Peter Flom is a prolific writer on Quora, and has recently started a blog there, titled Random Thoughts. He recently made a post that I thought was great, but since I'm really not a fan of Quora as a blogging platform, I asked his permission to reprint it here for my readers.

Obviously, the beliefs expressed about what "the 25 best things ever said" consists of are Peter's, not mine, as are the messages conveyed thereby. Nevertheless, I like Peter; we seem to see eye-to-eye on a lot.

The 25 best things ever said

Not in any particular order, except the last one, which is my favorite.

25) If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) -- I have seen this attributed to Truman, as well.

24) The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) -- quoting or paraphrasing John Locke

23) I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

22) To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.
-- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

21) When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
-- Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536)

20) It is impossible

or, "Ted Cruz's Campaign Logo is an Upside-Down, Burning American Flag"

First, a short lesson about why you should buy www.yourname.com before announcing your presidential campaign:

The site is, apparently, registered to Ted Cruz.

Just a different Ted Cruz.

Meanwhile, on Twitter...

Ted Cruz's campaign logo looks so familiar. pic.twitter.com/XsWYau105R

— clydetheslyde (@clydetheslyde) March 23, 2015

and on Gawker...

...and the Washington Post, who "could go on all day".

I guess, if you're a serious person, you might appreciate the Christian Science Monitor's serious article asking "Isn't this a bit early to be announcing a candidacy?" -- with a resounding (and data-supported answer of "no") -- and "Hasn't there been a lot of campaign coverage already this cycle?" -- with a similarly-supported answer of "yes".

Here we go again.

Recently, Milo King, on Gains From Trade, asks: What is the economic impact of divestment? A few years ago, and seemingly unrelatedly, the HPR came to the same conclusion, namely:

Because the stock market is efficient, selling off stock for reasons unrelated to that company's profitability will cause more amoral investors to step in and kindly take your depressed-price shares, reaping the spread for themselves. No long-term depression of prices, no pain felt by Exxon et al., and now the shareholder voting those shares has worse morals than you did. Oops.

Consider, for example, the widely-acclaimed divestment from South Africa, in protest of apartheid...

Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of divesting companies, the financial markets' valuations of targeted companies or even

I'm leaving on a cruise for spring break, and so will effectively be without Internet until Sunday, March 23. I don't plan to update Faults in that time, though I do hope to get some writing done and have some things to post when I get back. (This is a minor lie; I've got one more post to push out the door later today.)

But, the prospect of being a week without things to read being approximately as appealing as vacationing in the Third Circle of Hades, I'm bringing substantial reading material along. And, because I have a blog and an itch for publicy, here's my reading list (or at least, my carrying-along-like-a-comfort-blanket list):

Fiction

• A Wizard Alone, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VI)
• A Wizard's Holiday, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VII)
• Wizards at War, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VIII)
• The Eternal Flame, Greg Egan (Orthoganal: II)
• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson

Poetry

• The Oldest Word for Dawn, Brad Leithauser
• destruction myth, Mathias Svalina
• Selected Poems, Dylan Thomas ed. Walford Davies

Nonfiction for Classes

• Probability and Computing, Michael Mitzenmacher and Eli Upfal
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop

Nonfiction for Pleasure

• Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky (pdf)

Online Material

(cached at various levels of recursion with ScrapBook for Firefox)

• Slate Star Codex (all pages and outlinks), Scott Alexander
• My Faults My Own (all pages and outlinks), Ross Rheingans-Yoo
• This also doubles as "most go-to things I'd want to read", since I've outlinked to many favorite elsewhereposts by now.
• My Faults My Own -- editor portal (all pages), Ross

Selma teaches us, too, that action requires that we shed our cynicism. For when it comes to the pursuit of justice, we can afford neither complacency nor despair.

Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice's Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. I understand the question, for the report's narrative was woefully familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing's changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it's no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was.

We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing's changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress -- our progress -- would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.

Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the "race card" for

"Jury Selected in Boston Marathon Bombing Trial", reports The Crimson today. I don't care.

I am so far beyond caring about where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ends up that I'm refusing to click on that link, and won't give you a hyperlink here; feel free to search it up on your own, if you like. I am aggressively refusing to care.

Or at least, aggressively refusing to indulge in anything that would incite me to care more than I can possibly avoid.

I mean, look, you can hate the kid. You can meditate on the violence he perpetrated against the city of Boston and the fear that he and his brother struck across our city for days, plural, of 2013. You can follow the news of his trial, conviction, and imprisonment with a carefully-stoked bloodthirst, and feel a measure of closure on behalf of our city when he gets put away for life without parole, or executed.^[1] You can live a life where every time you're reminded of him or his brother, you indulge in the feeling of rising rage. I understand too well how close this thing cut to tell you not to do that, because, really, I understand.

But I won't. Quoth Pratchett:

"But we should kill him!"

"No. You've been listen to Brocando too often," said Bane.

Brocando bristled. "You know what he is! Why not kill--" he began, but he was interrupted.

"Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are."

I'm never going to see Dzhokhar, and I'll never have any sort of human interaction

James Mickens is speaking at the Harvard CS Colloqium at 4pm today in Maxwell-Dworkin, which is amazing because James Mickens is amazing because James Mickens is the author of "The Night Watch":

As a highly trained academic researcher, I spend a lot of time trying to advance the frontiers of human knowledge. However, as someone who was born in the South, I secretly believe that true progress is a fantasy, and that I need to prepare for the end times, and for the chickens coming home to roost, and fast zombies, and slow zombies, and the polite zombies who say “sir” and “ma’am” but then try to eat your brain to acquire your skills. When the revolution comes, I need to be prepared; thus, in the quiet moments, when I’m not producing incredible scientific breakthroughs, I think about what I’ll do when the weather forecast inevitably becomes RIVERS OF BLOOD ALL DAY EVERY DAY. The main thing that I ponder is who will be in my gang, because the likelihood of post-apocalyptic survival is directly related to the size and quality of your rag-tag group of associates. There are some obvious people who I’ll need to recruit: a locksmith (to open doors); a demolitions expert (for when the locksmith has run out of ideas); and a person who can procure, train, and then throw snakes at my enemies (because, in a world without hope, snake throwing is a reasonable way to resolve disputes). All of these people will play a role in my ultimate success as a dystopian warlord philosopher. However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer. A