Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specializations and leave it to others — primarily to the politicians — to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969).
None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.
Isaiah 59: 4-5. A cockatrice is a legendary winged dragon with a rooster’s head. Image features a decorative cockatrice figure over a door.
The Law of supply and demand was not promulgated in any code. Its power comes from elsewhere. It imposes itself upon mankind in as implacable a way as hunger and thirst. We furnish fresh demonstrations of its truth, whether willingly or not, even while we imagine ourselves to be violating it. If the Socialist excommunicates and abuses the economist, who formulates this law, he should also hold Newton responsible for all the tiles that fall on the heads of passers-by, and should declare that if some poor wretch, in throwing himself from a window, kills himself, it is the fault of those physicists who have discovered and taught the law of gravitation.
Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism (1894).
Qui grate beneficium accipit, primam eius pensionem solvit.
He who receives a benefit with gratitude, repays the first installment of it.
Seneca the Younger, De Beneficiis (On Benefits): Book 2, cap. 22, line 1.
The Law is reason free from passion.
Aristotle, Politics, Book III, 1287a.32.
Il est plus aisé de connaître l’homme en général que de connaître un homme en particulier.
It is easier to know man in general than to know one man.
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678).