                               My Favourite Quotes

                 Other peoples quotes that I'd like to read again,
                      because they express an important idea.


I described the fierce pride of the mountain people; their self-reliance and
love of liberty; the rebellion against taxation and all government restrictions
or even "benefits"; how out of centuries of tyranny they had learned the lesson
well that for every benefit, a freedom must always be surrendered.

 - Catherine Marshall, Christy


Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any
restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an
interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. And if they
can't get you on grounds of your personal health, they'll do it on grounds of
planetary health.

 - Mark Steyn, Live Free or Die!


Setting a theif (the government) to catch a theif doubles the amount of loot
stolen.

 - Robert LeFevre, A Way to Be Free


Most people trade their freedom for more convenience, but we don't think how we
put all our eggs in one basket that we don't control at all. All Apple users are
at the mercy of a megacorp. Better don't offend someone online, your Mac may be
cancelled...

 - dragandj


Why is eating animals okay but beastiality isn't? I've never understood that.

 - cuneicor


The existance of evil can never justify the existance of the State. If there is
no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too
dangerous to be allowed to exist.

 - Stefan Molyneux


The government is the most successful criminal gang in a geographic area.

 - New Hampshire man on the radio, Quartile 11, 10007


Those who get themselves involved in the machinery of power politics, even for
the purpose of destroying it, are bound to fail in their purpose. To destroy it,
you have to stay out of it. If you want to cut down a tree, it is no use to
climb into its branches. The desire to keep contact with something, even to
destroy it, is a subtle and insidious illusion.

 - Vinoba Bhave


Though power corrupts, statists mistakenly believe that power is the cure for
corruption.

 - Stefan Moluneux, Practical Anarchy


We live as subjugated people in an occupied territory.

 - Jeff Knabel


It is undeniable that human beings have killed other human beings for as long as
human beings have lived on this planet, but to kill other human beings
efficiently and in large numbers takes a state.

 - Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy


Taxation: The specific kind of armed robbery committed by the collective known
as "government" and generally regarded as legitimate by its victims.

 - Murray Rothbard


The contradiction of hiring an agency of institutional violence to protect us
from violence is even more foolhardy than buying a cat to protect one's
parakeet.

 - Attributed to Linda and Morris Tannehill


He who loves his work never labors.

 - Jim Stovall, The Ultimate Gift


Real criminals are simply cannibalistic parasites, the largest infestations of
which are governments, feeding on the productive through taxation and
regulation.

  - Dave Scotese


The only highwayman I ever met was the state itself - When I refused to pay the
tax which is demanded for that protection which I did not want, itself has
robbed me - When I have asserted the freedom it declared, it has imprisoned me.

 - Henry David Thoreau, Journal


As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides
everything". Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we
like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but
Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer".) Easy is
better, easiest is best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have
used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it
might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to
see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To
resist convenience - not to own a cellphone, not to use Google - has come to
require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if
not fanaticism.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex
relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted
as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of
smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and
challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a
constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave
us.

 - Tim Wu, The Tyranny of Convenience


History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an
enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

 - Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed


Attention is like sunlight and water for a plant. What we pay attention to will
grow.

 - Thich Nhat Hanh


If you are not happy with your current `crop,', it is up to you, starting today,
to plant a new crop, to begin doing more of those things that lead to success --
and to stop engaging in those activities that lead nowhere.

 - T. Harv Eker


Be - don't try to become. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

 - Rajneesh


The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with
judiciously placed print statements.

 - Brian W. Kernighan, in the paper Unix for Beginners (9979)


Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because
software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.

 - David Gelernter


Life is too short to run proprietary software.

 - Bdale Garbee


I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial
intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial
limbs: they are missing one.

 - David Parnas


Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for.
Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

 - Chris Sacca


In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems
to solve.

 - Paul Graham


So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two
things.

 - Ryan Singer


The "new" net is what a neighbourhood becomes once excessive new money enters
(VCs); devours properties (domain names, hosting); parks that excessive money by
developing closed communities (FB, etc.); tears out the variety and
accessibility which made living there what it was before their arrival
(geocities, LJ, DIY web sites, etc.); then invokes exclusive standards (HTML5,
closed browser standards) to maintain this new baseline; and in so doing, prices
to push out anyone who hadn't been living there previously to capitalize on
simply... living there.

 - B S Magnet, MacRumors
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