Socialism has its black sheep. What cause has not? But that which fills me with grief is that it has so many white ones. The most miserable circumstance of our time is that much of its devotion and self-denial is running into Socialistic channels. It is this misdirected self-abnegation, characteristic of the Dark Ages, which is carrying us back to them.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892).
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; — the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book III – “The Track of a Storm: Chapter V – The Wood-Sawyer.”
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas
Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.
Sir Isaac Newton, Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae [Certain Philosophical Questions] (c. 1664).
Individualism . . . means neither egotism nor isolation. It means voluntary beneficence and public spirit, as against all attempts to enforce these by penal laws. It means voluntary cooperation as contrasted with the forced cooperation of the State.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Socialism is essentially inimical to family life, which it regards as a bourgeois institution — to use its own favorite anathema. Socialism would make motherhood a State business or profession, would pay women for this sexual function, and deprive fathers of all status or recognition.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism, Third Edition (1892).
“Right now, there is agreement, sort of, on both sides, or maybe even all sides, that . . . people are successful now not because they’re good, but because the system is rigged. . . .
“The difference is that the Left looks at a rigged system and says we need a bigger system.”
Andy Levy, February 20, 2016.
[T]rue understanding of human nature requires freedom, since without liberty there will be little diversity, and without diversity all aspects of the human condition will be ascribed to fixed nature rather than to the workings of a particular culture.
Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (1973), p. 22.
Civilization is an enormous device for economizing on knowledge.
Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (1988).