Nature Archives - Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.

If marriage is centrally an emotional union . . . it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness?

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.

The brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

At any rate, while I am in public life, however short a time it may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.

The few must be watched, checked, and often resisted. Tyranny has ever shown a predilection to be in close amity with them, or the one man.

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify.

Socialism is structured so that it will never achieve its stated goals. The reason is self-evident: Socialism is a self-perpetuating consumption of other people’s labors, and when those labors run out, the whole system collapses.

But he who lives a hundred years, vicious and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous and reflecting.

Earnestness is the path of immortality (Nirvâna), thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are as if dead already.

I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized—and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent.

Sometimes people fail to recognize and respect human rights because they have self-interested motives for doing so. In most cases of exploitation, for example, the fundamental failing is moral, not intellectual.

Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.

Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.

Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.

International trade is not a zero-sum contest. Both sides must gain or it would make no sense to continue trading.

We should recognize how in a culture where each person wants to be bearer of his or her own subjective truth, it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a common plan which transcends individual gain and personal ambitions.

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