"Craftsmanship is the respect we pay to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the material world we try to shape and improve."
-Jim Meigs

"Freedom is never free, and is always the enemy of structured bureaucracies. Free people are not equal and equal people are not free. Equality can be a weapon in the hands of the bureaucracy. All one needs is to insist on equality of outcomes."
-Jerry Pournelle

"The history of civilization can be seen as a continuing conversion of output into structure. This continues until the structure makes growth difficult to impossible. Guilds, mercantile policies, Church rules, and what they used to call "permit Raj" stifle initiative and growth. Historically this has changed when resources suddenly multiply either by discovery - the discovery of the New World, as an example - or by technology, as with the several Industrial Revolutions and the Computer Revolution. Output rises, wealth rises, and the bureaucracies can't keep up. Eventually they do, of course, and the long term conversion to structure continues and overwhelms the growth."

-Jerry Pournelle

Arrogance of Central Planning

"It is hard to trace all the circuits of trade, to find its hidden recesses, to discover its original springs and motions, and to shew what mutual dependence all traffics have one upon the other. And yet, whoever will categorically pronounce that we get or lose by any business, must know all this, and besides, have a very deep insight into many other things."
-Charles Davenant

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure."
-Helen Keller

"Our political system (and, heck, our overall culture) rewards those who divide up pies far more lavishly than those who bake them. This is probably not sustainable over the long term."
-instapundit.com