Why do tourists gape so eagerly at this sort of thing? Most people, I believe, aspire to what these agents and sycophants of the state achieved: ease without work, services for themselves by edict, power and position by wishing plus, of course, a little intrigue.
Leonard Read’s Journals, August 16, 1950, referring to the Château de Fontainebleau, one of the largest of France’s royal châteaux.
Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678).
Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Article 23 of Declaration of Rights (1812).
Nobody would work for starvation wages if he were not in a situation in which he preferred such wages to not working at all.
All science is static in the sense that it describes the unchanging aspects of things.
What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.
Samuel T. Francis, “Synthesizing Tyranny,” Chronicles (April 2005). Sam Francis had coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” in the previous decade.
He who has failed three times sets up as an instructor.
Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Lin Ho and the Treasure of Fang-Tso” in Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928).
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Juan Muraña,” in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998).