Category: Thought

[T]here are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can’t save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

Robert A. Heinlein, Guest of Honor Speech at the 29th World Science Fiction Convention, Seattle, Washington (1961).

We live in fascinating times.

Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.

H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major (1916), p. 51.

Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (On The Wisdom of Life: Aphorisms), Vol. 1, Ch. 5, § 9.

To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

If we wish to gain insight into the essence of nationality, we must proceed not from the nation but from the individual. We must ask ourselves what the national aspect of the individual person is and what determines his belonging to a particular nation.

Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State and Economy (1919; 1983, Leland B. Yeager, trans.), p. 34.

Our politics will become more civil when we find ways to change the procedures for electing politicians and the institutions and environments within which they interact.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).

It is not the task of history to project the hatred and disagreements of the present back into the past and to draw from battles fought long ago weapons for the disputes of one’s own time. History should teach us to recognize causes and to understand driving forces; and when we understand everything, we will forgive everything.

Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State and Economy (1919; 1983, Leland B. Yeager, trans.), p. 28.

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring.  It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.

Anthony Burgess, Introduction (“A Clockwork Orange Resucked”) to a later, restored version of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. The American publishers of the novel elided the 21st and last chapter to his novel of futuristic “ultra-violence,” and in this introduction the author explained the publication history.