Category: Thought

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900).

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970), as quoted in TIME (February 25, 1974).

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900).

’Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor;
And the first wisdom, to be fool no more.

Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace (1733–1738).

We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion.

William Hazlitt, ”On Court-Influence,” in Political Essays: with Sketches of Public Characters (1819).

Never gallop Pegasus to death.

Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace (1733–1738), Epistle I, Book I, line 14.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt, from ”The Times Newspaper,” in Political Essays (1819).

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

William Cobbett, Letter (February 10, 1804).

The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

William Hazlitt, from a review of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold in Yellow Dwarf (May 2, 1818).

Accurst be he that first invented war.

Mycetes, in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (c. 1588), Part 1, Act II, scene iv, line 1.