Category: Thought

The first duty of power is to perpetuate itself. The first duty of free men is to resist it.

Mike Resnick, Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (1986), Chapter 23.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Rudyard Kipling, June 1935, from “Interview with an Immortal,” Arthur Gordon, Reader’s Digest (July 1959).

The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or estate, which more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he shall not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, Vol. II.

In the middle ages of Christianity opposition to the State opinions was hushed. The consequence was, Christianity became loaded with all the Romish follies. Nothing but free argument, raillery & even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, Vol. II, p. 256.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

Get up in one of our industrial centres today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in. Then what choice have you, save to degenerate either into a fool or into a hypocrite? And who wants to live in a land of fools and hypocrites?

Albert Jay Nock, “Free Speech and Plain Language,” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1936).

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

Arthur Miller, “The Year it Came Apart,” New York magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (December 30, 1974 – January 6, 1975), p. 30.

When all is said, slave-mindedness is the despicable thing.

There can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom. Friendship loves a free Air, and will not be penned up in streight and narrow Enclosures. It will speak freely, and act so too; and take nothing ill where no ill is meant; nay, where it is, ’twill easily forgive, and forget too, upon small Acknowledgments.

William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims (1682).

[M]an is incapable of conducting a satisfactory collective life on any larger than township scale. Neither his collective intelligence nor his collective emotional power will stretch much beyond that.