Americans pass a law against liquor and go right on drinking; they frown, publicly and openly upon the relationship of mistress and lover, and go right on having such relationships under cover. They draw up huge categories of business ethics, and American business is rotten to the core. It’s America’s fetich: this, ‘Save the Surface and You Save All,’ theory.
The character Nausicaa Bradford in Jack Woodford’s novel Unmoral, 1934.
War, the last argument of kings and people, war, in which they put forth their strength with pride, is not, however, the greatest exhibition of human power. A field of battle may excite terror or a feverish enthusiasm, pity or horror; but human strength applied to create is more imposing, than human strength employed in slaughter and destruction.
Michel Chevalier, Society, manners and politics in the United States; being a series of letters on North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company, 1839), p. 133-134.
It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Christian Davies (1741).
By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.
Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (1850).
What is at first small is often extremely large in the end. And so it happens that whoever deviates only a little from truth in the beginning is led farther and farther afield in the sequel, and to errors which are a thousand times as large.
Franz Brentano, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862).
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private.
Daniel Defoe, of the London pandemic of 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year / Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London (1722).
American liberty, as it now is, may be considered the result of a mixture, in unequal proportions, of the theories of Jefferson with the New England usages. From these dissimilar tendencies has resulted a series of contradictory measures, which have become strangely complicated with each other, and which might puzzle and deceive a careless observer. It is in consequence of these opposite influences in the bosom of American society, that such conflicting judgments have been passed upon it; it is because the Yankee type is at present the stronger, whilst the Virginian was superior in the period of the revolution, that the ideas which the sight of America now suggests, are so different from those which she inspired at the epoch of Independence.
Michel Chevalier, Society, manners and politics in the United States; being a series of letters on North America, 1839.
. . . this blue disposable mask is the MAGA hat for progressives.
Bill Whittle, in conversation with Scott Ott and Steve Green, on Right Angle (July 25, 2023).
There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America. This, however, must be done by degrees. The first step that is intended, seems to be an entire subversion of the whole system of our fathers, by the introduction of the canon and feudal law into America.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
Das Talent gleicht dem Schützen, der ein Ziel trifft, welches die Uebrigen nicht erreichen können; das Genie dem, der eines trifft, bis zu welchem sie nicht ein Mal zu sehn vermögen.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. III, para. 31 (On Genius), 1844.