There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Aristotle

Later in life, when mortar rounds were dropping around him, Brother said he didn’t mind a bit.  “Just like fishing back on the farm,” he always said.

Ragnar Benson
From: Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
Page 5, Copyright 1988

Man defends himself as much as he can against truth, as a child does against a medicine, as the man of the Platonic cave did against the light.  He does not willingly follow his path, but has to be dragged along backward.

Henri Frederic Amiel

No, that wasn’t a note.  That was an entire symphony.

Peter Zatloukal
When asked if that was a note of sarcasm in his voice.
3:00 PM, October 24, 2000

IMO there are to many stupid people in the world to waste any time worrying or complaining about them.

Greg Hamilton
11/11/2001
Insights Training Email List

Reliability in a handgun is extremely important.  If you point it at someone and all it does is go CLICK when you pull the trigger you don’t have much leeway in talking your way out of the situation.  I mean, what are you going to say?  “I wasn’t serious when I pulled the trigger?”

Eric Engstrom

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Tse-Tung, also Mao Zedung
Problems of War and Strategy, speech
6 Nov. 1938

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Albert Einstein

All our objectives are predicated on the belief that the interests of public safety demand a reduction in the availability and attractiveness of guns of all kinds.

1. Minimum age of 18 for the ownership, use and possession of all guns.
2. Ban on the sale, manufacture and import of imitation guns and their possession in a public place.
3. Certification of all deactivated weapons.
4. Inclusion of airguns in certification system.
5. One certification system for all legal weapons i.e. rifles, shotguns, airguns.
6. Multi-shot rifles and shotguns to be banned.
7. Practical or Combat shooting or any other shooting practice which involves the simulation of real life situations and/or the use of human shaped targets to be banned.
   Abolition or radical reconstitution of the Firearms Consultative Committee.

We recognise the existence of a significant minority interest in shooting for sport, and our proposals are aimed at striking an appropriate balance between the sport-shooting interest and the overriding interest in public safety.

Gun Control Network
Our Objectives as of February 19, 2005

Since emotions are few and reasons are many (said the robot, Giskard), the behaviour of a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behaviour of one person can.

Isaac Asimov

… religion is needed for restraining rude populations, which have to be ruled, whereas rational demonstration is for such, of a contemplative nature, as know how to rule themselves and others.

Guido (Giordano) Bruno
1548-burned at the stake, on this day in history, February 17 1600

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

Ludwigh Feuerbach

To believe regulation of anything by government automatically extends free will is a delusion.

 Anthony Evans
 April 30, 1998
 SOC Libertarian Discussion at Microsoft.

To rid ourselves of the entrenched, voracious type of capitalism that is in this country that perpetuates sexism and racism, I don’t think that can come nonviolently.

Lynne Stewart
Civil rights lawyer convicted February 10, 2005 of smuggling messages of violence from one of
her jailed clients — a radical Egyptian sheik — to his terrorist disciples on the outside.

[Apparently she doesn’t have a problem with the sexism of radical Islam.–Joe Huffman]

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

Edmund Burke
(1729-97), Irish philosopher, statesman.
First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796;
published in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 
vol. 9, ed. by Paul Langford, 1991).

I believe the American would prefer the policeman’s truncheon to the anarchist’s bomb.

Former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew

Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.

Bruce Schneier
February 9, 2005
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_th.html
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,,99628,00.html

Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

James Burnham
Suicide of the West