Quotes About Impact

We are not responsible for more than our own action, but for this we should take complete responsibility. Then the results will follow of themselves, in a manner we may not always be able to foresee. We do not always have to foresee every possibility.

IF you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish that you were dead.

It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in million years nothing we do now will matter.

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!

any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion of space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, registered with the U.S. Patent Office, which, incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the impact load of any known safe falling from any current altitude, transmitting to the wearer only the most trivial of resultant vectors.

Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.

History is not woven by innocent hands.

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

Nada es más fácil que tener buenas intenciones. Pero cuando no se entiende cómo funciona una economía, las buenas intenciones pueden llevar a consecuencias desastrosas

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

The feeling that the government should "do something" has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not "do something.

A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile.27 Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater. It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to "restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture."28

It is so easy to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong—when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.

With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population, since only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.

Quibbles about the fact that some other European explorers touched the hemisphere earlier, or that the Indians knew it was here all along, trivialize this turning point in the history of the world.

The impact of European conquerors on Africa, for good and evil, was relatively brief as history is measured-about three generations, as compared to the centuries in which the Romans ruled Britain or imperial China ruled parts of southeast Asia or the Moors ruled Spain.

The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7'Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74

How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.

Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.