Pavan > Pavan's Quotes

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
― E.M. Forster, What I Believe and Other Essays

“I believe, as many say they believe, that everyone has the right to run his own life—to go to hell in his own fashion.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Since the function of politics is to reduce the diversity of individual ends to a set of common ends (the ends of the majority, the dictator, the party in power, or whatever person or group is in effective control of the political institutions), public property imposes those common ends on the individual. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country.” Ask not, in other words, how you can pursue what you believe is good but how you can pursue what the government tells you is good.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“We live in a complicated and interdependent society; each of us is constantly affected by events thousands of miles away occurring to people he has never heard of. How, in such a society, can we meaningfully talk about each person being free to go his own way? The answer to this question lies in the concept of property rights.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“Of course, topologists don’t care about any of this “applied math” nonsense. They’re just trying to find all the shapes.”
― Milo Beckman, Math Without Numbers

“It is generally supposed that governments strengthen their forces only to defend the state from other states, in oblivion of the fact that armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You