"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
– Frederick Douglass

Dynamism

"...Unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices. Some [of them] prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to "stasis," a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority.
On the other side is an emerging coalition in support of "dynamism": an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, [and] dynamists are "the party of life." "
-Viriginia Postrel

"And to this day, rock and roll should be the escape from politics, not the answer to politics."
-Alice Cooper

Folly of Planning the Economy

"The central question was whether it was possible to make economic calculations in a socialist-planned economy. Lange was a proponent of market socialism with state ownership of the means of production, as embodied in the Soviet planned economy.
Using mathematical models and computers, the planned economy was supposed to be able to imitate the market and thereby solve the problem of economic calculation, according to Lange. Mises and Hayek believed that such a system could never function satisfactorily. They emphasized the importance of private ownership, in particular of the means of production, as a necessary precondition for price formation. Without personal property, there are no markets. If there are no markets, there is no price formation. And if there is no price formation, people lack the information to act in an economically rational way, with large-scale waste of resources as a result.
Thanks to the collapse of communism with its central planned economy, the debate was settled in the late 1980s in favor of Mises and Hayek. But, before that time, even many western economists had great confidence in the forecasting value of economic models. They recognized that these were not yet perfect, but believed that the shortcomings at that time could be remedied through further development of statistics, econometrics and the use of powerful computers. However, especially during the stagflation of the 1970s, economic models demonstrated that they were less and less able to explain and predict economic reality."
-Hans Labohm

Art of Programming

"I consider a good program to be "art." Granted, it's not "art" about which people in stylish clothes can debate whether it demonstrates the essential conflict between man and his inner raccoon. Unfortunately, the art of programming is only recognizable to people who have been trained to recognize it. It's like paintings made with ink that is only visible when wearing special glasses, except the glasses take years to build, and everyone must build their own glasses.
When I see a program that is well designed, that is loosely-coupled, and nicely laid out as a set of objects, I recognize it as beautiful.
In fact, I would suggest that the world is FULL of artists. It's just that not every artist uses a medium that is recognizable to anyone but those who work in that medium.
It's the efforts of those artists which drive human progress forward, in that the love of their craft drives the efficiency and productivity gains that have created our current level of technical sophistication. Which art matters more to humanity, the art which enables people with certain highly-symmetrical faces to earn vast quantities of money in return for having their picture taken (okay, I oversimplify), or the people who actually make the advances which improve the lot of humanity?"
-John Carroll

"Karl Marx dreamt of a world without hard labor; Brigham Young made a religious duty of it, and, indeed, an honor and a privilege. God had blessed us by giving us something genuinely productive to do, like growing the crops that will keep us from starving, like taking people's garbage out of the suburbs and the cities, or building people's houses, or landscaping their yards, or looking after them when they are sick.
In the eyes of Brigham Young, manual labor was collaboration with the Almighty in his ongoing effort to improve the world. The world, according to this point of view, was not created finished and perfect, as the educated theologians have vainly tried to argue; rather, it was deliberately left in an extremely unfinished state. Why? So that man would have a meaningful task to perform: so that he would become a co-creator of the universe.
Nor were the Mormons alone in sanctifying hard work. Their attitude was ultimately derived from the teachings of John Calvin, who preached what Max Weber would make famous as the Protestant work ethic -- an ethic that emerged in the Puritans, the Quakers, the Methodists, the Shakers and all the other various religious communities that glorified hard work and that inevitably ended up by making the members of these communities so prosperous that their wealth began to endanger the well being of their soul."
-Lee Harris

"The law of nature is change (chaos), while the dream of man is order."
-Henry Adams

"The Moon is not a destination - it is a direction."
-Mike Collins

Thinking You Know More Than You Do

"Our ideas for explaining trends in output, employment and living standards—what we call "macroeconomics" — are in a state of disarray."
"But here's an intriguing irony: the less we understand the economy, the better it does. In the 1960s and 1970s, many economists had confidence. They thought they understood spending patterns, could estimate "full employment" and propose policies to prevent recessions. What we got was high inflation and four recessions (1969-70, 1973-75, 1980 and 1981-82). Since then, we've had lower inflation, only two mild recessions (1990-91 and 2001) and faster productivity growth."
-Robert J. Samuelson

Graduation Exhortations

"Some things are beyond your control. What are not easily stolen from you, without your cooperation, are your principles and your values. They are your most important possessions, and if carefully selected and nurtured will well serve you and your fellow man."
-Neil Armstrong

"I want you to know that there are some amazing days ahead. Ultimately you define your own success. Some of you will be doctors or lawyers or parents or teachers, but make five choices: that you will keep learning; that you will live and work with passion and courage; that you will give of yourself to earn the trust of others; that you will always take on the world's toughest problems; and that you will be an optimist."
-Jeffrey Immelt

"...a vital lesson we have learned from the failures of the past is to reject Utopia as a goal. This lesson reflects the end of the idea that technological progress, or social progress, or any other arrangement of human affairs can establish universal human happiness. We know that technological and social changes have removed specific causes of unhappiness, and the world is better off for it...Happiness will remain the realm of religion and philosophy...we must at least remove one additional cause of misery, which is the harm that utopian philosophies have caused in attempting to engineer the perfect society. Coming into an era which is likely to be marked by unprecedented abilities to affect our condition in the world, it is all the more important to do so without the illusion that such changes, however great and however desirable, will bring perfection."
-James C. Bennett

"A new greatest generation is emerging – in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the other, less-publicized battlegrounds of the War on Terror. Focused on the U.S. political cycle, America’s press elites are missing the extraordinary story of the 19-through-35 year olds who are winning this war. The detailed history of this new cohort of American and Free World leaders – the people who will shape the 21st century – is being written by themselves, chiefly on the Internet, via email or web logs."
-Austin Bay

"The visual sense of sight is the highest bandwidth of information into the mind."
-Richard Zarda

"I wasted time and now doth time waste me."
-Shakespeare

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
-Ray Kurzweil

"I don’t view death as the end of the journey of a human soul. I view it as a transition. The God I believe in would not waste the total life experiences of a man or woman made in his image on a total and complete death; a dead end, if you will, with nothing to follow. I cannot believe that it is God’s plan that the life experiences of a man; wisdom gained, lessons learned and love experienced, should, upon death, disappear as if they never were. I believe that there’s something to follow the life we know on this earth."
-Neal Boortz

"The common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place, we now have a "balkanized" group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways."
-Terry Teachout