Robert > Robert's Quotes

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
― Robert E. Howard

“My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.”
― Robert E. Howard

“What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.”
― Robert E. Howard

“Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph”
― Robert E. Howard

“All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre—

The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.”
― Robert E. Howard

“The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.”
― Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Intellect is not wisdom.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

“If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

“Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”
― Thomas Sowell

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
”
― Thomas Sowell

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself.”
― Gene Simmons

“Believe me, the library is the temple of God. Education is the most sacred religion of all.”
― Gene Simmons

“Men want success and sex. Women want everything.”
― Gene Simmons

“ Before I ever knew what the word Entrepeneur was, I realized in America and in the Western part of the world in general, you are given the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. And that is all anyone should ever expect from the Capitalist system. The rest is up to you.

It's up to you to educate yourself.

It's up to you to learn speaking skills and people skills.

It's up to you to try (and usually fail, but to try again) all sorts of ventures.

The rest is a combination of hard work, being at the right place ...at the right time...with the right thing...oh yes...and more (never ending) hard work.”
― Gene Simmons

“The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.”
― Walter E. Williams

“Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.”
― Walter E. Williams