Best Words of Wisdom I Have Encountered Since 2010

· Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. – Winston Churchill

· All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.― George Orwell, Animal Farm

· Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is. -- Jeane Kirkpatrick

· Socialism is about government taking wealth by force from one group and redistributing it to others until it runs out. Socialism is about subjugating the populace and making them dependent on the government. Socialism is about creating scarcity and poverty -- I've lived it firsthand growing up [in Mao's China] for 26 years. Nothing much has changed, except now it's happening in America." -- Xi Van Fleet, Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning (2023)

· America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. – Tennessee Williams

· Isolation and lack of physical contact are detrimental to our well-being. That is why the most severe punishment in prison is solitary confinement. -- Judy Cho

· Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free. ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

· Socialism: Great idea. Wrong species. – E.O. Wilson

· The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right. -- G.K. Chesterton

· Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. ― G. Michael Hopf

· Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

· You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

· As Glenn Loury and Randall Kennedy insist, society has an obligation to set and enforce basic standards and to punish their violation with stigma and shame, not in order to keep the historically disadvantaged down, but, if the judgements are sound, to give them firm moral footholds on the way to more freedom and power – Jim Sleeper

· Nothing is more likely to be abused than the power of officials who think they are doing the right thing. – Anthony Lewis

· Speech is not violence – and violence is not speech. Equating the two is the hallmark of a tyrannical worldview: If I can treat your speech as violence, then I am justified in using violence to suppress your speech. – Ben Shapiro

· Postmodernism carved the heart out of the liberal project. Enlightenment liberalism pushed reason and logic to the center of discourse; postmodernism dismissed reason and logic as just, like, your opinion, man. – Ben Shapiro

· Americans have a thousand choices for a breakfast cereal, and one for mobility. – James Wilson

· Once you’ve mastered the pen and the podium you need never dine or sleep alone. – Christopher Hitchens

· The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. – Augustine of Hippo

· Forget the damned motor car and build cities for lovers and friends. - Lewis Mumford

· It’s better to look back on life and say: “I can’t believe I did that” than to look back and say: “I wish I did that.” -- Unknown

· If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough. – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

· Every man dies. Not every man really lives. -- William Wallace

· There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. – Niccolo Machiavelli

· Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. -- Alfred North Whitehead

· For the modernist architect, it is a virtue when their building design is innovative – so innovative that it does not fit into the design vocabulary of its neighbors. This partly explains why there is a nationwide NIMBY epidemic – a growing army of people who are terrified of new development because the decades long track record has been to build something jarring and unlovable. And because the “innovative” paradigm strives so strongly to reject time-tested design that communities have loved for many centuries, large majorities of citizens inevitably and strongly dislike the modernist building design. In effect, the modernist has ruined our world and destroyed any chance of making our communities more loved. – Dom Nozzi

· Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death. – Bismark

· “Thou shalt not” is soon forgotten, but “Once upon a time” lasts forever. – Philip Pullman

· Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain

· If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going. – Irwin Corey

· Communists, socialists, and others on the political Left champion the oppressed and claim to bring a utopia of liberty and justice. But as we have seen by the mass murders brought to us by the totalitarianism of Stalin, Mao, and the Jacobians of the French Revolution, a bitter irony is that those acting in the name of societal love (as the Left tends to do) bring the most awful cruelty. — Dom Nozzi

· There is a strong negative correlation between happy motorists and quality of life. The better we make conditions for driving a car, the worse becomes the quality of life for people in that community. – Dom Nozzi

· Car dependency breeds NIMBYs, because car travel is at odds with a walkable, compact city. – Dom Nozzi

· Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life. -- Naguib Mahfouz

· Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. -- former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

· We created cars to increase our convenience, now every menial movement requires an inconvenient auto trip. — Charles Marohn

· An Evangelical who thinks the world is ending is called a religious fanatic; a liberal who thinks so is called an environmentalist. – Dennis Prager