Thomas Allen > Thomas's Quotes

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
― Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, The Republic

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”
― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

“The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek

“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.”
― Friedrich Hayek

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining "punishment" and "being supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?
Punishing itself is terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it
promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom
that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it,
obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this
people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
― Etienne de la Boetie

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
― Milton Friedman

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
― Milton Friedman

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
― Milton Friedman

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
― Milton Friedman

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
― Milton Friedman

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton

“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: 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.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.”
― Michael Crichton

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]”
― Jerry Pournelle