Category: Thought

Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Just War” (1970), as reprinted at LewRockwell.com.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973), p. 49.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams, in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Life of John Adams (1856).

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

Simone Weil, Prelude to Politics (1943).

No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.

John Adams, as quoted in Fred R. Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations (2006).

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir
un cœur d’homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Bertrand Russell, On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914).

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

John Adams, as quoted in Thomas F. Shubnell, Greatest Jokes of the Century Book 22 (2008).

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two makes four is punished with death.

Dr. Bernard Rieux in Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague, 1947).

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Theodore Dalrymple, in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It,” by Jamie Glazov, FrontPage Magazine, August 31, 2005.