#mic

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place. ↗

— Criss Jami

#athletes #athletics #competition #confidence #improvement

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#caliphate #death-of-osama-bin-laden #fascism #islam #islamic-banking

State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#economics #fascism #monopoly #politics #socialism

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons ↗

— Milton Friedman

#economics #law #morality #economics

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control. ↗

— Robert Bringhurst

#literature #writing #economics

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark. ↗

— Friedrich A. von Hayek

#economics

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#simile #taxation #economics

Welcome to Morganville.You'll never want to leave.And even if you do...well, you can't. Sorry about that. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#eve-rosser #michael-glass #morganville-vampires #myrnin #oliver

When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#egocentricity #hubris #karma #karmic-effects #self-absorption

I looked at Micah, who shrugged. I looked at Rafael, who shook his head. Nice that none of us knew why he was undressing. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#blake #fiction #hunter #micah #paranormal