Profile
Name:
Mark
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Age:
51
Joined:
Jan 31, 2011
Latest Activity:
3 weeks ago
About Me:
"There is a thing inherent and natural, Which existed before heaven and earth. Motionless and fathomless, It stands alone and never changes; It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted. It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe. I do not know its name. If I am forced to give it a name, I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme".
Lao Tzu - Chinese philosopher (c. 4th century B.C.)
"The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world".
Max Born - 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics (1882-1970)
"Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions".
Zen proverb - attrib. Chien-chih Seng-ts'an (c. 5th century A.D.)
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth".
Marcus Aurelius - Roman emperor (121-180)
"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier".
H. L. Mencken - American journalist, essayist (1880-1956)
"Now that the Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science has been created, one can only be profoundly grateful for having been selected as one of its joint recipients... Yet I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it... It is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess... I am therefore almost inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence".
Nobel Banquet speech (December 10, 1974) Friedrich A. Hayek - 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics (1899-1992)
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
John Maynard Keynes - British economist, father of Keynesian economics (1883-1946)
"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income".
Milton Friedman - 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics (1912-2006)
"So let me take this into more interesting territory, and express my anti-social-planner views. Even more than in Hayek's days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Trader, essayist, author and epistemologist (1960-present)
[Whether the Safeguarding of Liberty can be more safely entrusted to the Populace or to the Upper Class; and which has the Stronger Reason for creating Disturbances, the 'Have-nots' or the 'Haves'] - "It must be confessed, then, if due weight be given to both sides, that it still remains doubtful which to select as the guardians of liberty, for it is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it".
The Discourses on Livy (c. 1513) Niccolo Machiavelli - Italian philosopher, historian and one of the founders of modern political science (1469-1527)
Hometown:
North Carolina
Country:
United States
Channel Comments
-G
All the best ,...JC