Category: Thought

The enchanting Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs around the globe. He is of all ages and climes. He knows that fantastic land of Gautier, which contains all the divine lost landscapes ever painted, and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes he flashes by the nymph in the brake, and dazzled, she sighs with desire. Mallarmé set him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in a dim rich forest (though he called him a faun; a faun in retorsion). Like the apocryphal Sadhuzag in Flaubert’s cosmical drama of dreams, which bore seventy-four hollow antlers from which issued music of ineffable sweetness, our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered he echoes the Seven Thunders of the Apocalypse, and we hear of desperate rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals.

He has always fought with the Lion for the crown, and he is always defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is Art, and the Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter, not the symbol. The Unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher’s stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown.

James Huneker, from “In Praise of Unicorns,” the first chapter of Unicorns (1917).

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (The Modern Library, Steven T. Byington, trans.), p. 380.

People constantly assume that there is something metaphysical and sentimental about government. At bottom there are two chief things with which government has to deal. They are, the property of men and the honor of women. These it has to defend against crime.

William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), Chapter VII, “Some Old Foes Under New Faces.”

Sleep is perverse as human nature,
Sleep is perverse as a legislature,
Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters,
And where it is least desired, it loiters

Ogden Nash, The Primrose Path (1935).

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.

Max Stirner, “The False Principles of Our Education,” Rheinische Zeitung
 (1842).

The buyer and the seller have usually been opposed to one another, and the interplay of their rival interests has been regarded as the source of the phenomena of the market. But we shall try to go below this. The obvious and universally recognised fact that the same man may be a buyer under one set of circumstances, or a seller under another, and that even in the same market a man who would buy if prices were low may sell if prices are high, will lead us to a decisive simplification of the theory of markets, based on the consideration of buyers and sellers as a homogeneous group arranged and graduated on a single principle.

Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), Introduction.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’

F. A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False” (1945), in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

Mary Ann Evans, writing under her pen name “George Eliot,” Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch. 4 (1879).

A man once boasted that he had been offered the whole site of Chicago for an old pair of boots, and when asked why he did not close with the offer, replied, “I didn’t have the boots.” The conditions, therefore, for mutually advantageous direct exchange are that two men, who have access to each other, should differ in their estimates of the marginal significances of some two commodities, and that each should possess a supply of that commodity which he relatively underestimates.

Philip Henry Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), fourth chapter.