Category: Thought

The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.

Anders Chydenius, Thoughts on the Natural Rights of Servants and Peasants (1778).

We’ve become too passive. Human beings have created the most complex and superb civilization which has ever been known on the surface of this Earth. And yet we’re not particularly happy in it.

Why are we not particularly happy? Because we spend most of our time in a robotic state in which we do not appreciate what we’ve created.

Colin Wilson, in a talk entitled “Science Fiction and the Esoteric,” which can be found on Scribd.

[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.

Anders Chydenius, The National Gain (1765), §5.

No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 27.

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other ‘tyranny.’

Karl Popper, as quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p. 112.

Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning.

Anders Chydenius, For What Reason do so Many Swedes Emigrate Every Year?, 1765.

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.

Washington Irving, “The Adventure of the German Student,” Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.(1824).

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

George Meredith, The Egoist (1879), seventh chapter.

Optimism laid down the railroad, but pessimism made it practicable with the air brake and the block-signal system. Optimism designed a ship to sail daringly into the skies — and fall perhaps at times. So pessimism designed the parachute.

W. H. H. MacKellar, The Rotarian (May 1939).

Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93.