White and black swans

"A white swan for the butcher is a black swan for the turkey."
Nassim Taleb

Lies and more lies

“[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” – Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

Secular religion

" Patriotism, like religion, meets people's need for something greater to which their individual lives can be anchored ... America's state religion, [is] patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that "treason" is morally worse than murder or rape "-- William Blum, author of Killing Hope

Liberty quotes

http://mises.org/books/liberty_quotes.pdf

Social cooperation

Ludwig von Mises: "What alone enables mankind to advance and distinguishes man from the animals is social cooperation." - Liberalism

Mind over matter

Ludwig von Mises: "What counts is not the data, but the mind that deals with them…. Galileo was certainly not the first to observe the swinging motion of the chandelier in the cathedral at Pisa." - Epistemological Problems of Economics

Paper Wealth

"We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher's stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, 'in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.'" --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:381