You wish to keep the morality and discard the theology; but it is the theology that makes the morality sink in to the soul.

Society is based upon morality, morality is based upon character, character is formed in childhood  and youth long before reason can be a guide.

The intellect is a constitutional individualist, and when it is uncontrolled by morality it can tear a society to pieces.

All restraint of instinct is unnatural, and yet without many such restraints society is impossible.

The hopeful revolutionists talked of liberty, equality, and fraternity.  But these idols never get along together.  If you establish liberty you let natural inequalities multiply into artificial inequalities; and to check these you have to restrain liberty so your utopias of freedom sometimes become straitjackets of despotism, and in the turmoil fraternity becomes only a phrase.

Truth is not truth unless it remains true through generations.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much and a lot of them just turn off.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter.

Form follows emotion.

Brave Companions by David McCullough

The way to all learning, the backbone of education, was to know something well.  A smattering of everything is worth little.

Facts are stupid things until brought into conjunction with some general law.

It was a great and common fallacy to suppose that an encyclopedic mind is a desirable thing.  The mind was made strong not through much learning but by the thorough possession of something.

Selected quotes from some of my July 2017 reading list.   All totaled there were 14 books finished during July or the first week of August.  Authors include E. M. Forster, Henry Hazlitt, C.S. Lewis, and Pat Conroy (admittedly those are the most impressive names.)  Topics covered last month include politics, religion, economics, bio-diversity, and of course history.

There were a lot of really good books this summer, so it is with difficulty I am reducing it to my favorite three.  The three books I enjoyed the most were Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, and of course The Age of Reason Begins (The Story of Civilization VII) by Will Durant.

The worst book, by far, this summer has been Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly by Bertrand Meyer which as near as I can tell is written for people who have decided they hate Agile and want academic justification for their opinions.

Overall, it was a pretty good month this summer and it only looks to get better.

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

It isn’t possible to love and to part.  You will wish that it was.  You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.  I know by experience that the poets are right, love is eternal.

Life is easy to chronicle be bewildering to practice and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.

Anyone can find places but finding people is a gift from God.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

It is impossible in maters touching practical life to be consistently wrong.

It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.  In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad.

The things so great that private capital could not have built it has in fact been built by private capital.  The capital that was expropriated in taxes or if borrowed must eventually be expropriated in taxes.

There is a strange idea abroad held by all monitary cranks that credit is something a bank gives to a man.  Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it perhaps because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan he is asking or he has it because his character and past record have earned it.  He brings it into the bank with him.

Private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans.  Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans.  Government loans, in short, compared with private loans will reduce production; not increase it.

Government guaranteed home mortgages especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment is required inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise.  The force the general tax payer to subsides the general risk and to defray the losses.  They encourage people to buy houses they cannot really afford.  They tend to eventually to bring an over-supply of houses.

note: this book was written in 1946

The best prices are not the highest prices, but the ones that encourage the highest volume of production and the largest volume of sales.  The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the ones that permit full production, full employment, and the largest sustained payrolls.

Profits do not actually bulk large in our economy.  …averaging less than 6% of the total national income. It is significant that while there is a word “profiteer” to stigmatize those that allegedly make excessive profits; there is no such word as “wage-eer” or “loss-eer” even though the profits of a barbershop may average much less than wages.

When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree  there is scare, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid.

The Church by C.S. Lewis

When it succeeds, I think the performers are the most enviable of men.  Privilege while mortals to honor God like Angles and for a few golden moments to see spirit and flesh , delight and labor, skill and worship, the natural and supernatural all fused into that unity they would have had before the fall.

It is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason in the wrong place.  And the more rational a man is, the better he knows this.

Unless equal means interchangeable, equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women.

Christians think that God himself has taught us how to speak of him. To say that it does not matter it to say either that all masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential.  And this is surely intolerable or if tolerable it is an argument not in favor of Christian Priestesses, but against Christianity.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alghieri

Faith is the substance of things hoped for; and evidence of things not seen.

Every substantial form that is separate from matter and is united with it has a specific virtue residing in itself which without action is not perceived nor shows itself save by its effect as by green leaves the life in a plant.  Yet whence the intelligence of the first cognitions comes man doth not know nor whence the affection for the first objects of desire which exist in you even as zeal in the bee for making honey and this first will admits not desert of praise or blame. Now in order virtue that counsels 1 is innate in you and ought to keep the threshold of assent. This is the principle wherefrom is derived the reason of desert in you according as it gathers in and winnows good and evil loves Those who in reasoning went to the foundation took note of this innate liberty wherefore they bequeathed morals to the world. Assuming then that every love which is kindled within you arises of necessity the power exists in you to restrain it. This noble virtue Beatrice calls the free will

The Age of Reason Begins, The Story of Civilization Volume 7 by Will Durant

The nature of man confesses itself in the conduct of states for these our ourselves in gross.

So wars determine theology and philosophy, and the ability to kill and destroy  is a prerequisite to live and build.

Faith might hold to beliefs for which science and philosophy could find no evidence but philosophy should depend only on reason, and science should seek purely secular explanations in terms of physical cause and effect.

By 1789 the English had digested their two rebellions and could look with horror and eloquence upon a revolutions that, like its own, had incarnadined a country and killed a king because the past had tried to stand still.

But even perfection pause when it is long continued. Change is necessary to life, sensation, and thought.  An exciting novelty may seem by its very novelty to be beautiful until the forgotten old returns on the wheel of time and is embraced as young and new.

History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical groves.  It plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules.  History is baroque.

History, like oratory, seldom makes a point without exaggeration.

Fame is a fashion.  We tire of wearing old admirations on our pens and find it exhilarating to discard worn idols from our fancy.  To take down the dead mighty from their seats and to put on the praises of new gods blown up by our originality or exhumed by some fresh renown.

Adjustment to a changing environment is the essence of life, and its price.

Only the fortunate can take life without mythology.

Science now began to liberate itself from the placenta of its mother philosophy…  It did not put its faith in pure reason, reason independent of experience and experiment.  To often such reasoning had woven mythical webs.  Reason as well as tradition and authority was now to be check by the study and record of lowly facts.    And whatever logic might say, science would aspirate to accept only what could only be quantitatively measured, mathematically expressed, and experimentally proved.

The soul of a civilization is its’ religion, and it dies with its faith.

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

In a reading life, one thing leads to another in a circle of accident and chance.

As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I’d like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to open heartedness or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on  feminism, and on the media.  It is a form above madness and maggotry and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

The Sixth Extinction by  Elizabeth Kolbert

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species you can picture a poacher in Africa with an AK-47, or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or better still you can picture yourself holding a book on your lap.

With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols come the capacity to change it which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.

As soon as humans started to use signs and symbols to represent the natural  world they pushed beyond the limits of that world.  In may ways, human language is like the genetic code.  Information is stored and transmitted with modifications down the generations Communication hold societies together and allows humans to escape evolution.

Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero

What we have here is yet another effort to turn religion into a water boy for morality.  …the collapse of religion into virtue.

Faith without knowledge is dangerous.

Learning was highly prized in the early colonies and the republic.  Puritan clergy were… the first class of American intellectuals and the nations founders were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning.

Most Americans, in short, remain far more committed to respecting other religions than to learning about them.

Efforts to update catechetical training have replace time honored instruction about church traditions with touchy-feely conversations about one’s personal values.

…a shift in emphasis from participating in the sacraments to loving Jesus and a growing tenancy to reduce the sum of religion to moral behavior.

Among academics curiosities is the persistent skepticism of its inhabitants, their tenancy to dismiss faith as fanaticism.  Theorists postulating the death of religion under modernity’s crush or, at a minimum, its retreat into the closet of the private often base their predictions on nothing more than the vague air of skepticism they detected at the Dean’s sherry hour.  If academia was marching away from god, or so the logic when, the rest of the modern world would surely follow.

Evangelicalism today has become less a matter of learning that it is a matter of experiencing.  Pop psychology has elbowed Biblicalexegesis out of many born again pulpits.  Self help books outsell theological works in most Christian book stores.

Few school administrators understand the crutal distinction… between studying the Bible academically, which is constitutional, and reading it devotionally which is not.   …the distinction between teaching about religions and teaching of religion.

For love of history.  A massive quote dump from some of the books I have been reading lately.  Hope someone else will enjoy them or, even better, enjoy the books!

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How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

The ago old platonic fallacy equates knowledge with virtue.

The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were now unobtainable by readers of the dark ages.  A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision.  Instead he apprehended similarities, imbalances; types and paradigms; parallels and symbols.  It was a world, not of thoughts, but of images.

To be Irish is to know, that in the end, the world will break your heart.

The Irish are the only people who can not be helped by psychoanalysis.”

–attributed to Sigmund Freud

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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II by Edward Gibbon

“When a public quarrel is envenomed by private injuries, a blow that isn’t mortal or decisive can be productive only of a short truce which allows the unsuccessful compeditent to sharpen  his arms for a new encounter.”

“…but experience has proved the distinction of active and passive courage.  The fanatic who endures without a groan the torture of the rack or the state would tremble and fly before the face of an armed enemy.”

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The Reformation (The Story of Civilization, volume 6) by Will Durant

“Your emphasis on faith as against works was ruinous and led to a religions who’s coldness of heart concealed behind the piety of it’s phrases.

For a hundred years charity almost died in the centers of your victory.

You destroyed nearly all the schools we had established, and you weakened to the verge of death the universities that the Church had created and developed.

Your own leaders admit that your disruption of the faith led to a dangerous deterioration of morals both in Germany and England.

You let loose a chaos of individualism in morals, philosophy, industry, and government.

You took all the joy and beauty out of religion and filled it with demonology and terror.

You condemned the masses of mankind to damnation as ‘reprobates,’ and consoled an insolent few with the pride of ‘election’ and salvation.

You stifled the growth of art, and wherever you triumphed classical studies withered.

You expropriated Church property to give it to the state and the rich, but you left the poor poorer than before, and added contempt to misery.

You condoned usury and capitalism but deprived the workers of restful holidays a merciful church had given them.

You rejected the papacy only to exalt the state.

You gave to selfish princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects and to use religions as a sanction for their wars.

You divided nation against nation, and many a nation and city against itself.

You wrecked the international moral checks on national powers, and created a chaos of warring national states.

You denied the authority of a church founded on your own admission by the son of God but you sanctioned absolute monarchy and exulted the divine right of kings.

Unwittingly you destroyed the power of the word which is the only alternative to the power of money or the sword.

You claimed the right of private judgment, but you denied it to others as soon as you could…

Meanwhile see what your private judgment has lead too. Every man becomes a pope, and judges the doctrines of religion before he is old enough to comprehend the functions of religion in society and morals and the need of the people for a religious faith.

A kind of dis-integrative mania, unhindered by any integrative authority, throws your followers into such absurd and violent disputes that men begin to doubt all religion, and Christianity itself would be dissolved and men would be left spiritually naked in the face of death were it not that the Church stands firm amid all the fluctuations of opinion and argument…

The world is supported by four things. The learning of the wise. The Valor of the Brave. The Justice of the Great. The prayers of the good.

A supreme and unchangeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.”

“Men would try again to capture the spirit of Erasmus, and the Renaissance, and renew the long slow labor of enlightenment.

“Wherever Protestantism Advanced scholarship declined.”

“For men are, by nature, unequal and can be induced to share their goods and fortunes only by a vital and common danger.”

“The communism that was set up was a war economy as, perhaps, all strict communism must be.”

“Internal liberty varies with external security and communism breaks with the tension of peace.”

œA nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean

“Liberalism is a luxury of security and peace.”

“Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes.  It  is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.”

Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford.

“No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself.

“The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.”

“…eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.

œFor barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility”

“Man will sacrifice anything but appetite for health.”

“Wisdom seems always a reincarnation, or echo, since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations of error.”

“When the myth dies, only force is free.”

“Time is the greatest vandal of them all.”

“Energy directed at a unifying will is almost the definition of genius.”