All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy
– Spike Milligan
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 16th, 2007 |
 10 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
When I checked my high yield investment portfolio earlier this week, the first three numbers matched exactly. Sadly, the last three were nowhere near so I have once again lost the chance to test Spike’s hypothesis.
Oh well, a tenner is still a tenner.
“All I want of the world is very little. I only want the best of everything and there is so little of that.”
(Michael Arlen on publication of “The Green Hat”, quoted in “The Big Spenders”, 1966, by Lucius Beebe)
Spike was right.
Without money (“resources” as we are supposed to say) everything else is pointless – it is pointless because one is dead.
Well, it might not be able to make you happy, but at least you can be miserable in comfort.
Quite so Louise.
And nor is just a question of comfort – it is a matter of survival.
“Life is not the only thing”.
True enough, but some of us find it hard to summon up the courage for the so called “coward’s way out”.
Not original, but……….
One of my favourite variants, by Terry Pratchett:
I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated; money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the rigid time of Islam or the Porch. The determinists deny there is such a thing in the world as a single possible act, id est an act that could or could not happen; a coin symbolizes man’s free will.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Zahir.
That is an excellent quote, Nick.
My favourite Spike quote: “I learned everything from my father. He was a lunatic.”