Category: Thought

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), as quoted in “Totalitarianism and the Five Stages of Dehumanization,” by Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau, Brownstone Institute (November 17, 2021).

All of our separate fictions add up to joint reality.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts [Myśli nieuczesane] (1957) as translated by Jacek Galazka (1962).

Campaign promises are — by long democratic tradition — the least binding form of human commitment.

Antonin Scalia, Republican Party v. White, 536 U.S. 765 (2002) (majority opinion).

[T]hose who view the world through a prism
bereft of principles — either due to lack of
intellectual capacity or ethics or both ­— assume
everyone’s world view is similarly craven.

Glenn Greenwald, “Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles,” Substack (November 16, 2021).

All science is static in the sense that it describes the unchanging aspects of things.

The cosmic process brings about retrogression as well as progression, where the conditions favour it. Only amid an infinity of modifications, adjusted to an infinity of changes of circumstances, do there now and then occur some which constitute an advance: other changes meanwhile caused in other organisms, usually not constituting forward steps in organization, and often constituting steps backwards. Evolution does not imply a latent tendency to improve, everywhere in operation. There is no uniform ascent from lower to higher, but only an occasional production of a form which, in virtue of greater fitness for more complex conditions, becomes capable of a longer life of a more varied kind.

Herbert Spencer, from the concluding pages of The Principles of Sociology, in Three Volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898). Vol. 3.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), first sentence.

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), Pt. IV, Ch. 30: General Considerations.

Meteors are not needed less than mountains.

Robinson Jeffers, from “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1925).

Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.

William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883).