Category: Thought

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.

Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, in Existence (1975).

When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all.

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).

Schizoid times demand schizoid government.

An excuse-making rumination of the mad dictator, Genghis II Mao IV Khan, in Robert Silverberg’s science fiction novel Shadrach in the Furnace (1976), Chapter 20.

[I]t is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than for anyone else.

Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander.

Legal plunder has two roots: One of them . . . is in human greed; the other is in misconceived philanthropy.

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. 

Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946), “The Lesson,” Chapter 1.

We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he’s friendly and cuddly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he’s still got teeth and claws.

Walter E. Williams, Conservative Chronicle (August 30, 1995).