Fire and Knowledge

For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I’m conservative. We disagree…But I don’t need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

—Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican who lost to a tea party candidate

A haunting quote:

Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.

—Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America

As a nation we began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it that all men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

—Abraham Lincoln

Here is Sam Harris on the relationship between science and morality:

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

—George Bernard Shaw, as quoted in Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 217.

From CNN:

A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.

he sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.

The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN….

TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

An expensive mistake that has cost many families their homes and land. They better be generously compensated — though there is probably no monetary compensation that can make up for losing their homes like this. It’s frustrating that people have to suffer for the mistake of a corporation.

You have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness.

—Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), p. 257.

I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

—Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), p. 85.