Steven > Steven's Quotes

“The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.”
― Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality

“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”
― Robert Lewis Dabney

“Everything great in art is born of service. It is a free and willing bondage, for it is born of inspiration. Not from servitude or slavishly “catering to the market.” And not from any base servility before today’s bored neurotics who fill the salons, restaurants, dance clubs, and the columns of the “literati.” Not servility, but service.”
― Ivan Ilyin, Foundations of Christian Culture

“Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“a large body of empirical research conducted over decades suggests that student evaluations are more than unhelpful; instead, they are likely to change the behaviors of presenters in ways that make learning and personal growth less likely. That is one reason why Armstrong concluded that “teacher ratings are detrimental to students.”
― Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

“Then an orderly brought up the goat from the basement.”
― Pope Brock, Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

“To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

“One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

“Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Ants

“Following imprinting, valuations become locally coherent, as the consumer attempts to reconcile future decisions of a "similar kind" with the initial one. This creates an illusion of order, because consumers' coherent responses to subsequent changes in conditions disguise the arbitrary nature of the initial, foundation choice.”
― Dan Ariely

“The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.”
― John Tooby

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?”
― H.P Lovecraft

“It is a choice, and therefore within the province of economics.”
― Jason Potts, The New Evolutionary Microeconomics: Complexity, Competence and Adaptive Behaviour

“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie”
― Joseph Schumpeter

“he who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing

“Culture wars' are really undeclared 'gene wars”
― J. Philippe Rushton

“Nothing is more complex than avoiding the obvious”
― Thomas Sowell, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays

“Should the discovery of fire have been avoided because arsonists can misuse it? Any kind of information can be misused by those who are determined to do so. The place to stop the misuse of knowledge is not at the point of inquiry, but at the point of misuse.”
― Arthur R. Jensen, Straight Talk About Mental Tests

“People will pay a dollar for a program with information, but they’ll pay $ 10 for a program with information plus a story.”
― Brian Tracy, The 6-Figure Speaker: The Ultimate Blueprint to Build a Business as a Highly-Paid Professional Speaker

“The most defensible answer to the question of why therapy works is, We don’t know.”
― Robyn Dawes, House of Cards : Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth

“The great leap was one from adaptation to, to control over the natural environment.”
― Pierre L. van den Berghe, Man in society: A biosocial view

“Novelty of outcome + Social Approval of that outcome = fake creativity”
― Edward Dutton, The Genius Famine: Why we need geniuses, why they’re dying out, and why we must rescue them

“And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

“Authority systems must be based on people arranged in a hierarchy. Thus the critical question in determining control is, Who is over whom? How much over is far less important than the visible presence of a ranked ordering.”
― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds … its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos.”
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed

“Men do not live in perfect harmony with each other. Rather, again and again conflicts arise between them. And the source of these conflicts is always the same: the scarcity of goods. I want to do X with a given good G and you want to do simultaneously Y with the very same good. Because it is impossible for you and me to do simultaneously X and Y with G, you and I must clash. If a superabundance of goods existed, i.e., if, for instance, G were available in unlimited supply, our conflict could be avoided. We could both simultaneously do ‘our thing’ with G. But most goods do not exist in superabundance. Ever since mankind left the Garden of Eden, there has been and always will be scarcity all-around us.”
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline

“I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.”
― John Randolph