Technology Writers From The United States

"The New York Times could print nothing but lies for a year, and it would still be the most powerful institution in the world."

"Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre."

"You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape."

"In fact, it's basically impossible to combine a system in which agreements stay agreed with one in which equality stays equal."

"All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press. None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government."

"An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today."

"[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement."

"[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared."

"[P]ower in a democracy is held by those who manage public opinion."

"[A]s long as the actions of two parties advance each others' interests, they can be considered allies, even if their philosophies of the world are so utterly opposed that they cannot afford the luxury of any such favorable reference."

"[T]yranny is best seen as a sort of static civil war. The tyrant's office differs from the monarch's in that the latter's legitimacy is assured by law, whereas the former's is a matter of personal power and prestige."

"Tyranny […] is essentially informal and unstable. At least in the modern era, they tend to evolve into juntas, which tend to evolve into oligarchies, which tend to evolve into democracies. […] With each of these steps, legitimacy and internal security increase, and the state becomes stronger and harder to overthrow. Unless Gaza is your idea of fun, a strong and secure state is a good thing."

"[T]he state is simply a real-estate business on a very large scale."

"[T]he modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles."

"Limited government is a recipe for corrupting the judiciary."

"In fact, the word racism is applied in almost exactly the same way, by almost exactly the same authorities, as atheism in 1811. It is an omnibus epithet for a tremendous variety of ideas and opinions which responsible authorities find dangerous or displeasing."

"In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007."

"The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government."

"[R]evenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable."

"Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty."

"[T]axation is not theft. Taxation is rent."

"The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one."

"It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish."

"In the twenty-first century, any writer whose work appears anywhere but his own blog is a shill. Or at least, he should be assumed to be compromised unless proven otherwise. The Internet has all the tools you need to write and be read without being beholden to anyone. If anyone rejects this independence, you have to wonder why."

"Most people in the West don't think their entire system of government is fundamentally, irreparably corrupt. Nor did most people in the Soviet Union."

"For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful."

"[T]he replacement of religion by idealism has allowed people who are essentially religious fanatics to achieve positions of unprecedented temporal supremacy, not only without arousing the alarm of reasonable, scientifically minded writers, but in fact enlisting their enthusiastic support."

"Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?"

"The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors."

"I hope you can agree that the Harvard faculty in 2007 by and large believes in human equality, social justice, world peace, and community leadership, that the faculty of the same institution held much the same beliefs in 1957, 1907, 1857, and 1807, and that in any of these years they would have described these views as the absolute cynosure of Christianity. Perhaps I am just naturally suspicious, but it strains my credulity slightly to believe that sometime in 1969, the very same beliefs were rederived from pure reason and universal ethics, whose concurrence with the New Testament is remarkable to say the least."

""Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

"This Rousseauvian idea […] that government is possible only when the governed love their governors has been responsible for literally centuries of bloodshed. It is killing people right now as we speak in Iraq. One hundred years ago, all sane people assumed that the purpose of the state was to enforce the law, not to be loved. The British governed half the world, with a much higher quality of service than exists almost anywhere today, under this theory, and did so quite successfully. When they were finally convinced to abandon it, […] the result was massacre, disaster, corruption, and poverty. Where would you personally rather live? In the Cairo of Lord Cromer, or the Cairo of Mubarak? The Basra of Gertrude Bell, or the Basra of Tony Blair?"

"You get rid of the system by making it fashionable, among the most fashionable people, to believe the system needs to be gotten rid of. It is certainly possible to build a system of government that can withstand, in a purely military sense, the disapproval of its own elites, but such is not the case with ours."

"The system will be defeated when most intelligent people realize that The New York Times is a government gazette and Harvard is a government seminary, and when they form alternate institutions that fulfill the same role in a way that is genuinely independent."

"Ultimately, a pacifist is just an activist whose strategy for victory is to suppress the military efforts of his enemies."

"The problem with the permanent bureaucracy is that any enterprise controlled by its own employees tends to expand without limit."

"Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits."

"The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear. The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't."

"A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?"

"The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing."

"The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people."

"Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it the hard way."

"Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different."

"It is physically impossible to win a war by arresting an invading army and trying each of its soldiers."

"In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear."

"Simplicity is the cure for violence. For example, if we postulate an imaginary oracle that could predict the outcome of any battle, we could eliminate war. The predicted loser would have no incentive but to concede to the demands of the predicted winner."

""Formalists attribute the success of Europe, Japan and the US after World War II not to democracy, but its absence. While retaining the symbolic structures of democracy . . . the postwar Western system has assigned almost all actual decision-making power to its civil servants and judges, who are 'apolitical' and 'nonpartisan,' ie, nondemocratic . . . In other words, 'democracy' appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

""The main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal [of formalism] is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence." - A Formalist Manifesto, (April 23 2007)"

"Hominids crave power, and they rationalize it as responsibility. No one ever achieved power by promising to enslave his followers. It is always about improving the world, at least from the perspective of prospective supporters. And it is almost always sincere. Insincere leaders are very rare, because hominids are very good at detecting insincerity. It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself."

"[U]niversal faith in progress is evidence for, not against, decline."