Richard

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“Of all the Whig projects of moral and civic improvement, their most ambitious instrument of republican soulcraft was the public school. As Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts, explained, if all were to share in governing, then true to the republican tradition, all would have to be equipped with the requisite moral and intellectual resources: “with universal suffrage, there must be universal elevation of character, intellectual and moral, or there will be universal mismanagement and calamity.” The question whether human beings are capable of self-government admits only a conditional answer; they are capable insofar as they possess the intelligence and goodness and breadth of view to govern on behalf of the public good. “But men are not born in the full possession of such an ability,” nor do they necessarily develop it as they grow to adulthood.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )”
― John Stuart Mill