Margaret Thatcher: Terrorism (1985)

“….The terrorist uses force because he knows he will never get his way by democratic means.

Through calculated savagery, his aim is to induce fear in the hearts of people. And weariness towards resistance.

In this evil strategy, the actions of the media are all important. For newspapers and television, acts of terrorism inevitably make good copy and compelling viewing. The hijacker and the terrorist thrive on publicity: without it, their activities and their influence are sharply curtailed. There is a fearful progression, which the terrorists exploit to the full. They see how acts of violence and horror dominate the newspaper columns and television screens of the free world. They see how that coverage creates a natural wave of sympathy for the victims and pressure to end their plight no matter what the consequence. And the terrorists exploit it. Violence and atrocity command attention. We must not play into their hands…….

And we must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship. But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause….”

Margaret Thatcher
Speech to American Bar Association
1985 Jul 15

George Soros: Assume that markets are always wrong…

The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis…. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.

~ George Soros

Ludwig von Mises: The Causes of Economic Crisis (1931)

Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not a real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth [i.e. the accumulation of savings made available for productive investment]. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later, it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.

Hat tip to John Hussman

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The rules of life are written…

An insight into the mind of F Scott Fitzgerald, from Malcolm Cowley. Originally published in The New Republic on August 20, 1951.

Tender Is The Night was published in the spring of 1934…. It dealt with fashionable life in the 1920’s at a time when many readers wanted to forget that they had ever been concerned with frivolities; the new fashion was for novels about destitution and revolt….Nor was it a popular success as compared with Fitzgerald’s first three novels, which had been easier to write: in the first season it sold 12,000 copies; This Side of Paradise had sold 50,000 in a similar period. Presently the new book seemed to be forgotten, although it really wasn’t; it stayed in people’s minds like a regret or an unanswered question. “A strange thing is that in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better,” Ernest Hemingway told Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, who was the editor of both novelists. In scores of midnight arguments that I remember, other writers discovered that they had the same feeling about the book.

Fitzgerald continued to brood about it, although he didn’t blame the public or the critics. It was one of the conditions of the game he played with life to accept the rules as they were written; if he lost point and set after playing his hardest, that was due to some mistake in strategy to be corrected in the future. He began looking for the mistake in Tender Is the Night….

Read how Fitzgerald re-wrote the novel at How F. Scott Fitzgerald Wrote and Revised Tender Is the Night | New Republic.