Quotes for a Sunday evening

I've really been stretched this weekend. One big distraction is upgrading the family's main computer from Windows XP to Windows 7. The new product is well-rated, but the upgrade can take many (as in more than 12) hours. I'm working on many ideas, but I haven't had a chance to write them up yet. Therefore, I will turn once again to the terrific quote collection of on of our readers, Mike Baker: "Do not save your loving speeches, For your friends till they are dead; Do not write them on their tombstones, Speak them rather now instead." Anna Cummins "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." ~ Mahatma Gandhi "He who is greedy is always in want." ~ Horace "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference." ~ British historian Ian Kershaw "The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety." ~ H. L. Mencken, American journalist and humorist (1880-1956) "With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority." ~ Stanley Milgram , 1965 "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge." ~Daniel Boorstin "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." ~ Galileo Italian astronomer & physicist (1564 - 1642) "Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new. ~ Galileo [More . . . ]

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Quotes about banks

Prominent thinkers and politicians have often had harsh words about banks and bankers. Here is a sampling: -"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." James A. Garfield -"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802) -"Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess." Irving Fisher -"Where would we be if we had I.O.U.'s scrip and certificates floating all around the country?" Instead he decided to "issue currency against the sound assets of the banks. [As opposed to issuing currency against gold.] The Federal Reserve Act lets us print all we'll need. And it won't frighten the people. It won't look like stage money. It'll be money that looks like real money." [Emphasis added.] (Source: 'Closed for the Holiday: The Bank Holiday of 1933', p20 - Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) Treasury Secretary Woodin, 3/7/33 -"Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good." John Adams -"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." Napoleon Bonaparte -“With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.” Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) Austrian Economist, Author and 1974 Nobel Prize-Winner for Economics -"There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." Chester Bowles (1901-1986) -“You are a den of Vipers! I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.” Andrew Jackson -“The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.” Helen Keller -“I hate banks. They do nothing positive for anybody except take care of themselves. They're first in with their fees and first out when there's trouble.” Earl Warren -“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value ---- zero.” Voltaire (1694-1778) [More . . . ]

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Robert A. Heinlein In Perspective

I finished reading William H. Patterson's large new biography of Robert A. Heinlein yesterday. I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I gave it a day to simmer. Frankly, I'm still not sure what to say other than I was positively impressed. Basically, Patterson achieved the remarkable goal of demythologizing the man without gutting him. I've read any number of biographies of famous (and infamous) personalities which tended either to be hagiographic (and therefore virtually useless as any kind of honest reference) or a brutal airing of personal failings in some sort of attempt to drag the subject down to "our level" and resulting in a catalogue of reasons to think ill of the person under study. (This is one reason I tend to urge people that if they like an artist's work, read it all if possible, see it all, listen to it all before finding out about them as human beings. Too often the person, depending on the book, spoils the work for many.) Patterson has done something useful for aspiring science fiction writers. (Hell, for any kind of writer as far as that goes.) Heinlein's reputation casts a long, dark shadow across the field. He is one of the pantheon of timeless Greats and in many ways the most intimidating of the lot. It is, I think, useful to know that he had just as much trouble getting started---and staying started---as any other decent writer. (Harlan Ellison has observed that the hard part is not becoming a writer but staying a writer, that anyone basically can get lucky at the beginning, but over time the work simply has to stand up for itself.) The legend has been repeated ad nauseum, how Heinlein saw an ad for a short story contest, wrote a story, then decided to send it to Astounding instead of the contest because Campbell paid better, and it sold. That story was Life Line. From there, up was the only direction Heinlein went. The reality is much more as one might expect. True, he sold that first story to Campbell and sold more, but not without rejections getting in there and Campbell making him rewrite some of the pieces and not without a lot of wrestling with reputation and deadlines. Writing is hard damn work and this book shows what Heinlein had to go through. Yes, he was better than most, but he wasn't teflon. And he had to learn, just like any of us. Reading about time spent living in a four-by-seven foot trailer on $4.00 a day while he sweated a new story makes him suddenly very human. But also very admirable. The other problem with Heinlein is that he did codifying work. There were time travel stories, generation ship stories, alien invasion stories, and so on and so forth before him, but he wrote a number of stores---all lengths---that more or less set the standard for how those stories should be done. He wrote "defining" stories, and for a long time people gauged their work and the work of others by that gold standard. One gets tired of having such a bar hanging over one's head all the time and naturally a reaction emerged over time that was as nasty as it was inevitable, casting Heinlein as the writer to work in opposition to. By the time I discovered Heinlein, during my own golden age at 11, 12, and 13, he was already being touted as "the Dean of Space Age fiction." [More . . . ]

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More quotes from Mike Baker

Mike Baker is one of our repeated visitors here at DI. He kindly sent me his long list of quotations he has been gathering. I published part of Mike's collection here. In this post, I'm published a second set of quotes Mike has gathered. I must admit many of these quotes regarding the role and power of government leave me in a dark and uneasy mood. It was oftentimes surprising when I saw the names of the well-known people who uttered these ominous but thought-provoking words. It's better to know than not know, right? With that in mind, here they are: “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” ~ William E. Gladstone The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. ~ Mark Twain The real rulers of Washington are Invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes. - Justice Felix Frankfurter - US Supreme Court Justice "The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences." -- Quote from Caroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, Chapter 20 "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." --Woodrow Wilson, 28th President ... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. ~Australian social scientist Alex Carey “The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.” [1941] Edward Dowling A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. ~ Edward R. Murrow When the Government fears the people, there is Liberty . When the people fear the Government there is Tyranny. – Unknown We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy." ~ Ramsey Clark , former U.S. Attorney General The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complaceny to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage. Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian [More . . . ]

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