There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979).
‘Yoda is the green face of white supremacy.’
‘Gone too far, inclusion has.’
Bridget Phetasy, Dumpster Fire #70, “Take Me to the Glue Factory,” September 27, 2021.
Capitalism and socialism are mutually extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both — ergo someone-must-die tenets of the class warfaring are extinct.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), p. 39.
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute.
From the novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.
Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903).
Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart to Hank Rearden in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), p. 297.
Il faut beaucoup de philosophie pour observer
les faits qui sont trop près de nous.
Much philosophy is needed for the correct observation of things which are before our eyes.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as quoted by Frédéric Bastiat, Harmonies of Political Economy (1850).
Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association voluntary and progressive.
But political economy is founded exactly on the datum that society is nothing else than association (such as the above three words describe it) — association, very imperfect at first, because man is imperfect; but improving as man improves, that is to say, progressive.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Natural and Artificial Organizations (Journal des Economistes, January 1848), and later in Harmonies of Political Economy, book 1, chapter 1 (1850).
The operation of burning it was perhaps as odious as that of writing it. . . . If the book was dangerous, it should have been refuted. To burn a book of argument is to say: ‘We do not have enough wit to reply to it.’
François-Marie Arouet, self-styled as Voltaire, referring to the burning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social in Geneva, in his undated pamphlet, Idées républicaines (Republican ideas).
What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there’s a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.