He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.

I never ponder counterfactuals.

Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.