Antonin Scalia

Nobody — remember this — neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, ‘Now, let’s create a really oppressive and evil society.’ Hitler said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.’ And Lenin said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.’

In short, it is your responsibility....not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person.

--Antonin Scalia, at a commencement speech in 2010

Beautiful Theories

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
--Richard Feynman

A Writer's Time

"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book."
--Samuel Johnson

Publish

"Publish and be damned!"
--the Duke of Wellington, to a blackmailer

Urge to Save Humanity

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
--H L Mencken

Supply and Demand

"Politicians build their careers on voters’ ignorance about supply and demand curves."

--Glenn Reynolds

Gradual and Silent

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- James Madison

Gell-Mann Amnesia

   Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-- Michael Crichton

Writing Influences

"My writing has been influenced by HP Lovecraft, because if you don’t like giant sky squids, there is something fundamentally wrong with you." -- Larry Correia

Deeply Deeply Skeptical

"Americans should be deeply deeply skeptical of government power. You
cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that."

James Comey
FBI Director
October 12, 2014

Learning to Write

“You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf... You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work.”
― Tom Clancy

Disturb us

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas, 
where storms will show Your mastery, 
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

Sir Francis Drake

Finishing

"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, yields the true glory."
--Sir Francis Drake

Movie Weekend

Diana is out of town this weekend so I've watched a couple of movies:

• Big Trouble in Little China. I was wondering how I missed seeing this when it was originally released, and the answer is that it came out in 1986 when I was in grad school. Kurt Russell and his buddy Wang Chi set off to rescue Wang's girlfriend McGuffin--er, Miao Yin--from the sorceror Lo Pan and his mini-bosses Thunder, Rain and Lightning. The great line, after they slay the villains and rescue the girl (and some other girls they run across along the way), is " We really shook the pillars of heaven, didn't we, Wang?" This appears to be a reference to Job 26:11: "The pillars of Heaven shake and are amazed at His rebuke."
• The Warrior's Way. A Japanese warrior/assassin refuses to kill the baby who is the last surviving member of the enemy clan; he takes the child, fights his way through his clan's other killers, and goes to the American West. He starts a new life as a laundryman in a small town, taking care of the baby and befriending a young woman. However, outlaws come raiding. The hero must take up his sword again, but once unsheathed, the sword's lament draws the clan assassins who are hunting him. This one didn't have any notable quotes but it did have a good structure, with The Final Battle Against the Outlaws being interrupted by the Final Battle Against the Assassins.

All's Well That Ends Well

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none"
All's Well That Ends Well    Act I, scene 1.

Courage

"Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other."

Samuel Johnson

Cynicism

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism, by those who don't have it".

--George Bernard Shaw

Freedom

"Those of us who have been so fortunate as to have been born in a free society tend to take freedom for granted and regard it as a natural state of mankind. It is not."
--Milton Friedman

Productivity

The #1 reason why most people aren’t productive, isn’t that they’re not exercising – it’s that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know what to do because they haven’t decided what they’re going to do. They’re either waiting for a cue from someone or simply mulling over the pros and cons of the decisions over and over and over. --Joel Runyon

Margaret Thatcher

"A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master--they are the essence of a free economy, and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend."

--Margaret Thatcher, from a speech in 1975, later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom