“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”
Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone (April 24, 1881).
“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”
Lord Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” 1877.
“Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Lecture, 2010
“You can’t make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero, 1963
On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.
On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.
The Intolerable Acts (among which was the Quartering Act) was the American Patriots’ name for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
A new report is in: billionaires are still doing well at the federal trough.
I’m not for it. Are you? More interestingly, what do progressives have to say? Can they mount a principled case against such subsidy? No. See the column.
Oh, and read about the report, too. (Click here.)
Word politics. Interesting argument. Does it all come down to “ah” instead of “er”?
Ah, no.
I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation.
Earl Warren, as quoted in Lawyers Guild Review, Vol. 13-14 (1953), p. 47.
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.