Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.
Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.
I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.
Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.
The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe – because no one else could be such a fool.
Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.
The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation...
Pedestrians never seem to realize that they are a threat to the safety of cars.
Politicians are forever coming up with ‘solutions’ to virtually every imaginable imperfection in life. But, if we give them more power and more of our money, we are very unlikely to end up better off on net balance.
It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is ‘public service,’ but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not.
In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment. The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.
The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.
The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an ‘extremist.’ That person will be said to be ‘out of the mainstream.’ But the mainstream is itself the problem.
Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.