Andrés Mc Cormack > Andrés's Quotes

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“A lady came up to me one day and said 'Sir! You are drunk', to which I replied 'I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.”
― Winston Churchill

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“If it's okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn't we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don't think that's a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don't think it's a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.”
― Steven E. Landsburg

“...given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“If, like me, you consider the Drug War a moral outrage, you’ll be distressed to learn that the police are maximizing drug convictions. Stopping motorists because you don’t like their race is reprehensible, but at least it doesn’t retard economic activity. If the police are going to harass a dozen motorists a day, it doesn’t much matter whether they target blacks, whites, or a representative sample; twelve harassed motorists are twelve harassed motorists. But it does matter whether they target drug dealers, because that discourages the drug trade and raises the price of drugs. That strikes me as bad—and in fact, worse than racism.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

“If you support protectionism because you think it’s good for you, you’ve probably just got your economics wrong. But if you support protectionism because you think it’s good for your fellow Americans, at the expense of foreigners, then it seems to me you’ve got your morals wrong too.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

“In the immediate postbubble period, the wealth effect of asset price movements has a bigger impact on economic growth rates than monetary policy does. People tend to underestimate the size of this effect. In the early stages of a bubble bursting, when stock prices fall and earnings have not yet declined, people mistakenly judge the decline to be a buying opportunity and find stocks cheap in relation to both past earnings and expected earnings, failing to account for the amount of decline in earnings that is likely to result from what’s to come. But the reversal is self-reinforcing. As wealth falls first and incomes fall later, creditworthiness worsens, which constricts lending activity, which hurts spending and lowers investment rates while also making it less appealing to borrow to buy financial assets. This in turn worsens the fundamentals of the asset (e.g., the weaker economic activity leads corporate earnings to chronically disappoint), leading people to sell and driving down prices further. This has an accelerating downward impact on asset prices, income, and wealth.”
― Ray Dalio, A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises

“That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.”
― Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —Justice Louis Brandeis,”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

“The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“So now all of this writing has diverted me from my purpose and I am not in the right state of mind anymore.  If you think it is easy to procrastinate on a school assignment, try killing yourself some time.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher

“Not allowing people to choose the time and manner of their own deaths is madness.  It is burning witches.  It is executing people for making scientific discoveries.  It is torturing infidels.  It is absolute, unqualified, inhuman insanity.  There are millions who agree with me and I’ll warn all of you again and again.  Beware!  There could be a horrible fate waiting for you and if you don’t all get together, look each other in the eye, recognize the insanity, and change the laws, you could wake up tomorrow as a head on a corpse with no way out for the next thirty years.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher

“I did not want much from the world in dying.  To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane.  To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear.  To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome.  And to be comforted as I died.  When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone.  But maybe you have to be there to truly understand it.  I wanted someone to hold my hand, to touch my face, to be with me.  The thing I feared most in life was being alone.  How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody!  But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone.  But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher

“Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me.  What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out.  Someday when you are helpless you may realize that your life is not your own after all and you will see that sometimes being forced to live is the ultimate tyranny and enslavement.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher