Berin Szoka

[Corbusier’s] vision of skyscrapers in the park degenerates into skyscrapers in parking lots, and there can never be enough parking lots

— Jane Jacobs, The Death & Life of Great American Cities, on the reality of Corbusier’s  grand, but inhuman, vision for cities.  Read more.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

—Aristotle

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

—Bertrand Russell, quoted as the epigraph in Thomas Sowell’s 1987 masterpiece A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles. Sowell goes on to say, in his preface: “Conflicts of interests dominate the short run, but conflicts of visions dominate history. We will do almost anything for our visions, except think about them. The purpose of this book is to think about them.”

So happy to rediscover this album after years away from it. Jazz cello at its best!

(Source: Spotify)

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’

—Mary McCarthy on the Dick Cavett show in 1979, on the subject of Lillian Hellman.

For those still unconvinced [by arguments for drug legalization], there is one instructive historical parallel apart from the notorious example of Prohibition. In 1784 Pitt introduced his Commutation Act, which lowered the duty on tea from 112 per cent to 25 per cent. By doing so he finally admitted that an enormously expensive repressive apparatus—public executions, a massive increase in the number of Customs and Excise men, the occupation of coastal towns by Army units, coastal patrols by the Royal Navy and a series of pitched battles with smuggling gangs all over England—would never prevent smugglers supplying the needs of consumers so long as the tax system ensured that the trade remained hugely profitable. The eighteenth-century smugglers were defeated in the end by the price mechanism, not the machinery of State repression. The same fate awaits the drug barons and dope dealers, if the State has the courage to admit its own impotence.

—“The Legalisation of Drugs,” A chapter from the hardback version of Saturn’s Children, the great British libertarian manifesto of 1995, by then-and-still Tory MP Alan Duncan and Dominic Hobson. Read more about the Commutation Act here.

With all due respect, Mr. President, we are not stupid. The State of our Union is not good.

—Herman Cain • Offering up the thesis statement in his Tea Party response. (via shortformblog)

(Source: shortformblog)