Category: Thought

Stupid ideas are immortal. Each new generation invents them anew.

Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.

Quoted by Christiane Kubrick, in “After Kubrick,” The Guardian (August 18, 2010). See also “The Shining — Kubrick’s Gold Story,” Part Two, by Rob Ager.

Men have been Laughed out of Faults which a Sermon could not reform.

Francis Hutcheson, The Dublin Weekly Journal, No. 12 (June 19, 1725).

The ultimate notion of right is that which tends to the universal good; and when one’s acting in a certain manner has this tendency, he has a right thus to act.

Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Book II, Ch. III, No. 12.

Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.

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.