| Quotes |
Topic |
| Government | No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would you replace it with?" When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? |
| Government | Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far. |
| Government | Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel. |
| Government | What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race. |
| Government | The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. |
| Psychological Subjects | The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas. |
| Psychological Subjects | The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best. |
| Psychological Subjects | Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare. |
| Psychological Subjects | Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,. |
| Religion | Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying. |
| Society | The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination. |
| Society | each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. |
| Society | The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization. |
| Society | Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds. |
| Society | Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities. |
| Society | It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. |
| Society | People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do. |
| Society | The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite. |
| Society | Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity. |
| Society | Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral. |
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