He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.

The sympathies of a well-adjusted person can easily be aroused by the plight of strangers. Indeed, the skillful writer of a novel, a play, or an opera can engage our emotions on behalf of people who are not only strangers to us, but who do not even exist! And a person whose emotions cannot be so aroused is not behaving normally.

You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling.

I never ponder counterfactuals.

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

Razib Khan Hired And Fired By The New York Times, Both On The Same Day!

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature.