+

"It has never had anything to do with quality. What it really does have to do with is people who don't farm telling farmers how to farm. And I minded that. It was a lot of urban people getting together saying, 'Well you can't use this on your cows. You can't do this to your sheep. You have to do this to your soil. And then we will buy what you make.' And what it does make is a two tier food system, so you get food for the poor which is processed, high saturated fat, lots of sugar, lots of salt, and then you get food for the middle class which is expensive and has pictures of fields on it and has lots of writing. You notice how much writing comes with organics?" Adrian Anthony Gill   "The causality is debatable. Maybe poorer people have a harder time getting married. Maybe being married makes it easier to earn more. Maybe some third factor causes both phenomena. But what is clear is that you're most likely to have a better life if you're married—even if, it turns out, you get cancer." Virginia Postrel   "The 'poor' as a class are rolling so in luxuries that it is the rarest thing in the world to find an opportunity of helping them to anything better than to get a little more drunk than usual." Coventry Patmore   "If the nineteenth was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) it may be expected that this one may be the century of 'collectivism' and therefore the century of the State." Benito Mussolini   "The truth is that parents are one of society's most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life's lottery." Rich Lowry   "Only through the fluctuations of competition, and consequently of commodity prices, does the law of value of commodity production assert itself and the determination of the value of the commodity by the socially necessary labour time become a reality. That thereby the form of manifestation of value, the price, as a rule looks somewhat different from the value which it manifests, is a fate which value shares with most social relations. A king usually looks quite different from the monarchy which he represents. To desire, in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, to establish the determination of value by labour time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that, at least in this sphere, one has adopted the usual utopian disdain of economic laws." Friedrich Engels   "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." Thomas Sowell   "A genius differs from a good understanding, as a magician from a good architect; that raises his structure by means invisible; this by the skilful use of common tools. Hence genius has ever been supposed to partake of something divine." Edward Young   "We have produced no series of prophets, as has Judaism or Islam. We have not even produced a Joan of Arc, or a Savonarola. We have produced few saints. In Germany the Reformation was due to the passionate conviction of Luther. In England it was due to a palace intrigue. We can show a steady level of piety, a fixed determination to live decently according to our lights—little more." Edward Morgan Forster   "Can you believe that I'm honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I'm trying to be honest instead of dishonest? That I've decided the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and feel abandoned and I feel like shit is to try to be honest for once? Even if I should have done it sooner? Even when I admit it's maybe possible that you might even interpret what I'm saying now as dishonest, as trying somehow to maybe freak you out enough so that you'll move back out and I can get out of this? Which I don't think is what I'm doing, but to be totally honest I can't be a hundred percent sure?" David Foster Wallace   "Do you think Marilyn Monroe would have died if we had had socialism? Who killed Marilyn Monroe—that's a question. That was a tragedy that affected me very much. I hate the idea of Hollywood in which she had to survive. She said she wanted to meet me when she was over here and I wish I had. I would have liked to have talked with her." Sean O'Casey   "Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventative of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided." Adam Smith   "It is essentially necessary to all true magistracy that it intend the good of the people. Those magistrates that perform their duty and office in seeking and procuring this, may justly be called fathers and shepherds. But maintaining an interest contrary to that of the people that entrusted them, they become enemies of that people and ought no longer to be looked upon as fathers or shepherds, which are titles of love and sweetness, but thieves, wolves, tyrants, the worst of all enemies." Algernon Sidney   "The owner of your local McDonald's employs, say, six low-skilled workers, who are (at least slightly) better off because he's there to employ them. What have you done for low-skilled workers lately? Let's suppose your best answer is 'nothing.' Then, if we're going to try to do something additional for low-wage workers, shouldn't it be your turn, rather than the McDonald guy's turn, to make a contribution?" Steven Landsburg   "The aesthetic and the ethical are two arms of one lever: to the extent to which one side becomes longer and heavier, the other side becomes shorter and lighter. As soon as a man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly responsive to the aesthetic." Leo Tolstoy   "The true drama, and especially the tragedy, calls for the hero to exercise will, to create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us—and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." David Mamet   "The old English noun 'travel' (in the sense of a journey) was originally the same word as 'travail' (meaning 'trouble,' 'work, ' or 'torment'). And the word 'travail,' in turn, seems to have been derived, through the French, from a popular Latin or Common Romanic word trepalium, which meant a three-staked instrument of torture. To journey—to 'travail,' or (later) to travel—then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work." Daniel Boorstin   "In everything there is still some spot unexplored, because we are accustomed only to use our eyes with the recollection of what others before us have thought on the subject which we contemplate. The smallest object contains something unknown." Gustave Flaubert   "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it." Daniel Kahneman   "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America." Franklin Roosevelt   "Man, motivated by self-interest, undertakes that which may be to his immediate or later advantage, and avoids that from which he expects no present or future gain. Following this natural instinct, everything we do for our own sake, everything we do without compulsion, we do carefully, industriously, and well. On the other hand, all that we do not do freely, all that we do not do for our own advantage, we do carelessly, lazily, and all awry." Alexander Radishchev   "It is almost as if our present programs of public assistance had been consciously contrived to perpetuate the conditions they are supposed to alleviate." James Tobin   "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." John Stuart Mill   "When Europe came to life again in the eleventh century, the market economy and monetary sophistication were 'scandalous' novelties. Civilization, standing for ancient tradition, was by definition hostile to innovation. So it said no to the market, no to profit making, no to capital. At best it was suspicious and reticent. Then as the years passed, the demands and pressures of everyday life became more urgent. European civilization was caught in a permanent conflict that was pulling it apart. So with a bad grace, it allowed change to force the gates. And the experience was not peculiar to the West." Fernand Braudel   "Note to self: Be kind, be kind, be kind." Rob Reynolds   "The definition appears on page 51 of Journey Down a Rainbow, a book in which Mr Priestley gives his impression of life in the United States, and in particular in Texas. It reads: 'Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.' It is clear at once what sort of definition this is. It is the expression of a number of things that Mr Priestley particularly dislikes. The words 'the whole system' are not really a claim to scientific accuracy and consistency in the definition, but rather an indication that Mr Priestley does not wish to be tied down by such limiting concepts. We are reasonably clear also about the thing itself, the 'whole system' of which he writes. It seems to refer in particular to the dreary wastes of new houses, motor roads, and 'light industry' surrounding so many European and North American cities. But 'Admass' is not a usable term in social science, and it would be unfair to Mr Priestley to treat it as such. For example, an economist, even an economist sympathetic to Mr Priestley's ideas, might wish to get the term 'inflation' out of the definition, in order to make it clear that 'Admass' does not cease to exist in those periods when inflation is supplanted by deflation." Walter Taplin   "Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like." James McNeill Whistler   "Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt." Barack Obama