Some favorite quotes

Investing, miscellaneous

Political

Jesse Livermore

Warren Buffett

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
-- Voltaire
"…the United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century."
-- Laurance Kotlikoff, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis "Review", July/Aug 2006
"To buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward."
-- Sir John Templeton
"Bull markets are born in pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die of euphoria."
-- Sir John Templeton
"It is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism... For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion."
-- John Maynard Keynes (attributed)
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
-- John Maynard Keynes
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
-- John Maynard Keynes
"It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth."
-- John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919. pp. 235-248.
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him".
-- John Maynard Keynes
"By this means government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft."
-- John Maynard Keynes (the father of 'Keynesian Economics' which our nation now endures) in his book "THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE" (1920). (this is in the context of speaking about the ability to control money supply)
"The roots of violence are wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principals."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."
-- Friedrich Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
-- Winston Churchill
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
-- George Santayana
"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
-- Sir Walter Scott - "Marmion", Canto VI, Stanza 17
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
-- Winston Churchill
"Ponzi’ finance units must increase its outstanding debt in order to meet its financial obligations. A transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built in margins of error superfluous - encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments."
-- Hyman Minsky
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
-- Napoleon
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"...if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."
-- Harry Truman, U.S. President 1945-1952
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."
-- Galileo Galilei
"It is the part or wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket."
-- Miguel de Cervantes
"Life is a banquet - and most poor suckers are starving."
-- Auntie Mame
"The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
-- Edmund Burke
"It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true."
-- James Branch Cabell
"Don’t gamble! Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it ‘till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it."
-- Will Rogers
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"
-- Will Rogers
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some models are useful."
-- George E.P. Box (Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin)
Before this century is over, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will probably be over one million versus around 10,000 now. So for the long-term, the outlook is tremendously bullish if you buy stocks blindly to keep for a century.
-- John Templeton, 1999
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-- Milton Friedman
"Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one."
-- Milton Friedman
"It was probably a mistake to allow gold to rise so high."
-- Paul Volcker, ex Federal Reserve Chairman in looking back at the rise of gold from $35 to $850 during the 1970s, per "Paul Volcker: The Making of a Financial Legend" by Joseph B. Treaster
"Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake."
Paul Volcker,from the Nikkei Weekly, which in 2004 published excerpts from his memoirs commenting on monetary policy and the rising gold price in the 1970s
"Significant changes in the growth rate of money supply, even small ones, impact the financial markets first. Then, they impact changes in the real economy, usually in six to nine months, but in a range of three to 18 months. Usually in about two years in the US, they correlate with changes in the rate of inflation or deflation."
"The leads are long and variable, though the more inflation a society has experienced, history shows, the shorter the time lead will be between a change in money supply growth and the subsequent change in inflation."
-- Milton Friedman
"We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
-- Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve US Central Bank), appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security.
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The obvious is obviously wrong."
-- Joe Granville
"As soon as you think you've got the key to the stock market, they change the lock."
-- Joe Granville
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios.. The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
-- George Soros
You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets.
-- Peter Lynch
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that men of good will do nothing."
-- Cicero, B.C.
"One... with courage makes a majority."
-- Andrew Jackson
"In the hands of this formidable power, thus organized, was also placed unlimited dominion over the amount of circulating medium, giving it the power to regulate the value of property and the fruits of labor in every quarter of the Union, and to bestow prosperity or bring ruin upon any city or section of the country as might best comport with its own interest or policy....Yet, if you had not conquered, the government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, and this organized money power from its secret conclave would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their wishes. The forms of your government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it."
-- President Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address of March 4, 1837 and talking about not having renewed the charter of the U.S. Central Bank
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside it is too dark to read."
-- Groucho Marx
"It is only by not paying one's bills, that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes."
-- Oscar Wilde
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we’ve been so credulous."
-- Carl Sagan
"That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done."
-- Solomon
"I am not young enough to know everything."
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life."
-- George Burns (at age 87)
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
-- Aldous Huxley
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McLuhan
"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do."
-– B.F. Skinner
"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
-- Cicero, 66 B.C. (Translation by W.W. Fowler, 1909)
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
-- Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141), William Shakespeare
"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
-- Cicero, 55 BC
"Economics exists to make astrology look respectable."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
-- Joan Robinson, Cambridge University
"The rescue operation brings to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's dictum that in the United States, the only respectable form of socialism is socialism for the rich."
-- John Cassidy, "A Bankers' Bailout"
“The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster".
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Great Crash 1929"
"Those who had been riding the upward wave decide now is the time to get out. Those who thought the increase would be forever find their illusion destroyed abruptly, and they, also, respond to the newly revealed reality by selling or trying to sell. And thus the rule, supported by the experience of centuries: the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith writes in his book "A Short History of Financial Euphoria"
"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, A Journey Through Economic Time(1994)
"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist
"I'll give you the bottom 10% and the top 10% of any move if I get to keep the middle 80%."
-- Bernard Baruch
The Three Laws of Motion
1. An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. (This law is often called "the law of inertia".)
2. Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object).
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action.
-- Sir Isaac Newton
“Often wrong, but never in doubt”
-- Ivy Baker Priest, and others
“Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size… If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders.”
-- Ludwig von Mises (1949)
"Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes. Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber."
-- Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Roman educator - Institutio Oratoria II, xvi
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
-- Mark Twain
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
-- Mark Twain
"Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts."
-- Mark Twain
"A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing in front of it."
-- Mark Twain
"Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.”
-- Mark Twain
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
-- Harry Truman
"There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them."
-- Clare Boothe Luce
"Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world!"
-- Archimedes
"In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip."
-- Daniel L. Reardon
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Charles Mackay, 1841, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions."
-- Gotfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937
"I had come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
"A transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built in margins of error superfluous - encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments."
-- Hyman Minsky
"The truth is that liquidity, the only significant weapon remaining in the central bank's arsenal as decision making moves to the markets, will not necessarily go where you want it to go when you need it to go there."
-- Martin Meyer writes in The Fed
"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection or production, we want to create further misdirection- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."
-Fredrich Hayek, 1933
"Once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and restrict his cash holdings to minimum size… If the credit expansion is not stopped in time, the boom turns to crack-up boom: the flight into real values begins, and the whole monetary system founders.”
-- Ludwig von Mises (1949)
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.
-- Gil Stern
"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them."
-- Matthew 7:15-23
“A lie can be halfway before the world before the truth gets its boots on.”
-- James Callahan (Former UK prime minister)
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
-- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
-— A. A. Milne
"You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right."
-— Benjamin Graham
"That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.
Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 -- that is what it amounts to, with interest."
-- Thomas Edison, The New York Times, December 6, 1921
"Not much in the history of money supports a linear view of history, one in which the knowledge and experience from one epoch provide the intelligence for improved management in the next. Of those who give guidance on these matters history says even less. Out of the 2500 years of experience and 200 years of ardent study have come monetary systems that are as unsatisfactory as any in the peacetime past. In recent times conservatives have reacted adversely to inflation, though not with great enthusiasm to the measures for preventing it. Liberals have thought unemployment the greater affliction. In fact no economy can be successful which has either. Inflation causes discomfort and frustration for many. Unemployment causes acute suffering for a lesser number. There is no certain way of knowing which causes the most in the aggregate of pain. It was the prime lesson of the thirties that deflation and depression destroyed international order, caused each nation to try for its own salvation, indifferent to the damage that its efforts caused to neighbours. It has equally been the lesson of the late sixties and early seventies that inflation too destroys international order. Those who express or imply a preference between inflation and depression are making a fool's choice. Policy must always be against whichever one has."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975), Chapter 20
“The truth is that liquidity, the only significant weapon remaining in the central bank’s arsenal as decision making moves to the markets, will not necessarily go where you want it to go when you need it to go there.”
-- Martin Meyer, from his book “The Fed”
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"Your actions speak so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919-1988)
“Nations are not ruined by one act of violence, but quite often, gradually, and almost imperceptibly, by the depreciation of their currency, through excessive quantity”.
-- Nicolas Copernicus, 1525
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
--Sir Walter Scott
"Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy."
-- George S. Patton
"Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition."
-- Milton Friedman
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
-- William Faulkner
“The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass."
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
-- Chinese proverb
"I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive."
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"We have seen security prices soar out of sight of earnings, brokers' loans swell till they absorb a third of the banking resources of the country, and the blind pools of ancient days return and multiply by endless crossing and pyramiding as the investment trusts of today. Banks merge and emerge in chains, trailing trusts and holding companies, while industrial corporations pay dividends not by producing goods but by buying each others' stocks and by borrowing and lending everybody's money in the market. But of all these things can anyone say with surety what they signify, whether they are safe and sound, or what they are leading to? We do not even know, or cannot agree, whether inflation exists, what it means, or how it shall be measured."
-- Business Week - September 7, 1929
"For 5 years at least, American business has been in the grip of an apocalyptic holy-rolling exaltation over the unparalleled prosperity of the 'new era' upon which we have entered."
-- Business Week, 1929
"Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight."
- Daniel Drew, 19th century speculator
"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
-- Samuel Adams
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
--P.J. O'Rourke
“On the issue of inflation, I think I could solve it no matter how much money it took.”
-- Pat Paulson: 1968 Presidential Candidate & Comedian
"A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her."
-- David Brinkley
"The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other."
-- Voltaire (1764)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident..."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
“Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum. (I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am)”
-- René Déscartes
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it's profits or so dependant on it's favors, that there will be no opposition from that class."
-- Rothschild Brothers of London, 1853
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was every invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in . But if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
-- Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920's, speaking at the University of Texas in 1927
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
-- Marshall McLuhan
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
-- Marshall McLuhan
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
-- Marshall McLuhan
"A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining."
-- Mark Twain
"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
-- Mark Twain
"It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed."
-- Kin Hubbard
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
-- JP Getty
"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
-- Issac Newton 1721, after being ruined by the South Sea Bubble
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C. S. Lewis
"Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight."
-- Daniel Drew, 19th century speculator
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
-- Winston Churchill
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-- Plato,The Republic (circa 380 B.C.)
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair, author
"But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown--a mountebank. "I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.
-- Pablo Picasso, 1952, In Art/The Artist
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
-- Jerry Pourelle
“I would rather err with Galen than be right with Harvey.”
-- Comment from an eminent physician in the 1820s when the great Dr. Harvey made the discovery in London that the heart functions as a pump for blood, which contradicted the prevaling wisdom from Galen, a Greek from around 200 AD.
"All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."
--John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"All goods must therefore be measured by some one thing ... now this unit is in truth, demand, which holds all things together ... but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name nomisma--because it exists not by nature, but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless. ... Now the same thing happens to money itself as to goods--it is not always worth the same; yet it tends to be steadier ... money then acting as a measure makes good commensurate and equates them ... There must then be a unit, and that fixed by agreement"
-- Aristotle, Ethics 1133.
"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance."
-- William O. Douglas (1898-1980), with 36 years longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice in history
“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.”
-- John Maynard Keynes
" ... the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time ..."
-- Thomas Jefferson (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779))"
"The four most dangerous words in investing are, 'It's different this time.'"
-- Sir John Templeton
"I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.
-- Confucius
"In most bull markets there comes a time when the public controls fluctuations and the efforts of the largest operators are insufficient to check the rising tide."
-- Charles H. Dow, 1901
"When a big market breaks badly on good news it is a bear market; when a big market rises sharply on bad news it is a bull market."
-- Unknown, a time honored adage
"... there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past ..."
-- Ray Bradbury, "The Martian Chronicles"
"Find the trend whose premise is false, and bet against it."
-- George Soros
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
-— John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the US
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
-- Sir Karl Popper
"It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?"
-- William Booth (1829 - 1912), founder of the Salvation Army
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"He is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
"The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do."
-- Jerry Pournelle
"It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so."
-- normally attributed to Will Rogers, more here.
"Age and treachery overcome youth and skill."
-- Unknown
"There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dimissed as the primative refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present"
- John Kenneth Galbreith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
"As times get harder, words grow more weaselly. Euphemisms boom in a recession, even if nothing else does."
-- Alison Eadie
"Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."
--H.L. Mencken
If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
-- Mark Twain
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
--H.L. Mencken
""Make haste to reassure us that you at home support and love us as we obey and love you, for if we find that you have sent us to leave our bleached bones in these desert sands for nothing, beware the fury of the legions."
-- A Roman centurion of the 4th Century.
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."
-- Abraham Lincoln
“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), French scientist
"I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone."
-- Charles Darwin, in the foreword to his book, The Origin of Species, 1869
"I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days."
-- Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
Mr. Greenspan: “Let me suggest to you that the monetary aggregates as we measure them are getting increasingly complex and difficult to integrate into a set of forecasts. The problem that we have is not that money is unimportant, but how we define it. By definition, all prices are indeed the “ratio of an exchange of a good for money.” And what we seek is what that is. Our problem is we used M-1 at one point as the proxy of money, and it turned out to be a very difficult indicator of any financial state. We then went to M-2 and had the similar problem. We have never done M-3 per se because it largely reflects the extent of expansion of the banking industry. And when in effect banks expand, in and of itself, it doesn’t tell you terribly much about what the real money is. So our problem is not that we do not believe in sound money. We do. We very much believe that, if you have a debased currency, that you will have a debased economy. The difficulty is in defining what part of our liquidity structure is truly money. We have had trouble ferreting out proxies for that for a number of years. And the standard we employed is whether it gives us a good forward indicator of the direction of finance and the economy.

Regrettably, none of those which (?) have been able to develop, including MZM – has not done that. That does not mean that we think that money is irrelevant. It means that we think our measures of money have been inadequate. And, as a consequence of that, we, as I have mentioned previously, have downgraded the use of the monetary aggregates for monetary policy purposes, until we are able to find a more stable proxy for what we believe is the underlying money in the economy.”

Representative Ron Paul: “So it’s hard to manage something you can’t define?”

Mr. Greenspan: “It is not possible to manage something you can’t define.”
-- Alan Greenspan, Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, February 17,2000
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
-- Epictetus
"The Americans had not played a very prominent part in the war of 1914-1918, he (Adolf Hitler) thought, and moreover, had not made any great sacrifices of blood. They would certainly not withstand a trial by fire, for their fighting qualities were low. In general no such thing as an American people existed as a unit; they were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and many races."
-- "INSIDE THE THIRD REICH MEMOIRS, Albert Speer,The MacMillan company, New York,1970, Page 121.
Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.
-- Thomas Szasz
The man who gets on best with women is the one who knows best how to get on without them.
-- Charles Baudelaire
"When popular opinion is nearly unanimous, contrary thinking tends to be most profitable. The reason is that once the crowd takes a position, it creates a short-term, self-fulfilling prophecy. But when a change occurs, everyone seems to change his mind at once."
-- Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
-- Arlan Andrews, "Indian Summa" (January 1989)
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
-- Marshall McCluhan
"So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow -- though I ain't done nothing. But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same."
-- Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-- Thomas Edison
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose."
-- John Maynard Keynes
List of cognitive biases
“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”
-- Benjamin Graham
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
"A transition occurs over the course of an expansion as increasingly risky positions are validated by the booming economy that renders the built in margins of error superfluous - encouraging adoption of riskier positions. Eventually, either financing costs rise or income comes in below expectations, leading to defaults on payment commitments."
-- Hyman Minsky
I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.
-- Cicero
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
-- John Maynard Keynes, "Consequences to the Banks of a Collapse in Money Values", 1931
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
-- Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale University, 1929
"Diversification is an admission of not knowing what to do, and an effort to strike an average"
-- Charles Loeb in 'The Battle for Investment Survival'
"In all likelihood world inflation is over."
-- International Monetary Fund CEO, 1959
Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.
-- Carlos Castaneda
"Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities, intrinsically, a 'dollar' bill is just a piece of paper. Deposits are merely book entries."
-- Modern Money Mechanics Workbook, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1975
"Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force."
-– British prime minister Lord North, on dealing with the rebellious American colonies, 1774
"It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister."
-- Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, October 26th, 1969
"Man will not fly for 50 years."
-- Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, to brother Orville, after a disappointing flying experiment, 1901 (their first successful flight was in 1903)
"With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself."
-- Business Week, August 2, 1968
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
-- Madame de Stael
Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers.
-- Rodan of Alexandria
"The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn’t mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing."
-- Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, 1942
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895
"Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public ... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company ..."
-- a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.
"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."
-- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."
-- Albert Einstein, 1932
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
-- Albert Einstein
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, it is not certain.
As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-- Albert Einstein
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one".
-- Albert Einstein
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
-- George Orwell
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"In the case of enemy crimes, we find outrage; allegations based on the flimsiest evidence, often simply invented, and uncorrectible, even when conceded to be fabrication; careful filtering of testimony to exclude contrary evidence while allowing what may be useful; reliance on official U.S. sources, unless they provide the wrong picture, in which case they are avoided... vivid detail; insistence that the crimes originate at the highest level of planning, even in the absence of evidence or credible argument; and so on.

"Where the locus of responsibility is at home, we find precisely the opposite: silence or apologetics; avoidance of personal testimony and specific detail; world-weary wisdom about the complexities of history and foreign cultures that we do not understand; narrowing of focus to the lowest level of planning or understandable error in confusing circumstances; and other forms of evasion."
-- Noam Chomsky, Pluto Press, 1991, Necessary Illusions, p.137
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay
"I believe that the industrial prosperity of England is much more than temporarily depressed, and that we are some way down the road of a long decline, at the end of which we shall find our relative industrial position entirely different from what it was in the 19th Century... I would sell the shares of almost all British industrial companies operating at home, particularly the shares of the older industries.

I believe that the economic, political and climatic advantages of the U.S. and Canada during the next few decades will be so overwhelmingly great that these countries offer the most attractive field for investment. There is room for immense expansion and the desire for it. Wealth is the main objective, the pace will be hot, and the profit high.

I think it is quite wrong to believe that the currency chaos of the last ten years will now be replaced by a long period of calm stability similar to that of the 19th Century. On the basis of this view, I would invest a large part of any fund in the strongest currency in the world, the American dollar."
-- Oswald T. Falk, a member of the distinguished London house of Buckmaster & Moore, 1930.

Warren Buffett
Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
-- Warren Buffett
Managers should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles: “How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?” The Answer: Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.
-- Warren Buffett
The future is never clear, and you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.
-- Warren Buffett
Value investing is so simple that it makes people reluctant to teach it. If you've gone and gotten a PhD and spent several years learning tough mathematics, to have to come back to this is like studying for the priesthood and then finding out that the Ten Commandments were all you needed.
-- Warren Buffett
"I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term "thinking outside the box."
-- Warren Buffett, Feb 29, 2008" (Source)
The stock market is there only as a reference point to see if anybody is offering to do anything foolish. When we invest in stocks, we invest in businesses. You simply have to behave according to what is rational rather than according to what is fashionable.
-- Warren Buffett
“Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.”
-- Warren Buffett
If you're in a card game and you can't figure out who the patsy is, you're it.
-- Warren Buffett
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
-- Warren Buffett
You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.
-- Warren Buffett
...holding cash is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as doing something stupid.
-- Warren Buffett
"You’re neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You’re right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right-and that’s the only thing that makes you right."
-- Warren Buffett
"Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing."
-- Warren Buffett

Jesse Livermore
"I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or a series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgment."
-- Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest stock market traders who ever lived.
"Speculators in stock markets have lost money. But I believe that it is a safe statement that the money lost by speculators alone is small compared with the gigantic sums lost by so-called investors who have let their investments ride."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 25)
"From my point of view, the investors are the big gamblers. They make a bet, stay with it, and if all goes wrong, they lose it all."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 25)
"let me warn you that the fruits of your success will be in direct ratio to the honesty and sincerity of your own effort in keeping your own records, doing your own thinking, and reaching your own conclusions. "
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 16)
"Profits always take care of themselves but losses never do. The speculator has to insure himself against considerable losses by taking their first small loss."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 21)
"The only reason an investor or speculator should ever want to have pointed out to him is the action of the market itself. Whenever the market does not act right or in the way it should - that is reason enough for you to change your opinion and change it immediately· Remember, there is always a reason for a stock acting the way it does. But also remember: the chances are that you will not become acquainted with that reason until some time in the future, when it is too late to act on it profitably."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks" (page 71)
"In fact, I always made money when I was sure I was right before I began. What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game - that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favored my play."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 14)
"Yet, I can see now that my main trouble was my failure to grasp the vital difference between stock gambling and stock speculation. Still, by reason of my seven years' experience in reading the tape and a certain natural aptitude for the game, my stake was earning not indeed a fortune but a very high rate of interest."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 44)
"It was the change in my own attitude toward the game that was of supreme importance to me. It taught me, little by little, the essential difference between betting on fluctuations and anticipating inevitable advances and declines, between gambling and speculating."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 45)
"One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 51)
"People don't seem to grasp easily the fundamentals of stock trading. I have often said that to buy on a rising market is the most comfortable way of buying stocks. Now, the point is not so much to buy as cheap as possible or go short at top prices, but to buy or sell at the right time. When I am bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don't buy long stock on a scale down, I buy on a scale up."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 63)
"But in starting a movement it is unwise to take on your full line unless you are convinced that conditions are exactly right. Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling. But after the initial transaction, don't make a second unless the first shows you a profit. Wait and watch. That is where your tape reading comes into enable you to decide as to the proper time for beginning. Much depends upon beginning at exactly the right time. It took me years to realize the importance of this. It also cost me some hundreds of thousands of dollars."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 67)
"I don't mean to be understood as advising persistent pyramiding. A man can pyramid and make big money that he couldn't make if he didn't pyramid; of course. But what I meant to say was this: Suppose a man's line is five hundred shares of stock. I say that he ought not to buy it all at once; not if he is speculating. If he is merely gambling the only advice I have to give him is, don't!"
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 68)
"If you want to make some money out of wheat I can tell you how to do it."
They all said they did and I told them, "If you are sure you wish to make money in wheat just you watch it. Wait. The moment it crosses $I.20 buy it and you will get a nice quick play in it!"
"Why not buy it now, at $I.I4?" one of the party asked.
"Because I don't know yet that it is going up at all."
"Then why buy it at $1.20? It seems a mighty high price."
"Do you wish to gamble blindly in the hope of getting a great big profit or do you wish to speculate intelligently and get a smaller but much more probable profit?"
They all said they wanted the smaller but surer profit, so I said, "Then do as I tell you. If it crosses $1.20 buy.
As I told you, I had watched it a long time. For months it sold between $1.10 and $1.20, getting nowhere in particular. Well, sir, one day it closed at above $1.I9. I got ready for it. Sure enough the next day it opened at $1.20-1/2, and I bought. It went to $1.21, to $1.22, to $1.23, to $1.25, and I went with it.
Now I couldn't have told you at the time just what was going on. I didn't get any explanations about its behaviour during the course of the limited fluctuations. I couldn't tell whether the breaking through the limit would be up through $1.20 or down through $1.10 though I suspected it would be up because there was not enough wheat in the world for a big break in prices.
...
"What I have told you gives you the essence of my trading system as based on studying the tape. I merely learn the way prices are most probably going to move. I check up my own trading by additional tests, to determine the psychological moment. I do that by watching the way the price acts after I begin."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 97)
"As I have said a thousand times, no manipulation can put stocks down and keep them down. There is nothing mysterious about this. The reason is plain to everybody who will take the trouble to think about it half a minute. Suppose an operator raided a stock -- that is, put the price down to a level below its real value -- what would inevitably happen? Why, the raider would at once be up against the best kind of inside buying. The people who know what a stock is worth will always buy it when it is selling at bargain prices. If the insiders are not able to buy, it will be because general conditions are against their free command of their own resources, and such conditions are not bull conditions. When people speak about raids the inference is that the raids are unjustified; almost criminal. But selling a stock down to a price much below what it is worth is mighty dangerous business. It is well to bear in mind that a raided stock that fails to rally is not getting much inside buying and where there is a raid, that is unjustified short selling -- there is usually apt to be inside buying; and when there is that, the price does not stay down. I should say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, so-called raids are really legitimate declines, accelerated at times but not primarily caused by the operations of a professional trader, however big a line he may be able to swing.

The theory that most of the sudden declines or particular sharp breaks are the results of some plunger's operations probably was invented as an easy way of supplying reasons to those speculators who, being nothing but blind gamblers, will believe anything that is told them rather than do a little thinking. The raid excuse for losses that unfortunate speculators so often receive from brokers and financial gossipers is really an inverted tip. The difference lies in this: A bear tip is distinct, positive advice to sell short. But the inverted tip -- that is, the explanation that does not explain -- serves merely to keep you from wisely selling short. The natural tendency when a stock breaks badly is to sell it. There is a reason -- an unknown reason but a good reason; therefore get out. But it is not wise to get out when the break is the result of a raid by an operator, because the moment he stops the price must rebound. Inverted tips!"
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 152)
"It has always seemed to me the height of dam foolishness to trade on tips. I suppose I am not built the way a tip-taker is. I sometimes think that tip-takers are like drunkards. There are some who can't resist the craving and always look forward to those jags which they consider indispensable to their happiness. It is so easy to open your ears and let the tip in. To be told precisely what to do to be happy in such a manner that you can eagily obey is the next nicest thing to being happy which is a mighty long first step toward the fulfilment of your heart's desire. It is not so much greed made blind by eagerness as it is hope bandaged by the unwillingness to do any thinking."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 159)
"SPECULATION in stocks will never disappear. It isn't desirable that it should. It cannot be checked by warnings as to its dangers. You cannot prevent people from guessing wrong no matter how able or how experienced they may be. Carefully laid plans will miscarry because the unexpected and even the unexpectable will happen. Disaster may come from a convulsion of nature or from the weather, from your own greed or from some man's vanity; from fear or from uncontrolled hope. But apart from what one might call his natural foes, a speculator in stocks has to contend with certain practices or abuses that are indefensible morally as well as commercially."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (page 227)
“I have long since learned, as all should learn, not to make excuses when wrong. Just admit it and try to profit by it. We all know when we are wrong. The market will tell the speculator when he is wrong, because he is losing money. When he first realizes he is wrong is the time to clear out, take his losses, try to keep smiling, study the record to determine the cause of his error, and await the next big opportunity. It is the net result over a period of time in which he is interested”
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
“All through time, people have basically acted and re-acted the same way in the market as a result of: greed, fear, ignorance, and hope – that is why the numerical (technical) formations and patterns recur on a constant basis”
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
“The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the man of inferior emotional balance, or for the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.”
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"I always have traded in commodities as well as in stocks. I began as a youngster in the bucket shops. I studied those markets for years, though perhaps not so assiduously as the stock market. As a matter of fact, I would rather play commodities than stocks. There is no question about their greater legitimacy, as it were. It partakes more of the nature of a commercial venture than trading in stocks does. A man can approach it as he might any mercantile problem. It may be possible to use fictitious arguments for or against a certain trend in a commodity market; but success will be only temporary, for in the end the facts are bound to prevail, so that a trader gets dividends on study and observation, as he does in a regular business. He can watch and weigh conditions and he knows as much about it as anyone else. He need not guard against inside cliques. Dividends are not unexpectedly passed or increased overnight in the cotton market or in wheat or corn. In the long run commodity prices are governed but by one law -- the economic law of demand and supply. The business of the trader in commodities is simply to get facts about the demand and the supply, present and prospective. He does not indulge in guesses about a dozen things as he does in stocks. It always appealed to me trading in commodities."
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscenses...", page 93
"I cleared about three million dollars in 1916 by being bullish as long as the bull market lasted and then by being bearish when the bear market started. As I said before, a man does not have to marry one side of the market till death do them part. "
-- Jesse Livermore, "Reminiscenses...", page 143
“Remember too that it is dangerous to start spreading out all over the market. By this I mean, do not have an “Interest in too many stocks at one time. It is much easier to watch a few than many. I made that mistake years ago and I cost me money”
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
"Successful traders always follow the line of least resistance. Follow the trend. The trend is your friend."
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
When you make a trade, you should have a clear target where to sell if the market moves against you. And you must obey your rules! Never sustain a loss of more than 10% of your capital. Losses are twice as expensive to make up. I always established a stop before making a trade.
-- Jesse Livermore, "How to Trade in Stocks"
A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong - not taking a loss - that is what does damage to the pocketbook and to the soul.
-- Jesse Livermore
I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.
-- Jesse Livermore
"I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way."
-- Jesse Livermore
It happened just as I figured. The traders hammered the stocks in which they figured would uncover the most stops, and sure enough, prices slid off.
-- Jesse Livermore
"People who look for easy money invariable pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth."
-- Jesse Livermore
“You know, a professional gambler is not looking for long shots, but for sure money. Of course, long shots are fine when they come in. In the stock market Pat wasn’t after tips or playing to catch twenty-points-a-week advances, but sure money in sufficient quantity to provide him with a good sense of living. Of all the thousands of outsiders I have run across in Wall Street, Pat Hearne was the only one who saw in stock speculation merely a game of chance like faro or roulette, but nevertheless had the sense to stick to a relatively sound betting method."
-- Jesse Livermore
"I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way."
-- Jesse Livermore
"If you cannot make money out of the leading active issues, you are not going to make money out of the stock market as a whole."
-- Jesse Livermore
"Never be afraid of the normal movement. But be very careful of abnormal movements, it is similar to a major change in personality."
-- Jesse Livermore

Download How To Trade Stocks by Jesse Livermore (1941)
Download Reminiscenses of a Stock Operator about Jesse Livermore (1923)

Political
"It's not the people Who vote that count; it's the people Who count the votes."
-- Joseph Stalin
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." (context of the quote involves the importance of a jury and the jury system)
-- Thomas Jefferson
"For more than six-hundred years, that is, since the Magna Carta, in 1215, there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases. It is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but it is also their right and their primary and paramount duty to judge the justice of the law and to hold all laws invalid, that are in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws."
...
"If the government can dictate the evidence, and require the jury to decide according to that evidence, it necessarily dictates the conclusion to which they must arrive. In that case the trial is really a trial by the government, not by the jury. The jury cannot try an issue unless they determine what evidence shall be admitted. The ancient oath, it will be observed, says nothing about 'according to the evidence.'"
-- Spooner
Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.
-- Harriet Rubin
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-- Mahatma Gandhi

-– John Lennon
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty."
-- H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come - (1936)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken
"The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."
-- Larry Laudan
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein
"Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare -- most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome."
-- Robert Heinlein
"You have been given the choice between war and dishonor. You have chosen dishonor, and you will have war."
-- Winston Churchill to the English Parliament, 1938 after the English Parliament's 1938 appeasement in Czechoslovakia
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
-- Mao Tse-tung
"Everything for the State. Nothing against the State. Nothing outside the State."
-- Benito Mussolini
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
-- Benito Mussolini
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”
-– President Franklin Roosevelt
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie."
-- Joseph Goebbels
"The measure of the wealth of a nation is indicated by the measure of its protection of its industry; the measure of the poverty of a nation is marked by the degree in which it neglects and abandons the care of its own industry, leaving it exposed to the action of foreign powers."
-- Congressman Henry Clay, 1824
“The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.”
--Theodore Roosevelt
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
-- Lord Acton
"He who wishes to deceive will never fail to find willing dupes."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of Human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt, Colonial America sympathesizer, British House of Commons, November 18, 1783
"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
-- David Rockefeller at the Bilderberg Meeting in June 1991 in Baden, Germany, as quoted in the 1991 issue of the Hilaire duBerrier Report
"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
-- David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002
"We are on the verge of a Global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
-- David Rockefeller to the United Nations Business Council on September 23, 1994
"The Trilateralist Commission is international ...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power: Political - Monetary - Intellectual - and Ecclesiastical."
-- Barry Goldwater , U.S. Senator AZ, "With No Apologies"
"If goods do not cross borders, armies will."
-- Frederic Bastiat
" It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-- Frederic Bastiat
"There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Group has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it...but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-- Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown), "Tragedy and Hope"
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
-- Barry Goldwater
"Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled.
-- Dr. Jerry Pournelle
The Economic Policies of Hitler

"By the mid thirties there was also in existence an advanced demonstration of the Keynesian system. This was the economic policy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. It involved large-scale borrowing for public expenditures, and at first this was principally for civilian works - railroads, canals and the Autobahnen. The result was a far more effective attack on unemployment than in any other industrial city. By 1935, German unemployment was minimal. 'Hitler had already found how to cure unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining why it occurred.'(17) In 1936, as prices and wages came under upward pressure, Hitler took the further step of combining an expansive employment policy with comprehensive price controls.

"The Nazi economic policy, it should be noted, was an ad hoc response to what seemed over-riding circumstance. The unemployment position was desperate. So money was borrowed and people put to work. When rising wages and prices threatened stability, a price ceiling was imposed. Although there had been much discussion of such policy in pre-Hitler Germany, it seems doubtful if it was highly influential. Hitler and his cohorts were not a bookish log. Nevertheless the elimination of unemployment in Germany during the Great Depression without inflation - and with initial reliance on essentially civilian activities - was a signal accomplishment. It has rarely been praised and not much remarked. The notion that Hitler could do no good extends to his economics as it does, more plausibly, to all else."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Money: Whence it came, where it went", Page 237
Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords.
-- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
-- Thomas Szasz
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-- Anaïs Nin
I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world.
-- Rev. Dr. President Idi Amin
The ultimate effect of shielding man from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spenser
The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.
-- Thomas Szasz
"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
-- United States Office of Strategic Services, Adolf Hitler, p.51
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
-- Plato
The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
-- Tacitus
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
You know you get a lot more with a kind word and a gun then you do with a kind word alone.
-- Al Capone
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
-- Tacitus
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Being against the military because you are against war is like being against the Fire Department because you are against fire."
-- Retired Marine Major Jim McDonough
I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.
-- Frederic Bastiat
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults.)
-- Unknown
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
-- J. W. von Goethe
The real art of governing consists, so far as possible, in doing nothing.
-- Lao Tzu
The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
"A government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have."
-- President Gerald Ford
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt!"
-- Marcus Tullinus Cicero, Roman Senator, 63 B.C.
"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: "President Can't Swim."
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and...the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector.
-- Henry Hazlitt
The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education.
-- Neal Boortz
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
-- Michael Crichton
"We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
"Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."
-- Margaret Thatcher Source
“It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.”
-- Patrick Henry
“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
-- Patrick Henry
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
-- Philip K. Dick
Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don't have brains enough to be honest.
-- Benjamin Franklin
When politicians presume to do God's work, they do not become divine but diabolical.
-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."
--Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".
-- Robert A. Heinlein
I am convinced that we can do for guns what we've done with drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control.
-- George L. Roman
“Self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance.”
-- Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics
"Being a leader is like being a lady - if you have to go around telling people you are one, you aren't."
-- Margaret Thatcher
"I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things."
-- John Adams, U.S. President
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
-- Andre Gide
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the [public] bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
-- President Jackson, in 1836, forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter for their abuses in the issuance of the nation's currency.
(During World War II, Joseph Stalin) was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.
-- "Freedom Under Seige", Ron Paul
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
-- Abraham Lincoln, from a November 21, 1864 letter to Colonel William F. Elkins
"When you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership in gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty."
-- Congressman Howard Buffett (Father of Warren Buffett) from a 1948 issue of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle
“In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.”
-- Charles de Gaulle
"A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one."
-- J.P. Morgan
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
-- Attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Unverified per the US Library of Congress.
"... the dangers of loose fiscal policy were stated as follows: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury."
-- Attributed to the French author, Alexis de Tocqueville
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1755
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."
-- James Madison
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "
-- President Eisenhower, January 1961
"The first casualty of war is the truth."
-- Aeschylus
“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.”
-- Thomas Paine
"Reason obeys itself. Ignorance submits to what is dictated to it."
-- Thomas Paine
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein
Bastiat's Moral Law
"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them; and gives it to persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil in itself, but also is a fertile source for further evils, for it invites reprisals. If such a law is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.:
-- Frederic Bastiat
"Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination."
-- Harry Truman
"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
-- John F. Kennedy, 1960 Inauguration speech
"Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston’s job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one."
-- George Orwell, 1984
...throughout recorded time...there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low...The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.

-- 1984, George Orwell

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