I’ll be adding to this periodically as I collect / remember more stuff.

For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised.

Judge Ann Aiken, in Mayfield v. USA

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that–with one hand tied behind their back–is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

–The Economist

If you don’t have anything nice to say, say it on the Internet.

–Toothpaste for Dinner

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

–Mahatma Gandhi

It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products.

But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.

–Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning… Was the Command Line

“The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet. Don’t be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.”

–Alan Kay

It has been pretended by some… that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors… Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

–Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson

My name is volatile
I’ve been this way a long while
I’d surely like to rest
But the energy gets the best of me yeah
It’s been a wild ride
I wouldn’t change a minute
I can’t slow down inside
Guess that’s why I live it…

–311, “Creatures (For a While)”

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.

– Ludwig von Mises, Prohibition-era economist

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
…
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

– T.S. Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock”

This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts.

– Zechariah 4:6

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

– Bene Gesserit litany, Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles

Change,
Everything you are
And everything you were
Your number has been called
Fights and battles ‘ve begun
Revenge will surely come
Your hard times are ahead

Best,
You’ve got to be the best
You’ve got to change the world
And use this chance to be heard
Your time is now

Don’t,
Let yourself down
And don’t let yourself go
Your last chance has arrived

– Muse, “Butterflies and Hurricanes”

Specialization is for insects.

– Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

You must be the change you want to see in the world.

– Mahatma Gandhi

I want to sweep the halls of arrogance
Sweep the walls of the excrement of these baboons
But I respect and prize the covenant
I respect the process
I respect the rules
When will we find a chord that’s resonant
Just to shake the sheets and make us move?
…
Roll out and make your mark,
Put on your boots and march.

– Ted Leo, “Shake the Streets”

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies… They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others–as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders–serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few–as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men–serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

– Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

– Frederick Douglass

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

– Douglas Adams

To be great is to be misunderstood.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (by way of a fortune cookie)

People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.

– Codename V (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson)

We have succumbed to mindless ritual, and seductive ceremony, placed faith in those who crush dissent, enrich themselves with power, commit atrocity all in the name of righteousness, all in the name of [the Prophet] Muad’dib. We have fouled the nest, and it is killing us… All humans make mistakes, and all leaders are but human.

– The Preacher, Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles