“I have only ever addressed one prayer to God, and it is very short: ‘My God, please make all our enemies ridiculous.’ God has granted my wish.”

-Voltaire

“The man from Mars reading the typical pronouncements of our best financial writers or statesmen could hardly avoid the conclusion that a nation’s prosperity depends upon getting rid of the greatest possible amount of goods and avoiding the receipt of anything tangible in payment for them.”

Yes, people really do think that way. We call many of them politicians. Read Don’s entire letter here.

I don’t know which is the more useful to the state: a well-powdered lord who knows precisely when the king gets up in the morning… or a great merchant who enriches his country, sends orders from his office to Surat or Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.

I found this quotation on page 398 of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. Too good not to share.

Fortune can bestow no higher benefit upon us, than the discord of our enemies.

-Tacitus, Germania, 33.179

“The furious behavior of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.”

-Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

“[S]uch is the excellence of your judgment that it was ever contrary to that of the people’s.”

Indeed.

[O]nly 38% of Americans say Obama definitely was born in the USA, and 18% say he probably was. Fifteen percent say he probably was born in another country, and 9% say he definitely was born elsewhere.

Republicans are inclined to say the president was born abroad by 43%-35%.

What makes this poll useful? As Oscar Wilde once explained, “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, p. 133

“There is nothing so absurd which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.”

-Cicero, De Divinatione, ii, 58.

“But he was primarily an artist and therefore knew that in nature the intermediary colors predominate and an absolute white and an absolute black are rarely found.”

-Hendrik WillemVan Loon, describing Desiderius Erasmus‘ The Praise of Folly.

Wise words for Republicans, Democrats, good-government types, anarchists, and all the other ideologies that suffer from too much Certainty.