#mic

Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent. ↗

— Dr. Seuss

#parenting

Parents had some kind of sin radar, Claire thought. They always called when you were in the middle of something you just knew they'd consider wrong. Or at least risky. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#eve-rosser #michael-glass #parents #reba #shane-collins

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly. ↗

— Robert W. Cox

#economics #god #monopoly #morality #religion

Heidegger’s parlamblings on ‘Nothing’ and ‘Not’ and ‘the Nothing that Nothings’ were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy. ↗

— John Gardner

#john-gardner #mickelsson-s-ghosts #respect

He pinned me in place with a direct look, his dark brown eyes smoldering. “You’re Mary Jane,” he said finally. “And you have all these Flash Thompsons and Harry Osborns hovering around you, trying to make a move. Because...you’re basically amazing. ↗

— J.M. Richards

#comic-books #geek-girl #geek-love #hero #heroines

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. ↗

— Murray N. Rothbard

#science

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#nerdiness #science #science

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ↗

— Charles Wheelan

#goverment #humanity #incentives #politics #social-policy

A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives. ↗

— Charles Wheelan

#economics #free-market #markets #science

Government succeeds by failing. ↗

— L.K. Samuels

#complexity-science #economics #politics #science