Usually, so far as improvement in the people’s economic conditions is concerned, humanitarians simply play the role of the busybody.
Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927, Ann S. Schwier, trans., 1971), p. 301.
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.
Clive Staples Lewis, “Equality,” The Spectator, Vol. CLXXI (August 27, 1943).
Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.
Winston Churchill, as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), p. 535.
Society is not homogeneous, and those who do not deliberately close their eyes have to recognize that men differ greatly from one another from the physical, moral, and intellectual viewpoints.
Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927, Ann S. Schwier, trans., 1971), p. 281.
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
Clive Staples Lewis, “Equality,” The Spectator, Vol. CLXXI (August 27, 1943).
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Friedrich von Logau, “Retribution”, Sinngedichte III, 2, 24.
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.
The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.
Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1927, Ann S. Schwier, trans., 1971), p. 90.
We must — it is absolutely necessary — seek for law, or general leading principles, in politics. Until that is done there can be nothing rightly done; and the first great law that we have to seek out is the law that determines the right of men to exercise power over each other. Have men any right to this power? If they have it, do they possess it for all matters? If not for all matters, for what matters? And in this last case how are we to tell what these matters are?
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
Toutes les fois que je donne une place
vacante, je fais cent mécontents et un ingrat.
Every time that I fill a high office, I create a hundred discontented men and an ingrate.
Louis XIV, as quoted in Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch.26.
“Neocons” is really just a polite euphemism for “bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers.”
Glenn Greenwald, System Update, June 19, 2023.