Even today — in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman than most New Deal economists.
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter III, “Adam Smith,” p. 62
We’d all like t’vote fer th’best man, but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard, as quoted in The Best of Kin Hubbard (1984).
Diversity is Sauron’s strength — and that’s very much the theme of The Lord of the Rings.
Carl Benjamin, @SargonofAkkad, responding (November 3, 2025) to a tweet by Don McGowan of the previous day.
On the Fifth of November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England. Now known as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, originally called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, the conspiracy was an unsuccessful attempted regicide against by a group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby.
Guy Fawkes himself had been assigned to light the fuse. He was tortured, tried, and finally executed on the last day of the first month of the next year. Parliament declared a memorial day of November Fifth, and the event has been celebrated in one form or other ever since, echoed in literature, with poems by John Milton (1626), a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth (1841), and a comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982-1989) contributing to the memorials. The latter was turned into a movie, V for Vendetta (2006), in which the hero wears a Guy Fawkes mask (designed by Lloyd) and recites a famous nursery rhyme on the subject:
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
If, by being revolutionary, one means rational rebellion against intolerable social conditions, if, by being radical, one means “going to the root of things,” the rational will to improve them, then fascism is never revolutionary. True, it may have the aspect of revolutionary emotions. But one would not call that physician revolutionary who proceeds against a disease with violent cursing but the other who quietly, courageously and conscientiously studies and fights the causes of the disease. Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusions.
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), preface to the third edition (1942).
Soyez résolus à ne plus servir, et vous voilà libres. Je ne
vous demande pas de le pousser, de l’ébranler, mais
seulement de ne plus le soutenir, et vous le verrez,
tel un grand colosse dont on a brisé la base,
fondre sous son poids et se rompre.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Nation (New York, July 7, 1956), also in The Price of the Ticket (1985).
Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548).
When the publisher steps out of his legitimate function as a packager and forwarder, he cures people by the millions of the habit of reading books, just as real schoolmarms make windrows of brats permanently allergic to literature by cracking them over the head with the worst of it.
Jack Woodford, The Loud Literary Lamas of New York (1950), p. 47.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as used by Alston Chase for the epigraph of Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (1986).