Churchillian Proverbs

Winston Churchill overcame a childhood speech impediment to become one of the world’s great orators and writers. He was also a visionary, standing nearly alone in warnings about the rise of national socialism (i.e., Nazis). The combination of keen insight, the ability to turn a phrase, and a lengthy career as a writer and speaker resulted in lots of quotable material. Here are some of my favorite quotes from Churchill. Enjoy them. These are gems!

1. Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.


2. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.


3. We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.


4. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.


5. Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.


6. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.


7. You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.


8. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.


9. Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.


10. It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.


11. The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.


12. The first quality that is needed is audacity.


13. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.


14. The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.


15. The price of greatness is responsibility.


16. The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.


17. There is no such thing as a good tax.


18. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.


19. A joke is a very serious thing.


20. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.


21. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.


22. All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.


23. An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.


24. Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.


25. Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.


26. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.


27. Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.


28. Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.


29. Eating words has never given me indigestion.


30. However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.


31. We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.


32. I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.


33. I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.


34. There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.


35. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.


36. If you are going through hell, keep going.


37. Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.


38. No crime is so great as daring to excel.


39. No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.


40. One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!


41. Play the game for more than you can afford to lose... only then will you learn the game.


42. Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.


43. This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.


44. To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.


45. True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.


46. We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.


47. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

John Stossel: The Green Jobs Fallacy

Life Before Air Conditioning

Photo: Caitlinator
What was life like before air conditioning? A writer recalls...

In the 1940s and 1950s, with the thermometer reaching the 90s, you’d get off the bus in downtown Anderson (bus windows usually were open to capture whatever breeze there was) and head for the nearest dime, drug or department store. The doors would be propped wide open, and when you entered you’d notice giant ceiling fans rotating lazily to stir up the stagnant air as customers and clerks alike mopped their brows to wipe off the perspiration.

Few public buildings had air conditioning. Many church buildings equipped their hymnal racks with cardboard fans, and parishioners hoped the preachers would keep their sermons short.

Air conditioning was unheard of in schools.

Read the whole article.

I'm old enough to remember the drug store in downtown Tallahassee promoting the fact it was air conditioned, courtesy of Kool cigarettes.

"Come in. It's Kool inside," proclaimed stickers on the door.

Some of my friends lived in homes lacking central air conditioning. We tended to cluster in the small TV room with a window rattler during the summer.

Today, air conditioning is a necessity, not a luxury. Yet, for many Americans air conditioning is becoming less affordable. As the government imposes mandates over fear of ozone depletion and the quixotic quest for ever higher efficiencies, no matter how lengthy the payback, some Americans may find themselves returning to the days of window rattlers in the bedrooms and family room during the summer months.

And this is progress?

Brit Plan To Live Without A/C Fails

A year ago, I wrote a Rant for Contracting Business titled, Is Air Conditioning The Next Tobacco? in response to Joe Klein's screed in Time Magazine, Kill Your Air Conditioning. Well, the Brits tried it. It didn't work.

The UK's Direct.Gov website makes the following recommendation:

You could cool your home naturally instead of using air conditioning, which can damage the environment:

• create a breeze through your home by opening the windows at the highest and lowest points in the house, or on opposite sides of the house
  
• when it’s very hot, open windows at night to let cool air in; close windows and curtains or blinds during the day to trap the cool air inside

The notion of cutting air conditioning is apparently quite popular among British elites.

"Opening a window," exclaimed a London Assembly member, "is the cheapest, most climate friendly way of cooling a building."

So how is the British Department for Energy and Climate Change, which is responsible for cutting carbon emissions nationwide, going to meet its goal of reducing department carbon emissions 10% by March? Why cut the A/C, of course.

"As part of our efforts to save energy over the summer," they announced, "we decided to turn off the air conditioning and open the windows."

It lasted three days...

One...

Two...

Three...

That's a whole 72 hours.

The UK's Daily Mail reported...

The trial was abandoned after three days because officials complained about noise from building works, security risks and "the wrong kind of breeze."

An internal memo said: "We have therefore decided to revert to air-conditioned cooling for the building."

Staff were told other "innovative ways" to reduce the building's carbon footprint would be looked at instead.

Environmental campaigners said the decision sent a terrible message to the rest of the country.

I've lived in southern England. It doesn't get all that hot. Even with London's urban heat island effect, it's still not that hot. The chart below shows average monthly temperatures from Weather.com.


And the committed environmental bureaucrats still couldn't take it more than three days.

Economic Fundamentals: Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy

Originally Posted 2.11.09

The following is excerpted from Kenneth Green’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on September 25, 2007. It’s a great explanation of Frederic Bastiat’s refutation that destruction of wealth leads to its creation. Green uses a variation to show how the creation of “green jobs” at the expense of other jobs is a fallacy.

The fallacious idea that one can make jobs by destroying others is a variation of Bastiat's Broken Window fallacy. As Bastiat explained, imagine some shopkeepers get their windows broken by a rock-throwing child. At first, people sympathize with the shopkeepers, until someone suggests that the broken windows really aren't that bad. After all, they ‘create work’ for the glazier, who might buy food, benefiting the grocer, or clothes, benefiting the tailor. If enough windows are broken, the glazier might even hire an assistant, creating a new job.

Did the child then do a public service by breaking the windows? Would it be good public policy to simply break windows at random? No, because what's not seen in this scenario is what the shopkeepers would have done with the money that they've had to use to fix their windows. If they hadn't needed to fix the windows, the shopkeepers would have put the money to work in their shops, buying more stock from their suppliers, or perhaps adding a coffee-bar, or hiring new stock-people.

Before the child's action, the shopkeepers had the economic value of their windows and the money to hire a new assistant or buy more goods. After the child's action, the shopkeepers have their new windows but no new assistant or new goods, and society, as a whole, has lost the value of the old set of windows.

The analogy holds just as well when it is the government that comes, and by regulatory fiat ‘breaks the window’ of a company successfully providing goods and services into a free market. When the government establishes a regulation favoring product A over product B, what is seen is the new sales of product A, and the jobs associated with such sales.

What is not seen is the lost sales of product B, and the lost jobs that go with it. Because the market is superior at efficiently identifying and providing what people want than are planners, it is virtually certain that the lost jobs in any regulatory scenario will outnumber the created jobs in a regulatory scenario.

Well said!

Economic Fundamentals: Francisco's "Money" Speech From "Atlas Shrugged"

Originally Published 1.07.09

In Ayn Rand’s seminal book, “Atlas Shrugged,” the character Francisco d'Aconia is at a wedding reception and overhears another say that “money is the root of all evil.” Francisco launches into a soliloquy about money that should be required reading in schools today.

This will sound very familiar to the people who are disciples of Frank Blau. I’ve heard Frank express similar sentiments on many occasions, though Frank clearly has his own unique way of expressing himself.

If you have yet to read “Atlas Shrugged,” this is the perfect time to pick up a copy. Rand published the book in 1957, yet it is incredibly apt for our current time.

Click to read the speech.

Economic Fundamentals: The Difference Between Income and Wealth

Originally Published 12.24.08

Sophists were teachers in ancient Greece. The original Sophists trained politicians. Thus, the original use of sophistry was in the political arena. I guess not much as changed in 2500 years, has it?

One area where political and media sophistry has thoroughly corrupted a field of study is economics. The result is that economic illiteracy is at an all-time high. Politicians, the media, and some economists have engaged in an Orwellian “newspeak” that by design or chance has twisted public perception. A good example is the difference between income and wealth.

Income is not the same as wealth. Yet, politicians and the media often refer to wealth when describing income. Income is the flow of dollars resulting from productive activity. Wealth is the accumulation of dollars and other assets.

Think of it this way, income is water running out of the sink faucet. Wealth is the water that’s accumulated in the sink. If a lot of water (lots of income) is flowing out of the faucet, but draining just as fast, little water (little wealth) is accumulated. If a trickle of water is flowing (not much income), but the sink is full and stopped, there’s a sink full of water (lots of wealth).

High income earners are not necessarily wealthy. They are productive. Their productivity and value to society generates the high income, but if they have not managed to accumulate large amounts of it, they are hardly wealthy.

By contrast, the wealthy are not necessarily productive. They may not generate any income from their own efforts. They might be living off the wealth created in prior generations. Granted, Grandfather’s trust might generate income when it’s put to productive use, but that’s mostly a reflection of Grandfather’s effort.

Whenever you hear a politician or journalist use the word “wealthy” see if substituting the word “productive” makes more sense. For example, when politicians say they want to “tax the wealthy,” they really want to “tax the productive.”

© 2008 Matt Michel

The Real Problem With Congress

Originally Published 11.4.2008

Forget political parties. The problem with Washington is not party, but occupation. Click here (it’s an Adobe PDF) and scroll down to occupation. Look for business experience.