“The most common doubt about economists stems from their apparent inability to agree, best captured by George Bernard Shaw’s line that ‘if all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. But economists’ hard-core detractors recognize the superficiality of this complaint. They know that economists regularly see eye-to-eye with one another. A quip from Steven Kelman directly contradicts Shaw: ‘The near-unanimity of the answers economists give to public policy questions, highly controversial among the run of intelligent observers, but which share the characteristic of being able to be analyzed in terms of microeconomic theory, reminds one of the unanimity characterizing bodies such as the politburo of the Soviet Communist Party.’ It is not lack of consensus that incenses knowledgeable critics, but the way economists unite behind unpalatable conclusions, such as doubts about the benefits of regulation.”

Bryan Caplan, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Cato Policy Analysis #594 (May 29, 2007)

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment”

Jim Rohn, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email January 31, 2022

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”

Henry David Thoreau, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email February 6, 2022

“my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world’s history.”

“The Willows” in Algernon Blackwood Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

“The Singular Mark Twain [by Fred Kaplan] arouses in the reader an urgently fugitive instinct, as at the approach of an unpolished yet tenacious raconteur.”

Christopher Hitchens panning the book in The Atlantic Monthly November 2003

“For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Frances Farrell in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000

“The master said, ‘In antiquity men were loath to speak. This is because they counted it shameful if their person failed to keep up with their words’”

Confucius The Analects IV.22

“You can critique marriage. Fine. But what game are you going to play? Try coming up with one on your own. Maybe you can. Maybe you’re like avant-garde Picasso, maybe you are, and maybe you have a right to make your own arrangement. Maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution, but I bloody well wouldn’t count on it. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as a job, or better yet, a career. You’re lucky that there’s such a thing as friendship, as marriage, all of these social institutions. And when you criticize them, Nietzsche put it as one question of conscience, and I think it’s in Twilight of the Idols: Whether you’re a leader, or whether you’re running away, you’re outside the pack and moving in a different direction. In either case, you know, are you a rebel because you can’t fit in? Or are you a rebel because you could fit in, but you see a better way? People in that category are not that common. And the first question of conscience should be, well, ‘Which of those two are you?’ It’s highly probable that you’re the first one, and not the second, because that would mean that you would be intensely disciplined, plus creative on that dimension. Maybe that is you, and God, then we need you. You know, like, you’re an avatar of the savior under those circumstances, and maybe everyone has some of that in them.”

Jordan Peterson in a video clip from “The JBP Show” on Instagram January 18, 2022