Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful; but we have many friends, determining to be free, and heaven and earth will aid the resolution. On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943, p. 242.
The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
Karl Popper, “Utopia and Violence,” address to Institut des Arts in Brussels, Belgium (1947); later published The Hibbert Journal 46 (1948), and in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963).
But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943, p. 250.
κύνες γὰρ καὶ βαΰζουσινὃν, ἂν μὴ γινώσκωσι.
Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.
Heraclitus, Fragment 97.
Weep not that the world changes — did it keep
William Cullen Bryant, “Mutation: A Sonnet” (1824).
A stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.