August 14, 2004
Quotation Of The Day

Ludwig von Mises:

Wes Brot ich ess, das Lied ich sing.

Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.

I don't know where I read this, just that I jotted it down on a scrap of paper years ago.

In preparing to move, I'm going through boxes of extremely miscellaneous papers throwing out whatever needs to be thrown out: roughly 100 pounds so far. I've never had time to do that in my previous 15 or so moves, though I did last time pack seven large boxes labeled 'Crap I' through 'Crap VII', which actually contained unstable and fine-grained mixtures of crap, non-crap, and hard-to-say-whether-it's-crap-or-not. Some of the discards are easy, for instance tax instruction booklets (sometimes with duplicates!) going back to 1977. I'm keeping the actual tax forms, partly to track the interesting fluctuations in my income, but a half-hour's work slimmed down my tax file from more than a foot thick to less than three inches. Telephone bills from 1982 were only interesting in reminding me that I routinely spent over $100 a month back then on long-distance telephone calls. Thank you, deregulation and the Internet! I even found a page of code I wrote to insert into a Basic program at a company I worked for from 1978 to 1982, but that only survived because I wrote something more important on the back 5 or 10 or 15 (who knows?) years later. Should I scan it and post it? Probably not.

So what does all this have to do with von Mises? It's simple: I finally know what to do with interesting quotations jotted down on scraps of paper, when the quotations don't fall into an easily fileable category: put them on the web and throw the hard-copy away.

Posted by Dr. Weevil at August 14, 2004 02:09 PM
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