Complexity kills.

"Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration."

Ray Ozzie

http://winsupersite.com/cloud/rethinking-ray-ozzie

"Elections are moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state."

 

Noam Chomsky 

 

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/noam_chomsky_how_the_business_class_views_democracy/ 

People in need are the ambassadors of the gods.

“Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum’s rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are the ambassadors of the gods”
   
Peter Maurin

“The Economist is an excellent magazine for keeping informed about subjects you don’t know anything about, but its deficiencies begin to appear as soon as it addresses one you do.”

James Bowman in The American Conservative

Empirical Evidence Is Overrated

Matt Iglesias in Slate.

Empirical evidence should be n important part of truth seeking, but you need a proper cause and effect theory and experimental evidence as well


http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/02/29/empirical_evidence_is_overratedi.html

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change..

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

  Milton  Friedman

(I disagree with Friedman on almost everything)

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Eric Hoffer

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming 'WOO HOO what a ride!'"

-Hunter S. Thompson