Subversion is an activity which is a two-way traffic. You cannot subvert an enemy which does not want to be subverted.
Soviet defector (KGB propaganda expert; former Novosti Press journalist)Yuri Bezmenov, lecturing as Tomas David Schuman.
The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
There’s no business that’s too small for government to torture.
It is certain that if people do not understand a true political economy, they will make a false one of their own.
William Stanley Jevons, Political Economy (1878).
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand, praising her novel Atlas Shrugged, in correspondence (January 23, 1958), quoted in Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).
The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l’erreur.
Love truth, but pardon error.
François-Marie Arouet (pen name “Voltaire,” 1694-1778), “Deuxième discours: de la liberté,” Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme (1738).
Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
Letter (January 23, 1861), published in Abbot Gasquet, Lord Acton and his Circle (1906), Letter 74.
On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.
We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.
François-Marie Arouet (pen name “Voltaire,” 1694-1778), Letter to M. de Grenonville (1719).
We live in a society of individuals, not a society of equals. We can make little or no progress in analyzing the former as if it were the latter.
James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975).