"The wealthy were in a position to take risks with new ventures. Under the new 1935 [Roosevelt tax increase], a very wealthy man would see more than three-quarters of any profits from new ventures taken by income tax. Any loss, however, would be the same man's to bear. This man would try to hoard his capital and wait - thus coming to fit the very stereotype of the idle rich man the New Dealers were hoping to propagate."
-Amity Shlaes, "The Forgotten Man"

"Just as science is a journey from the unknown to the known, religion is a journey from the known to the unknown."
-Robert Godwin

"History is an argument without end."
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (quoting an unknown source)

"A talented man is like a marksman who is able to hit a target that others can't hit, while the great artist is like a marksman who is able to hit a target others can't even see."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

"Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends."
-Andrew Mellon, from his book "Taxation: The People's Business"

"This is the self-perpetuating logic behind the unstoppable momentum of the expanding State: The bigger it grows, the more it intrudes into our lives, and the more it intrudes into our lives, the more dependent we become on it."
-Gerry Baker

"Permanence is an illusion of every age."
-Mark Steyn

"Who do you sound like?" asked a secretary at a Memphis recording studio in August 1953, when a truck driver came in seeking a singing career. "I don’t sound like nobody."
-Elvis Presley.

"The U.S. economy survived the dotcom bubble and crash of 1999-2000 much better than it survived the stock market bubble and crash of 1929. One reason is that President Bush did a better job of sifting through economic advice than did President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt and many others saw the Depression through [a] "hard times are upon us" lens. Their ambition was to redistribute the pain, because they did not believe that the pain could be ended and the former prosperity restored. They acted as though productive capacity had been destroyed, as if by a war or a natural disaster."
-Arnold Kling

"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

"Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed. Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures."
-Daniel J. Levitin

"The struggle over economic policy in the 1930's was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs."
-Arnold Kling

"The entitlement mentality encouraged by the welfare state exacerbates social conflicts -- between generations (the welfare state transfers wealth to the elderly), between racial and ethnic groups (through group preferences) and between all organized interests (from farmers to labor unions to recipients of corporate welfare) as government, not impersonal market forces, distributes scarce resources."
-George Will

"Liberals tend to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government."
-George Will