"All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important."

Structured Procrastination

Quando que conversamos, perguntei a ele se Joca Ramiro era homem bom. Titão Passos regulou um espanto: uma pergunta dessa decerto que nunca esperou de ninguém. Acho que nem nunca pensou que Joca Ramiro pudesse ser bom ou ruim: ele era o amigo de Joca Ramiro, e isso bastava. João Guimarães Rosa em Grande Sertão: Veredas

Discursos que colocam criminosos condenados como vítimas da sociedade não encontram boa recepção entre aqueles que convivem de perto com esse tipo de público. Eduardo Matos de Alencar no livro De Quem é o Comando? O desafio de governar uma prisão no Brasil

We know also the end that impels the champions of all these fads that nowadays parade under the name of Unified Science. Their authors are driven by the dictatorial complex. They want to deal with their fellow men in the way an engineer deals with the materials out of which he builds houses, bridges, and machines. They want to substitute “social engineering” for the actions of their fellow citizens and their own unique all-comprehensive plan for the plans of all other people. They see themselves in the role of the dictator—the duce, the Führer, the production tsar—in whose hands all other specimens of mankind are merely pawns. If they refer to society as an acting agent, they mean themselves. Ludwig von #Mises in the book The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science

A statement recurrently made by Mises in his books is that the existence of constants for non-human action opens up the possibility of mathematical formulation . The inexistence of human action constants prevents mathematical formulations epistemologically equivalent to those employed in natural sciences. The following excerpt from Epistemological Problems of Economics is an example: Even the mathematical sciences of nature owe their theories not to mathematical, but to nonmathematical reasoning. Mathematics has a significance in the natural sciences altogether different from what it has in sociology and economics. This is because physics is able to discover empirically constant relationships, which it describes in its equations. 89 The scientific technology based on physics is thereby rendered capable of solving given problems with quantitative definiteness. The engineer is able to calculate how a bridge must be constructed in order to bear a given load. These constant relationships cannot be demonstrated in economics.

Although the older branches of physics, particularly optics and acoustics, started from the study of sensory qualities, they are now no longer directly concerned with the perceptible properties of the events with which they are dealing. Nothing is more characteristic of this than the fact that we find it now necessary to speak of ‘visible light’ and ‘audible sound’ when we want to refer to the objects of sense perception. F. A. Hayek writing about direct and indirect human perception in the book The Sensory Order

When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself. Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems In Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes

It seems I cannot post a note anymore after post my deleted notes which weren't deleted within this great protocol that is going to disrupt social media. 😏

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

It seems to me almost incontrovertible that the prescriptive content of any dominant ideology coincides with the interest of the state rather than, as in Marxist theory, with that of the ruling class. In other words, the dominant ideology is one that, broadly speaking, tells the state what it wants to hear, but more importantly what it wants its subjects to overhear. Anthony de Jasay in The State

Que era: que a gente carece de fingir às vezes que raiva tem, mas raiva mesma nunca se deve de tolerar de ter. Porque, quando se curte raiva de alguém, é a mesma coisa que se autorizar que essa própria pessoa passe durante o tempo governando a ideia e o sentir da gente; o que isso era falta de soberania, e farta bobice, e fato é. João Guimarães Rosa em Grande Sertão: Veredas

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls— with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws— no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy— which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged— is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Crowds of isolated individuals The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions — such, for example, as a great national event — the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences. Gustave Le Bon in the book The Crowd

At the end of the 1980s, Theodore Dalrymple sensed that the communist regimes around the world were on the verge of collapse. So he decided to visit these countries as soon as possible to see them before the likely changes to come. His impressions are collected in the book The Wilder Shores of Marx. An excerpt from the book that I remember often is the following: "I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate. In this sense, the less true it was, the less it corresponded in any way to reality, the better; the more it contradicted the experience of the persons to whom it was directed, the more docile, self- despising for their failure to protest, and impotent they became." Every time I see the blatant lies told by the powerful and by the legacy press, that snippet comes to my mind.

Was space conceived by the atomists of antiquity as an unbounded extension, permeated by all bodies and permeating all bodies, or was it only the sum total of all the diastemata, the intervals that separate atom from atom and body from body, assuring their discreteness and possibility of motion? Max Jammer in Concepts of Space

From 1584 to 1585, Antwerp was besieged by Spanish forces led by the Duke of Parma who was intent on maintaining the rule of the Habsburg Empire in the Lowlands. Naturally, during a siege, food quickly becomes a scarce commodity and prices accordingly rise. The City Fathers of Antwerp reacted as many others in their position have done before and since: they passed a law fixing a maximum price for each item of food. Severe penalties were prescribed for anyone who attempted to charge the market price. “The consequences of this policy were twofold,” according to the historian John Fiske. “It was a long time before the Duke of Parma, who was besieging the city, succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might have been hurried into the beleaguered city by thousands of tons. But no merchant would run the risk of having his ships sunk by the Duke’s batteries merely for the sake of finding a market no better than many others which could be reached at no risk at all. . . . . If provisions had brought a high price in Antwerp they would have been carried thither. As it was the city, by its own stupidity, blockaded itself far more effectually than the Duke of Parma could have done.” “In the second place,” Fiske concludes, “the enforced lowness of prices prevented any general retrenchment on the part of the citizens. Nobody felt it necessary to economize. So the city lived in high spirits until all at once provisions gave out. . . .” In 1585 the city of Antwerp surrendered and was occupied by the forces of Spain. Robert L. Schuettinger in "Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation"

Defenders of government are often keen to point out the harms that might result from the widespread greed and selfishness of mankind in the absence of a government able to restrain our worst excesses. Yet they seldom pause to consider what might result from the very same greed and selfishness in the presence of government, on the assumption that government agents are equally prone to those very failings. Michael Huemer in "The problem of political authority"

A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. G. K. Chesterton in "Heretics"

Thus in social arrangements, as in all other things, change is inevitable. It is foolish to suppose that new institutions set up will long retain the character given them by those who set them up. Rapidly or slowly they will be transformed into institutions unlike those intended; so unlike as even to be unrecognizable by their devisers. In 'Man versus the State' by Herbert Spencer

Galileo didn’t invent the telescope— but he was the first to think of pointing a good one at Jupiter, because he believed that Jupiter was a planet, like Earth, that went around the Sun. In the book "What is real" by Adam Becker